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An Unreal Decision

martiancraft.com

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Re: An Unreal Decision

#21

Post by sillysaurus3 »

nbody wrote: post #16
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has WebGL solved the local storage limitation yet? I've been waiting for a few years for that. There's still no way to "install" a game into a browser, as far as I know, and redownloading 1GB+ of assets every time the game loads isn't an option.

AppCache?

It sounds like AppCache limit is 5MB. I can't find very much info, though, but a reasonable limit for gamedev circa 2014 would be 16GB or so.

http://grinninggecko.com/2011/02/24/developing-cross-platfor...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6757945/cache-manifest-si...

Re: An Unreal Decision

#22

Post by mschuster91 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #21
nbody wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppCache?

It sounds like AppCache limit is 5MB. I can't find very much info, though, but a reasonable limit for gamedev circa 2014 would be 16GB or so. http://grinninggecko.com/2011/02/24/developing-cross-platfor... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6757945/cache-manifest-si...

There are the HTML5 local filesystem extensions, in addition to that. Just no idea how these are called.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#23

Post by xavierxf »

mrfusion wrote: post #11

Side question. Where do single indie developers get the artwork for games?

1. Make it yourself

2. Use free assets

3. Find an artist for hire

4. Maybe www.reddit.com/r/gameDevClassifieds/ will have some artists willing do do some work for free. Free assets also occasionally get posted to www.reddit.com/r/gamedev so check there.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#24

Post by Stratoscope »

Coincoin wrote: post #9

As someone who tried to develop a Unity game on a big team, it was hell. The collaboration is horrible, there are conflicts all the time for no reason. Simply getting the source, running the game and updating would produce conflicts. We also had to buy the cache licenses to make it somewhat workable. But the worst was the support. It was worthless. Anytime we would open a ticket, they would simply google and return u…

I'm sure you know this, but for anyone who is new to Unity, one thing that helps a tiny bit is to open the Edit/Project Settings/Editor panel and change the Asset Serialization Mode to Force Text. Then your .unity scene files and such will be text files instead of binary. Whenever I start a new Unity project I flip this setting right away and save the empty project with text assets as the first commit.

This won't solve the problem at all - the asset files are still fairly inscrutable and the slightest change in the editor can result in all kinds of seemingly unrelated changes - but at least you'll have text diffs instead of huge binary files in the repo.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#25

Post by dublinben »

mrfusion wrote: post #19
nacs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By hiring a graphics person or by creating it yourself. There are some free assets out there but they're mostly low-quality and the few production-quality ones are used in numerous low-quality games.

Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?

Programmers tend not to be artistic, and artists tend to not support ideals like free software/free culture.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#26

Post by mahyarm »

Their entire attitude of accessible, changeable source, accepting patches and responsiveness is really refreshing. If you do windows or apple dev, the frustrations of having none of that available is a big productivity drain. The high amount of responsiveness part is even nicer, since that seems rarer in platforms such as unity or android.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#27

Post by shard972 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #18
vertex-four wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way. Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam. [0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Why wouldn't you want to produce a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL? It should be the default, not some crazy thing. The best argument against javascript + WebGL is "javascript is bad." But the disadvantages of JS are sometimes strengths. The lack of static typing, for example, allows a REPL. It's true that with an average gamedev team, you'll get below average results. But with an above-average team, power…

> Why wouldn't you want to produce a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL? It should be the default, not some crazy thing.

Performance. Show me some like gears of war running in a browser and then I will be convinced.

> The best argument against javascript + WebGL is "javascript is bad."

That is the worse attempt to portray the other side's argument I have seen a while.

> The lack of static typing, for example, allows a REPL.

You can also just have a console implemented, like most AAA games. They are also built into engines like Source.

> It's true that with an average gamedev team, you'll get below average results. But with an above-average team, powerful languages tend to translate into stellar results.

I don't understand how javascript would allow someone like John Carmack to make anything new, I write Javascript every day but when it comes to games I much prefer something like c#.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#28

Post by err4nt »

dublinben wrote: post #25
mrfusion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?

Programmers tend not to be artistic, and artists tend to not support ideals like free software/free culture.

I think that's selling content creators a little short - I think a lot of visual asset creators would love to contribute but are neither reached out to, nor sought after. It can be intimidating telling a graphics guy: just clone the git repo, put your assets in a fresh branch and we'll merge when were ready. You may as well be speaking Swahili to the poor volunteer! Making publically accessible list of needed assets, and a straightforward submission process for getting assets from contributors to programmers for integration might be the missing piece of the puzzle.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#29

Post by keerthiko »

My teammate and I started moonlighting on the first game for our studio about 8 months ago, right before Epic announced the current $19.95/seat pricing model. We decided to go with Unity purely because I already owned a Pro license, that we could use to make final beta builds and be responsible for the advanced visual effects that needed Pro. Additionally I already had lots of experience with Unity, and nearly none with UE.

We are only a two-person team, making a fairly limited-scope 3D puzzle racer game. Thus we didn't hit the major issues with collaboration bugs (we did a few times) or platform switching (we're focusing only on PC). We were able to build our MVP in less than 2 weeks of hacking, and it felt amazing. The asset store was also an amazing resource to circumvent the artist issues.

However, it's been nearly a year since then, and polishing the game to the standards we'd like has been presenting larger and larger challenges -- performance, obscure shader behaviour, limited editor extensibility (it's good, but not quite good enough), and reading this post, it looks like at this stage of development Unreal would have served us much much better.

If we can get our studio rolling and increase our team size to actually incorporate dedicated artists, we'll have to seriously consider switching to UE4 for our next game.

Jeff's write-up sheds insight that few people can have, given not everyone has spent the time to get well-enough acquainted with both engines in the team setting to know their professional tradeoffs as well, and I appreciate it a lot.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#30

Post by the_af »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #18
vertex-four wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way. Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam. [0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Why wouldn't you want to produce a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL? It should be the default, not some crazy thing. The best argument against javascript + WebGL is "javascript is bad." But the disadvantages of JS are sometimes strengths. The lack of static typing, for example, allows a REPL. It's true that with an average gamedev team, you'll get below average results. But with an above-average team, power…

> The lack of static typing, for example, allows a REPL

Uh? Languages with static typing can have REPLs. See: Scala, Haskell and more. I don't think that is what makes JS an option for game development, but rather its ubiquity in browsers. If you remove that, I don't see why you would choose it for serious development.

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