131–140 of 289 posts
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And Apple is no longer the cool company it used to be. Their decline in hardware and software quality was what made me stopped buying Macs after being a fan for the longest time.
Is this a joke? Apple with M1 and iterations is changing the industry.
>I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job. If you ever need a reprieve or change of pace and want to write some words instead of code, do consider writing an engineering blog about how you designed and built…
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So what exactly is the utility of Unity in this setup then?
It is basically a big rendering library, providing C# APIs for rendering and sound. It also packages all assets, and can be used as editor.
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Thanks and sorry for no Mac support. The hard truth is that Mac users represents less than 1% of our potential user base and it is hard to justify the time to support Mac. We are planning to revisit this decision soon and see how much effort would it be.
> 1% of our potential user base How did you determine this? Factorio is available for Mac. How did they, and other game developers, justify the work for a Mac port?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
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I thought that by now game engines just have two extra checkboxes to ’build for Mac’ and ‘build for Linux’. Perhaps the signing requirements changed that, though. Notably also, plenty of games work fine under Wine, but Steam client itself doesn't—on Mac.
We do use Unity that does lots of heavy lifting for you regarding porting to other platforms. However, it's not always that easy as checking a box. For example some shader optimizations may be specific to DirectX. File system works differently (no "User/Documents" on Mac). Or issues with native libraries. Our game does work on Linux Proton though, that was a surprise to us.
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For games it seems the trend is toward Windows emulation (Wine, Proton, etc). I onder if and how much games test and cater for those, to validate on emulation platforms. On one hand it's good thing in the big picture because it's a step in geting games to run sandboxed. For ARM Macs it might be not so good.
As far as I know, you get no support usually, when you run it with proton/wine. I'm not interested in paying full price and then having the risk all myself. Of course there is the return before two hours thing, but then I also don't wanna create all that hassle. But if a developer makes some guarantees about proton support, that'd be something else, actually.
If something doesn't work, you usually just have to report it, it will run through their QA queue to be confirmed, and then handed off to Codeweavers devs they contracted to work on Wine/Proton to fix the bug. It's a bigger hassle than just playing on Windows, but most games run out of the box now.
Native Linux versions of games basically don't happen anymore as they often end up unmaintained, lacking features or are hard to support with a small userbase on often arcane setups.
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I thought that by now game engines just have two extra checkboxes to ’build for Mac’ and ‘build for Linux’. Perhaps the signing requirements changed that, though. Notably also, plenty of games work fine under Wine, but Steam client itself doesn't—on Mac.
We do use Unity that does lots of heavy lifting for you regarding porting to other platforms. However, it's not always that easy as checking a box. For example some shader optimizations may be specific to DirectX. File system works differently (no "User/Documents" on Mac). Or issues with native libraries. Our game does work on Linux Proton though, that was a surprise to us.
Great job and everything to get so far! I like that you actually mine the stuff in the style of mines you use and the stuff is getting removed visually. What i find disappointing is the trucks/vehicles not needing any streets. I'm not sure if it would make the game more interesting or not though but that i have to build a bridge over a pipe for the trucks but the trucks just drive through each other... not liking it…
Thank you! Trucks not needing roads was actually our "feature". You just build things and logistics network will figure things out. This goes hand-in-hand with the free-form mining (also our big feature), since that would be impossible to do with roads. However, we do hear many people wanting roads, especially later on, it is on our list of potential additions. Vehicles having no collisions is a technical limitation.…
I’m a sad. No Mac. :-( Looks really good. Congrats man. 84% overwhelmingly positive isn’t anything to sneeze at too. The experience must have been amazing. I learned more about computers in developing games that were 1% of what you’ve done. No matter the financial outcome you are winning at nerd life, which is the only life that matters (other than to your spouse your family and friends).
Thanks and sorry for no Mac support. The hard truth is that Mac users represents less than 1% of our potential user base and it is hard to justify the time to support Mac. We are planning to revisit this decision soon and see how much effort would it be.
Have you tried sending out a survey asking “how much would you be willing to pay for this game?”
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Thank you! 1. All 3D assets and music was done by our contractors. All paid work. On average, one model is probably around $500. 2. C#. We both were familiar with it and it is a great language. Lots of nice features, easy to work with, lots of tools, less error prone (looking at you C++), has reflection (very helpful for serialization and code gen), and if you know what you are doing, it can be very performant (avoid…
It sounds like you had several different contractors working on it, so what steps did you take to ensure a consistent art style?
Initially, we asked them to do things "realistically", but not looking too brand new. Eventually, we had a good set of models that we could use as a style reference. We had to redo some models that were not fitting the style and we still have a list of models to improve.
One thing that we learned early is that all models need to have a common scale, otherwise details like doors look bad when scaled differently on each model. We have established a metric system, each tile in game is 2x2 m, all railings are 1m tall, all doors are 2m, etc.
Now we have a doc with all our notes regarding style and rules that we share with new artists.