61–70 of 142 posts
I just had a play with it. It seems very well thought out. It has a very nice tutorial that introduces all the basic concepts. I am looking forward to trying out the multiplayer aspect, as that seems to be the most compelling thing about it.
Not sure who the audience for this is. Kids I guess? Game developers want engines and tools that make development easier without losing power or flexibility. Players want new interesting gaming experiences.
Seems nice. Anyone has an opinion on why Google built this? Do you think it is related to Stadia? Or just a company hobby turning well?
From another comment, it was released by their internal startup incubator. It's potentially not related to anything else at all inside Google, just a project a small team was able to put together with Google's money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steam provides a CDN, updater, friends list/social infrastructure, really terrible but functional user generated content sharing infrastructure, and cloud saves to game developers, so it's pretty appealing even if you're a team inside Google since the alternative is building your own installer and updater - Google has no competitor to Steam on Windows or any other platform of note other than Android. Also, Gamers act…
To be more specific, gamers get annoyed when they have to install yet another "game manager" program to play a game. This is especially true when that game manager is well know to lack features and be insecure. Installing a game standalone doesn't annoy anyone I know (though, to be fair, I'm now older with few friends)
Any word on when it will get Linux support?
I thought Steam could automatically load up Wine, or something like that?
It will be good for a few quarters of it's existence before Google shuts it down, as is tradition.
Why do I need steam for this? Seems very odd.
Steam provides a CDN, updater, friends list/social infrastructure, really terrible but functional user generated content sharing infrastructure, and cloud saves to game developers, so it's pretty appealing even if you're a team inside Google since the alternative is building your own installer and updater - Google has no competitor to Steam on Windows or any other platform of note other than Android. Also, Gamers act…
It will be good for a few quarters of it's existence before Google shuts it down, as is tradition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have killed to have tools like Unity when I got into game programming. All of my hobby time was eaten up trying to wrangle OpenGL and C++ and crappy open source engines, and cobbling together a shitty physics engine, so I never got around to the actual game part. When I went back years later to prototype ideas in Unity, it was a breath of fresh air. However, in my struggles to get off the ground, I did learn…
Wait, you can’t leave us hanging about how font rendering was unexpectedly useful. What kind of fonts did you deal with later in life and why?
I had to write my own font rendering code for lack of much in the way of general purpose libraries for doing it in 3-D engines back around 2005. Your options were, more or less, to pay through the nose for Scaleform, to roll your own, or to use something really ugly. So I had to learn some basic typography to tie Freetype into a text rendering engine, which got me practical experience with editing font files, anti-aliasing, hinting, kerning, processing digraphs, Unicode, the works.
Web 2.0 started more or less right after that, so interest in digital typography in general exploded. I ended up working on some applications of text layout in non-left-to-right and pictograph languages for 2D canvas, SVG, and web based image manipulation in general. So out of sheer coincidence my hobby work messing with OpenGL/Freetype was suddenly directly relevant.