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Thread: So whats everyone been up to?

  1. #81
    I'm feeling supersonic kdsh7's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Son of Bryce View Post
    Yeah, it's mr_malee's game! haha! I had the pleasure of re-skinning it. I've been at Soap for a couple years, I joined as the LA office was starting up. Been doing mostly games, but some banners and site stuff as well. You can see some stuff I've been doing at my portfolio site sonofbryce.com.

    I've been in the depths of Flash but I'm kind of bored with it. I've been interested in experimenting with new stuff, been learning more HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery web stuff to get a feel for what it's all about. I was a lot more interested in HTML when it began seeming that Flash wasn't necessary for a lot of the more straightforward web/layout stuff. Javascript is a hindrance to me though, trying to figure out how scoping works and getting comfortable with that. Error city.

    I've been into Unity for a while now but still haven't done enough experimenting with it. I participated in the Global Game Jam this year and our team did a Unity game, while learning it on the fly. It came out pretty good! Fortunately someone joined our team that knew Unity and saved our butts with the more of the complex things. It was a great way to learn the program, especially since we limited complexity by using spheres for our characters. And C# is a much better language than Actionscript from that experience because of all the math functions and utilities that it has built in. You can read a blog post about it, and download the project source at http://blog.sokay.net/2011/02/13/bry...game-jam-2011/

    I like Unity, but it has a lot of quirks of its own. The concept of building a game out of an already made game engine was a bit different for me, and it took a while to figure out how to do small things like instantiating objects through code. But it's easy as hell once you get over the speed bumps, I think. And I very much like that it's fast.
    Great job on the Horrible Bosses reskin! Checked out your portfolio, lovely work you have there, and some I recognise as having come through the office before (Reepicheep!).

    I still love Flash, i guess I'm just fatigued with a lot of the work I'm being given during the day job. Loving Unity at the moment though, but it's strictly an off hours thing as the clients at the day job are thinking of accessibility all the time. Unity to me is a little like the old days of Flash; when you start out you do everything as code on MCs on a stage, and then you start instantiating everything and trying to make your code cleaner. Playing around with features I'd have only read about in magazines, like Beast Lightmapping, Occlusion Culling and all the post processing fx is so much fun. Good job on the Game Jam and great write up, I'll be having a good look at that later!

    The HTML5 stuff I'm not enjoying so much. I can't help feeling it's like a new band being hyped in the NME, people are willing it to succeed before it's time. Javascript is such a messy thing to work with too. There's some very impressive things being done with it using WebGL (not compatible with IE) in conjunction with three.js. Most exciting for me though is Bartek Drodz's new J3D, a 3d engine for WebGL he's put together, for which he's even created a Unity Exporter for! Examples here: http://www.everyday3d.com/blog/index...experiments-2/

    Squize/Lux, glad you've released those screens into the wild, the game just looks like it's piled on the pounds of awesome each time I look at it. Hype it to the max, it's going to be great

    .hooligan, I started off using Unity with JS and it was very straightforward but I made the decision a little while back to switch to C# and I haven't looked back. C# is very new to me, and I'm still getting my head round some of it, but I'm enjoying it loads. The Quaternion stuff is something I tried to look into when I was messing with Away3D a couple of years back, but Unity makes using them so much easier. As I said above though, it's just so much fun having all that power!

    Tom, not bad thanks, what are you up to these days? What you said about Unity is spot on, I really wish they'd bought that ScaleForm tech (http://www.scaleform.com/) before Autodesk did, it would have been the perfect solution to UI in Unity.

  2. #82
    Yes we can tomsamson's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    Unity to me is a little like the old days of Flash; when you start out you do everything as code on MCs on a stage, and then you start instantiating everything and trying to make your code cleaner.
    Yeah, i totally agree, it feels a lot like that. In a way though even if one does it the more designer manner way of placing stuff in the scene one can still get to more reusable stuff though thanks to the components setup where one can add several scripts onto a single game object and that way reuse scripts (even any where one hasn´t defined it as class etc since then for js files it basically treadts it like a class internally) and when turning the whole thing into a prefab then also reuse the gameObjects etc.
    That side to me feels like a more implied class and (flash) component setup.
    It still isn´t perfect by any means of course, for example it doesn´t have support for nested prefabs yet (but that should come with one of the next dot upgrades), but yeah, i see it as nice advancement on such fronts.


