Live data from Hacker News

Building a Game with the Real Engine

novalis.org

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#11
post #6
post #2

Point and clicks have quite a few similar examples, the genre lends itself well to dioramas because even when it's 3D it's often a fixed camera path that you can optimize for. As an example, a nice looking one from a decade ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/205020/Lumino_City/ Papetura also got a fair bit of attention for a while (for good reason, just look at it): https://youtu.be/ZVhtuKleLuI Personally I love…

Lumino City was the first one that came to mind for me as well! The next one was the Fantasian, by the creators of Final Fantasy ( https://youtu.be/ePFgyBtvqQU ) - apparently this is finally coming to non-Apple platforms this year, at that.

Same, it's such an amazing game. And the mobile port is great too.

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#12

Something similar was done for the 1996 game Creatures . A part of the diorama still survives and is on display at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge ( https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/42694/Creatures-Deve... ).

Wow that's a blast from the past! 12 year old me was absolutely addicted to this game.

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#13
post #7

You could do gaussian splat on the diorama picture and you can have pretty good dynamic camera movements where the player could walk around

Your game would go from playable on a smartphone to requiring an rtx 4090 and 64gb of RAM (ok, slight exaggeration). But it would certainly look amazing.

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#17
post #7

You could do gaussian splat on the diorama picture and you can have pretty good dynamic camera movements where the player could walk around

Your game would go from playable on a smartphone to requiring an rtx 4090 and 64gb of RAM (ok, slight exaggeration). But it would certainly look amazing.

In true game dev fashion, I think parent meant to do the splatting once at build time, and runtime would just use the resulting data, rather than each scene load involving a dynamic "Splatting the gausses" in order to finish loading.

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#18
It seems quite obvious that Gen AI will be a major change in the creation of game assets. If not stand-alone then certainly in the form of AIded (get it?) tooling. In particular there's huge potential for the indie market. If you're thinking about starting up a company, that's definitely a space where things are going to be hot IMO.

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#19
post #6
post #2

Point and clicks have quite a few similar examples, the genre lends itself well to dioramas because even when it's 3D it's often a fixed camera path that you can optimize for. As an example, a nice looking one from a decade ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/205020/Lumino_City/ Papetura also got a fair bit of attention for a while (for good reason, just look at it): https://youtu.be/ZVhtuKleLuI Personally I love…

Lumino City was the first one that came to mind for me as well! The next one was the Fantasian, by the creators of Final Fantasy ( https://youtu.be/ePFgyBtvqQU ) - apparently this is finally coming to non-Apple platforms this year, at that.

Same, I was blown away watching the making of video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLv2uHxygc0) and discovering that these environments were created physically. The whole world had that soft handcrafted feel, and it turned out to stem from actual crafts!

Re: Building a Game with the Real Engine

#20
post #18

It seems quite obvious that Gen AI will be a major change in the creation of game assets. If not stand-alone then certainly in the form of AIded (get it?) tooling. In particular there's huge potential for the indie market. If you're thinking about starting up a company, that's definitely a space where things are going to be hot IMO.

Every single game dev on Earth has been thinking that since the very first GANs, but the state of the art when it comes to generative AIs that are actually useful for asset generation is still pretty bad.

Much like LLMs are still pretty bad at logic. It seems like we're plateauing in that regard...

The thing about assets is that they have to be coherent with each other. You can't just generate them one at a time in a bunch of different styles and sizes or they'll look terrible. In the simplest case you want to generate at least an entire spritesheet for a single character or object. And that's still fundamentally impossible with modern generative AIs

Post reply on HN