71–80 of 105 posts
Side question. Where do single indie developers get the artwork for games?
I use Turbosquid for free 3D models, and then customize them in Lightwave or Blender. I work on my own textures. For audio I rely on Looperman for free music and sound fx.
Are there any tutorials out there that explain your process a bit?
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> 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.
Why does Haskell have a REPL but not Go?
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Programmers tend not to be artistic, and artists tend to not support ideals like free software/free culture.
I make 3d models for games. In fact, I make 3d models for the game in the OP at MartianCraft. There's a vibrant community of game and 3d artists supporting eachother, giving out free assets, free help, free advice, tutorials ETC. I take issue with your broad assertion that artists don't support free culture. When it comes to assets, it's tough to put together a library of free, or even purchased ones, because the sty…
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Because Go sucks? What point are you trying to get at here?
My point? Before I get to my point, how about a rant: It mystifies me how nobody sees the obvious advantages of in-browser games, both for development and deployment. It should be obvious to anyone in the field, because the current method of developing and deploying games completely sucks. Do you honestly think that in 100 years, people are going to be deploying games through Steam, or worrying about cross-platform O…
But javascript? Is there any reason why we can't have a better language on the browser? Languages and tools do matter, after all.
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Ok, my apologies. I genuinely thought you were trying to make some kind of point. Haskell has a REPL, Scala has a REPL, OCaml has a REPL, F# has a REPL; it's not at all unusual for a statically typed language to have a REPL. (If I had to guess why Java doesn't have one I'd assume its emphasis on OO and everything-is-a-class; expressions in a REPL are almost inherently not contained in a class. For C/C++ I'd guess the…
If a browser is an extra layer of junk, then surely a bunch of the features that come with an OS are unnecessary junk too. Printer drivers, for example. But of course, printer drivers don't impede the ability to make games in any way. The fact that platforms have features which are useful for other purposes is unrelated to whether a platform can be useful for a specific purpose, like making games. There's nothing tha…
I fully agree with your opinion on this. I also can envision a future where AAA games can run fine on the browser, which would act like a universal platform. Not sure if this will ever come to pass, but it is technically feasible. I just don't like javascript :)
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Ok, my apologies. I genuinely thought you were trying to make some kind of point. Haskell has a REPL, Scala has a REPL, OCaml has a REPL, F# has a REPL; it's not at all unusual for a statically typed language to have a REPL. (If I had to guess why Java doesn't have one I'd assume its emphasis on OO and everything-is-a-class; expressions in a REPL are almost inherently not contained in a class. For C/C++ I'd guess the…
If a browser is an extra layer of junk, then surely a bunch of the features that come with an OS are unnecessary junk too. Printer drivers, for example. But of course, printer drivers don't impede the ability to make games in any way. The fact that platforms have features which are useful for other purposes is unrelated to whether a platform can be useful for a specific purpose, like making games. There's nothing tha…
But if you don't want to use them, printer drivers don't get in the way. Even if I'm laying out my screen by hand, I still have to worry about what the browser layout engine will do if the user resizes the window. If I want to capture keyboard input, or even just make API calls, I have to jump through hoops to convince the browser I'm not a malicious remote document. And whatever I'm writing, I have to transpile it into javascript, which is a pain for debugging.
> Why not use Steam? Because Gabe is going to die someday, and there's no reason to think that his successor will inherit his good judgement. Locking yourself into a monoculture isn't a good idea when your whole business can be smashed by one poor decision by the company pushing that monoculture. It's the same reason you don't see any companies built solely on Facebook or Twitter. (Apple is a notable exception, but companies can still live or die based on whether Apple feels like admitting you into their appstore.) Yes, Steam is pretty awesome right now, but arguing against exploring other alternatives is arguing against progress of any kind.
Are you that much safer on the browser? You'll write games that work for one, maybe two rendering engines - one of them made by google, the other made by an organization that gets most of its funding from google. The web's standards might theoretically be open, but they're so enormous and complex; writing your own browser from scratch (to the standard that modern html games require) is beyond the resources of all but the biggest organizations.
I'd certainly favour an open standard for a steam-like games runtime. Which would be a lot simpler than the browser standards, which would make competing implementations much more practical.
> Your objections seem to boil down to "a browser isn't meant for games." Well, nothing short of a gaming console is truly meant for games. But a browser can be used for games, if only the manufacturers would provide a single necessary tool: a place to put them. That is the sum total of my argument, and it mystifies me why so many people are not only against this idea, but somehow offended that a browser might be repurposed for anything other than viewing lines of text.
I am offended, because I have a sense of engineering aesthetics, and bodging everything into the browser is ugly. And from a practical point of view, I fear a future where the only programming jobs require javascript, because having to write javascript makes me very sad.
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What is the deal with software being hard to release as 64-bit? I'll fully admit that I don't work in C/C++ on the desktop, at all. This just seems like a button toggle problem (I know it was that way for C#/.NET apps, again, grossly simplify and apples to oranges) though, and it's surprising that you aren't just able to ping someone at these companies and ask for a 64-bit build.
> This just seems like a button toggle problem Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The problem is knowing when it is or isn't. That needs building with all warnings enabled and vetting through them manually, a run with a static analysis tool searching for possible 64 bit bugs, or at worst, running extensive test suites to try to detect errors at runtime. Some (older) software might also have some internal structures…
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Because Go sucks? What point are you trying to get at here?
My point? Before I get to my point, how about a rant: It mystifies me how nobody sees the obvious advantages of in-browser games, both for development and deployment. It should be obvious to anyone in the field, because the current method of developing and deploying games completely sucks. Do you honestly think that in 100 years, people are going to be deploying games through Steam, or worrying about cross-platform O…
In 100 years most of my plans revolve around being dead. The best tools for delivering AAA-quality games right NOW are native binaries on Windows and dedicated gaming consoles.
And yes, JavaScript and WebGL "suck" for AAA gaming development. JavaScript is a dynamically-typed, garbage collected language that can't deliver the performance of well-written C/C++ code, and WebGL is a subset of OpenGL, which by definition makes it less powerful than the full OpenGL that's available. And on Windows, the biggest platform for AAA games that also runs a full web browser, WebGL is just a wrapper that sits on top of DirectX, which means an additional performance hit.
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My point? Before I get to my point, how about a rant: It mystifies me how nobody sees the obvious advantages of in-browser games, both for development and deployment. It should be obvious to anyone in the field, because the current method of developing and deploying games completely sucks. Do you honestly think that in 100 years, people are going to be deploying games through Steam, or worrying about cross-platform O…
Ok, my apologies. I genuinely thought you were trying to make some kind of point. Haskell has a REPL, Scala has a REPL, OCaml has a REPL, F# has a REPL; it's not at all unusual for a statically typed language to have a REPL. (If I had to guess why Java doesn't have one I'd assume its emphasis on OO and everything-is-a-class; expressions in a REPL are almost inherently not contained in a class. For C/C++ I'd guess the…
For C and C++ you can use CINT, for example.
Two nice REPL experiences for strong type languages similar to Interlisp-D and Smalltalk, were the Mesa/Cedar environment and Oberon, which was inspired by Wirth's experience with Cedar.
I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, bein…
I really don't get why this is like this still.
Currently they seem more willing to implement their own IL2C++ generator, than agreeing with Xamarin about a new license.
Personally, specially given that C++11/14 is quite an improvment over C++98, I would go Unreal instead.