    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    Playing around with features I'd have only read about in magazines, like Beast Lightmapping, Occlusion Culling and all the post processing fx is so much fun.
    Yeah, totally =)


    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    The HTML5 stuff I'm not enjoying so much. I can't help feeling it's like a new band being hyped in the NME, people are willing it to succeed before it's time.

    Couldn´t agree more. I like it for websites when its used for things where it can replace flash while retaining nice functionality and running well accross most browsers, but as soon as there´s more complex interaction/skinning with videos or audio stuff or 3D stuff etc involved, well, demos like those you linked to are quite cool but they of course don´t work in most browsers =(



    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    .hooligan, I started off using Unity with JS and it was very straightforward but I made the decision a little while back to switch to C# and I haven't looked back. C# is very new to me, and I'm still getting my head round some of it, but I'm enjoying it loads.
    yup, started with doing js in unity, too and then switched over to C# for most stuff for a while, now i´m back to js again for some stuff and using C# for some projects but not that much in (mobile) cross platform ones anymore.
    I like coding in C# quite a bit but performancewise there´s not a noticable difference from my experience in unity whether one codes in js (but with #pragma strict tag, so still strict data typing) or C#.
    The main reason i´m doing more JS stuff now again though is that doing C# lead me to do more and more things which are kinda risky or no good idea to do when deploying to iOS devices.
    (Long story but as example in short iOS device deploy enforces AOT (Ahead of time compilation, so no jit compilation etc permitted) and some things one can joyfully do in C# like some generics stuff then leads to crashes on iOS device since it would use jit compilation. Unity js meanwhile supports doing some generics stuff, too but not the full range and yeah, has more restrictions on other ends compared to coding in C#, which is annoying and could be skipped when deploying to other platforms but is in the sense i explained actually a good thing in many cases when deploying to iOS.. weird world =) )


    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    As I said above though, it's just so much fun having all that power!
    Yeah, exactly =) I was already initially attracted to unity of course seeing at how much better performance comparable stuff ran on the same device when made in it, even no matter which language one used, but that was while i was mostly working on mobile games using it or web stuff, so in both cases having to optimize for (way) less powerful machines than a newer more powerful desktop.
    I´m just getting to work on a game now for the first time which is targetted at more powerful machines and man is it fun to finally be able to go all out with it =)

    And yeah, will also be interesting to see how much (or not) all the talk we did on unity now will hold true for flash when the molehill stuff gets finalized.

    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    Tom, not bad thanks, what are you up to these days?

    doing ok, too =)
    Got a bunch of games out on some of the mobile devices, next to some web stuff, still working lots, in between looking after my baby nephew when he is brought to my place and well, attending gdc europe for the first time in a few days (next to gamescom afterwards), that should be fun =)

    Quote Originally Posted by kdsh7 View Post
    What you said about Unity is spot on, I really wish they'd bought that ScaleForm tech (http://www.scaleform.com/) before Autodesk did, it would have been the perfect solution to UI in Unity.
    Yeah, i would have prefered UT to license Scaleform rather than buying them as i prefer such companies to stay independent (as that often turns out better for all involved in the long run instead of just for the swallower ) but yeah, if a company gets bought its of course also important which other one buys it and in that case i´d have much prefered the unity fellas than Autodesk doing it, too.

