261–270 of 273 posts
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There's a book I read a while back named "Longitude" that maps the storied quest in science to improve upon dead reckoning by devising greater and greater accuracy in time pieces used on ships. Iirc it was a fun read if anyone else finds that sort of thing interesting (as I do.)
What other books do you like?
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But if you were a game dev, you would understand why it‘s not as easy as it seems to outsiders. :)
I'm not saying it would be trivial, but I bet that once you figure out a workable pattern, you could replicate that on other games. One idea that might be relatively easy to implement- Slow the framerate down to something super slow instead of fully stopping
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That's not more of a problem than synchronizing the player names at game start. It's table stakes for an online game.
If you synchronize the seed at game start for speedruns, the seed is the same for everyone, and players can again manipulate their luck, so nothing was gained.
But if you're running a multiplayer game with random elements and aren't colluding, you don't have to let a malicious party set the RNG seed to whatever they like just because you agree on it at game start. There's any number of simple cryptographic protocols that allow each peer to contribute equally to the RNG state based on having a separate commitment phase. And it's a lot easier to run a quick cryptographic setup than it is to have constant input-driven adjustment.
I was suspicious of those random game developers getting quoted, and this is the pinned post of the one giving this cute silly story about slowing down game speed time: "Announcing TORMENT HEXUS, a match-3 roguelike about putting technofascist CEOs on the wrong side of skyscraper windows! [...] And remember: they SHOULD be afraid of us. #indiedev #indiegame" Weird times.
Eh, I remember the myriad of both "Torture Bin Laden" as well as "Torture George Bush" flash games in the early/mid 2000s. I think it's very on brand for indie developers.
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Pick a subject I guess, that's a really hard question
Last two books that you read?
"On Trails" by Robert Moore that discusses how walking paths from the first peoples persist, grow and change over hundreds of years, along with advances in walking trail design in recent years to become a part time recreational activity vs the pure utility of terrain traversal as they first were. Covers how a trail is a "living thing", as it were, because any who tread on it help reinforce it. Covers non human trails like ants and their reenforcement via pheromones and the like.
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Saving the current state? What does that even mean? You don't save transient things like visual particle positions but it's something you expect to persist between pauses. Pausing the render? But not the physics so you keep falling? You need to pause many systems. At the very least you'd want to pause gameplay, and sound and physics. You'd want to keep input and some of the UI unpaused. If you have a fancy UI with VF…
And if you pause sound in Unity using AudioListener.pause = true, which is supposed to make life easier, but ends up being useless if changing settings/clicking buttons has audio feedback, or changing the volume has audible feedback to tell you how loud, or you allow to change voice style, and on and on. Repeat that for every system - all those edge cases for each system can waste a lot of time and energy.
This is silly reporting with a couple of interesting stories. Forget about the technical ways of doing it. Doing it at all changes the game experience. Pausing a game has a massive impact on the game experience. It lets you break the fourth wall experientially. Not wrong, but it changes the dynamic of the game. Same as saving at any time does. As losing your loot or your life permanently does. Not wrong, but a hard c…
That choice should be left for the player.
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I'm not saying it would be trivial, but I bet that once you figure out a workable pattern, you could replicate that on other games. One idea that might be relatively easy to implement- Slow the framerate down to something super slow instead of fully stopping
Ah, but now your pause menu feels like total garbage to use!