    Autodesk has a bit of a history of swallowing up all sorts of other companies and then progress on the produtcs often not going on as nicely and fast and affordable for users as it used to in the future, so yeah, i hope it goes better this time round.
    At least they seem to have some interesting concepts for what to make with all the aquisitions judging on the last few things i´ve seen from them, so let´s see =)

  3. #83
    Senior Member Olorin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomsamson View Post
    Oh, sweet, hey there Olorin , very nice to see you checking in here, too =)
    I tried your Dibblez Adventure, nice game =)
    I like it that after the first tutorial screen it jumps right into the action with several enemies attacking one =)
    After playing several levels the only things that felt off to me were:
    -When completing a level/room the text in the stats boxes shows like in times new roman, maybe the font isn´t embedded
    -also on that screen it says one would have to be logged in to get the progress saved but there´s no option right there to login, have the progress saved and continue.
    Besides that, well, i always liked your friendly dibblez games =)
    I´m almost scared to ask, how is your experience with CS5.5 now? =
    Hi there
    Thanks for playing! I might have forgotten to embed that font, I'll have a look at that. And yeah, I don't have an ingame option for logging in (except at the end when you can send your score) I should probably make that too some day.

    My experience with CS5.5 hasn't been great so far. AS3 is making my head hurt, mostly because it's hard to drop flash programming habits that I've been using for about 10 years. But I'm slowly learning and I hope it'll start to feel more natural soon.

  4. #84
    Senior Member Pazil's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Squize View Post
    Pazil it's going to be a survival horror mate. We've got Nape in there for the physics, but there's no real puzzles as such, it's more for things like objects reacting correctly to gun fire / explosions etc. Physics puzzles are an easy thing for the player to screw up, and there's no restart option as such, so we had to make it really simplistic, like using a crate to hide behind to avoid turrets etc.

    Squize.
    Well, this isn't fair! I see this 2 on 1 thing going on!
    I was already planning a sequel to my game where I would use physics as well (and I had even decided to use Nape, wow coincidence!), to make a 2D version of Penumbra/Amnesia:The Dark Decent, that kind of style... (If the sequel will actually be made...that's a whole other question)

    I hear you on the physics thing...but the only "puzzles" I would have used them for would be the player running into a room and blocking the door or something, so yeah, something that's hard to **** up on.

    Surprisingly, I find myself a bit more motivated now, and now thanks to you, I'll slowly start development again I think, but I have a strong urge to do a rewrite... :/ (must.....resist...)

    (I'm currently taking a break from big projects, and remaking snakey and have a few other small game ideas. The snakey will sort of be like flying a spaceship around with a bunch of kinematic balls following you...so far so good)

    @.hooligan : Weeell...I do have an alpha up online, but I don't want to show that anymore I'll try to set **** up during August and make a demo level. That will both finally show the game as it will be, and also tell me if I should do a rewrite or not, depending on how hard it is to set the level up...

    Good luck Squize + Lux! I expect frequent updates and playable demo's of your game! And I'm signed up as a beta tester...right?

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  5. #85
    Hype over content... Squize's Avatar
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    Glad to hear we've helped get your juices flowing

    Yeah the whole physics thing, you've got to be really carefully, as increased freedom for the player means increased ways for them to break the game.
    As for beta testing, yeah sure. We always ask for beta testers via our blog, as that's our home for want of a better word, so you'll have to check there I think as I don't come here too often anymore ( And wouldn't really ask for beta testers here. Times moved on and all that ).
    Hopefully 3/4 weeks should see it in a beta state.

    We're also working on a mini-game too, I was hoping to kill it off tonight and get it up for sale, but I think it'll be tomorrow now. I'm not doing it through choice, just a delayed client project has screwed up my finances so I'm having to break from Outpost to knock out a quicky.

    Squize.

  6. #86
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    Hey Squize, thanks for asking :P

    I just wrote a blog post about how virtual goods are no longer a good option for game developers, whether you are working in Flash or on iOS/Android (read it here: http://betab.ly/qAe4Vr) and would love some feedback. Thanks!

  7. #87
    Yes we can tomsamson's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Olorin View Post
    Hi there
    Thanks for playing! I might have forgotten to embed that font, I'll have a look at that. And yeah, I don't have an ingame option for logging in (except at the end when you can send your score) I should probably make that too some day.
    cool =)

    Quote Originally Posted by Olorin View Post
    My experience with CS5.5 hasn't been great so far. AS3 is making my head hurt, mostly because it's hard to drop flash programming habits that I've been using for about 10 years. But I'm slowly learning and I hope it'll start to feel more natural soon.
    Hm, yeah, i know how it feels =) To me AS3 still doesn´t feel natural at all after several years of using it, usable yes, more structured yes, but also way more longwinded and over engineered than most other languages and apis i use =)
    I also tend to use other middleware for the really performance intensive stuff for a good long while meanwhile so when i actually use flash for something i decide based on the project type whether its something i think profits from doing it in AS3 or its more something that could be done nicely in AS1/2 and its way quicker to prototype/ flesh out in that.
    Since you also switch from way older IDE to the latest one maybe first get used to the IDE and do 1-2 projects in AS1/2 and then afterwards do the transition to AS3.

  8. #88
    Senior Member Olorin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomsamson View Post
    Hm, yeah, i know how it feels =) To me AS3 still doesn´t feel natural at all after several years of using it, usable yes, more structured yes, but also way more longwinded and over engineered than most other languages and apis i use =)
    Good to hear that it's not just me Longwinded indeed.
    I decided to dive straight in though, so I'm currently working on the engine for a tilebased platformer in AS3, with everything in classes. Although I'm still putting most of my code in one class, which feels more familiar, but is probably not the most AS3-ish thing to do.

  9. #89
    Yes we can tomsamson's Avatar
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    Well, as long as you´re comfortable with how you do it and get things done that´s the most important thing initially, you can always seperate things out more into more classes with later projects, no use to get stuck on such things with your first AS3 project =)
    And yeah, you´re surely not the only one at all thinking like that about AS3, all those years have passed since it was first introduced and we still get people moaning about it every once in a while =)


    On a completely different topic: I´m going to GDC Europe and Gamescom next week, anyone else here attending?

  10. #90
    Senior Member Pazil's Avatar
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    @Squize: Your Orbs game is looking pretty cool on the blog btw! And I find it funny that you were making a survival horror game, and now you're making a neon/particle-like remake of an old classic with a twist...

    Here's what I've been working on in the past week:
    http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/...660e264aa7950e
    Controls are Left/Right arrows to steer, and Space bar to use your power up.

    It's actually almost done, just adding in 2 enemy things that are meant to mess with you later on. And I'm surprised how quickly it took off too...

    Anywhore, I hope to see your Orbs game when it's released! As long as you have a bajillion particles in there, it's sure to go viral.

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  11. #91
    Hype over content... Squize's Avatar
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    I like your snake game mate, bit tricky to start with but I soon settled into it. I think you're running more particles than Orbs

    If you've sold a game on FGL you should be able to play it here:
    http://www.flashgamelicense.com/view...&game_id=19661
    ( If not, send me a friend request on there, same goes for anyone whose interested and can't view it ).

    It was 8 days work, and it shows, def. not a classic. Don't know when it'll be live, bidding on it is both painfully low, and slow. The 3D tilting effect is quite nice though, first time I've tried it and hopefully I'll use it in a bigger game one day.

    Squize.

  12. #92
    When you know are. Son of Bryce's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pazil View Post
    Here's what I've been working on in the past week:
    http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/...660e264aa7950e
    Controls are Left/Right arrows to steer, and Space bar to use your power up.
    This is pretty fun! Took me a few tries to get a feel for the controls and to realize that my tail kills me (at first I thought the combo meter running out killed me).

    I see a lot of potential for things to add. Different stage layouts. Maybe scrolling. A boss type battle where you have to kill the boss tripping him up with your tail. Kinda depends on what direction you want to take it.

    The most frustrating thing for me is have to start from the beginning after killing myself. It would be good to add in stuff to give the player a feeling of progression to prevent someone like me from angrily closing the browser tab, haha.

  13. #93
    formerly hooligan2001 :) .hooligan's Avatar
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    We're also working on a mini-game too, I was hoping to kill it off tonight and get it up for sale, but I think it'll be tomorrow now. I'm not doing it through choice, just a delayed client project has screwed up my finances so I'm having to break from Outpost to knock out a quicky.
    I know how you feel, seems that larger personal projects seem to take much longer because every couple of months I have to fit in a client project to keep me going too.

    Anyone participating in the ludum dare this weekend?

    EDIT: Also had a dream the other night of porting http://www.euclideon.com/news/new-un...-detail-video/ to flash
    Last edited by .hooligan; 08-15-2011 at 08:05 PM.
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  14. #94
    Senior Member Pazil's Avatar
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    I've thought about porting it too! If they say that they're really running that in software...I'd like to see how it comes out in Flash.

    But unlimited detail is total bull**** anyways. They keep complaining how nobody's paying attention to them, when there are still so many problems with it, like animation, physics, and the fact that their island demo uses many many copies of the same object, rather than truly different objects. If I burst anyone's bubble, I'm very sorry, but not to worry, because HERE is the real deal!
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  15. #95
    formerly hooligan2001 :) .hooligan's Avatar
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    Yeah I see so many people saying its bs. I hope that it is true though. I'm on the fence. I can see how its possible, but if it was so easy like they state. Surely someone would have work this out much earlier.

    Will have to wait and see I guess.
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  16. #96
    Senior Member Pazil's Avatar
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    Well the thing is it is possible what they're doing, just not practical for use in games (Though it would work really well for static maps, even though most games are starting to lean into fully destructible terrain...)

    The reason it isn't practical is because for animation and physics to happen in it, means it needs to UPDATE every single one of those points, which of course is impossible. At the current state, they're only touching/updating the points they need for rendering. All the other just sit in memory.
    The next thing is memory...to store a map as big as their island map in memory, that can take gazillion gigabytes. So what they do is they use copies of the same object, which of course saves a lot of memory, but means that instead of giving artists a poly count, the developers will have a model count, which imo is worse...

    Anywho, his videos piss me off anyways, because he doesn't mention anything negative, tries to be modest (How many times does he have to say "and nothing against the artists here, they have done a great job with what they have had, BUT, with Unlimited Point Cloud Data..."), and sounds weird and just like he's begging for sponsors

    ANYWHO...

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  17. #97
    formerly hooligan2001 :) .hooligan's Avatar
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    Yeah I cant picture the physics/collision working any differently so it's gotta be resource intensive. Only other way is to have a fake poly world for collision (more CPU time). I've seen older videos of his with animation which just uses bones, but I've seen no physics.

    Only reason other reason why I think they re-used all those assets is maybe because it would be a son of a b***h to model that many new assets for the demo

    I'm not defending him though. Just some thoughts. I know it sounds like its a scam but how much funding does he need. I heard he got the largest Australian grant of 2 million dollars. But I don't know if that's a lie either, it was straight from the horses mouth.

    I can see the videos piss a lot of people off. He does claim a lot. Maybe it pisses most people off because he seems to have worked out the holy grail of 3d and some people are jealous. Or its that he sounds smug

    Ow well hopefully this technology isn't too far off and I won't have to upgrade this old beast of a machine.
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  18. #98
    Yes we can tomsamson's Avatar
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    I met Bruce Dell at GDC Europe, he has a crazy genius vibe to him =)
    They have some big hurdles to overcome so not sure if it´ll go anywhere but i can assure you that at least what one can see in that youtube video really runs like that.
    Not at ginourmous framerate, and no lighting and no animated meshes, yes, but well, what seems like at around 20 fps right now with super detailed objects.
    I wish him good luck, its good to have more people in the industry which think a bit outside the box.

  19. #99
    formerly hooligan2001 :) .hooligan's Avatar
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    Ow really, I've only seen him in interviews. I can see why people may think his a bit cocky. I think his just miss understood and is excited about the work his doing. Did you get to see a live demo of the tech?

    How was GDC Europe? Were you there promoting something or just as a visitor?
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  20. #100
    Senior Member Pazil's Avatar
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    Yeah, I just watched an interview with Bruce Dell, and I'm a lot less skeptical now, he did a good job of explaining a few things.

    If Squize is reading this, I just wanted to know the stage dimensions of your sci-fi horror game! I'm hoping it's smaller than 600x600...

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