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Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

Bester

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Duckard

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Bester covered most of it, but I want to mention this Blender add-on. It will be quick to learn if you already know Blender.

Also keep in mind that while the pro version of Spine is the industry standard, the basic version doesn't even get you meshes or IK. I wouldn't buy it.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Spine Pro is great, but if you already have Adobe Animator (formerly known as Flash Pro) you can get a lot of the same functionality without paying anything extra. Or if you already have Photoshop CC, it doesn't cost very much to add Animator. And if you're going to pay for Photoshop and Animator, you may as well get the whole Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe has wormed its way into just about all of my art pipelines: model textures, tiling textures, sprite sheets, animated gifs, particle effects, trailers, menus, color grading....
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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I've had a few days off due to power-related issues and played Wizardry non-stop until the battery ran out.
Now I'm genuinely curious on how to implement a similar look from the ground up. After some fucking around for an hour or so I think I'm onto something.

Jn755MP.png

If you're using Unity you're over thinking the whole thing. Just use planes and set the engine to wireframe mode.

Zep--
In this case I'm using C + SDL. Besides, I've already got a line renderer in Unity so building something like this would be a piece of cake, except I want to dig deeper.

Are you using OpenGL's GL_LINE_STRIP primitive? You may want to make a geometry shader that transforms lines into actual quads for more flexibility, because aside from the bare bones most video drivers give little thought to line primitives. I remember having to make one myself because glLineWidth was buggy and inconsistent between different video cards, according to the spec "Only width 1 is guaranteed to be supported; others depend on the implementation." (thanks Khronos!)
In this case I've only used the standard function to draw lines within SDL as a test. No OpenGL or anything like this.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Beta test underway and no one's computer exploded, so that's good. Starting work on the real campaign now and redoing the starting city again. It gets more complicated each time.

HS_NewSunriseFalls.jpg


I haven't added all the barrels, crates, doors, plants, or NPCs to flesh out the city. I need to figure out why the grass on the cliff meshes is so much darker than the grass on the landscape. And I haven't built the lighting yet. But this is the rough depiction of where our story starts.

A friend asked me "What if someone climbs up the right side of the mountain there?" I said, "No one in the game can ascend steeper than a 45 degree slope."
 

barker_s

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Looking good Nathaniel3W ! The only thing that's jarring to me in this screenshot is that the buildings feel kinda disjointed from the rest of the scene. One of the reasons for this is that there are no shadows, but as far as I remember you went with a custom lighting solution. So perhaps, if shadows are out of the question, maybe you could try setting up ambient occlusion? Either by a shader, or maybe even by baking it directly into textures.

Here's what I mean (I slightly exaggerated the effect on the right):

Q6kQdnM.png
 

shihonage

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I may have asked this question before. When I am using Direct3D9 from Visual C++ IDE, and the program crashes, and I have any of those fancy debug windows open... I don't see the error dialog box, and I don't see the windows. I have to blindly switch to the UI, press ENTER to shut down the error box, and then Shift-F5 or something to terminate the debug process, at which point of course I can use the IDE again, but all the helpful windows disappear, as the process was terminated.

Is there a way for D3D9 to NOT freeze/obscure Visual Studio IDE redrawing? Because this is like debugging with your eyes closed.
 

Tavernking

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First I wanted to make an MMORPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Second I wanted to make an RPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Third I wanted to make an 2D RPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Fourth I wanted to make an RPG with RPG Maker, but I realised it was too generic and time-consuming.
Now I've lowered my standards to making a Choose Your Own Adventure :/
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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First I wanted to make an MMORPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Second I wanted to make an RPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Third I wanted to make an 2D RPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Fourth I wanted to make an RPG with RPG Maker, but I realised it was too generic and time-consuming.
Now I've lowered my standards to making a Choose Your Own Adventure :/
Didn't know Vault Dweller had an alt.
 

shihonage

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First I wanted to make an MMORPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Second I wanted to make an RPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Third I wanted to make an 2D RPG, but I realised it was too hard and time-consuming.
Fourth I wanted to make an RPG with RPG Maker, but I realised it was too generic and time-consuming.
Now I've lowered my standards to making a Choose Your Own Adventure :/

You can start with CYOA and then start adding stats and more complex logic to branching, characters that traverse between branches, etc. Start simple, make something functional, then conservatively add to it.
 

Duckard

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Making some progress on the animation system: https://gfycat.com/SelfreliantIndelibleArgentinehornedfrog

The encoding kind of ruins the clarity of the animation, but whatever. Added some line width variation to the limbs and went for a more stylized look overall.

Gameplay wise, the long term goal is to have a strategy layer (think X-COM) where you manage an order of holy knights dedicated to purging demons and burning heretics. The goal for end of May is a polished series of 3-5 progressively more challenging, hand-crafted tactical encounters to share on the Codex.

Tavernking Look into Ink. It's basically a scripting language for CYOA. I suggest this one because it's open source, has good documentation, has been used in commercial products before, and has no licensing fee. Also easier to integrate with game code if you decide to do something more complex.
 

pbrand

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The encoding kind of ruins the clarity of the animation, but whatever.

What are you using to record? I usually do Open Broadcaster+WebM For Retards or ScreenToGif (webm and gif respectively) myself.
 

Duckard

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After wasting a bunch of time reading that inXile drama thread, I did some more work: https://gfycat.com/CrazyInsecureAfricangroundhornbill

Animations are driven by the equipped weapon type. Right now the only weapon types are 1 handed melee (i.e. arming sword), and reach weapons (i.e. spear), but adding more is easy. Also, dead simple VFX!

What are you using to record? I usually do Open Broadcaster+WebM For Retards or ScreenToGif (webm and gif respectively) myself.

I record in OBS, crop it, then just upload to gfycat and let them handle conversion to WebM and gif (although their gifs look bad because of file size limits). I'll give those tools a try next time I get the chance. Where do you normally host your webms and gifs?
 

Zed

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I have absolutely nothing to show for it, but I made great progress on a thing I'm working on. ok, peace.
 

Nathaniel3W

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barker_s Yeah, I've got a custom lighting thing going on that doesn't do proper shadows. When I bake the lighting there will be shadows under the buildings, but it won't change according to time of day.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm dreading the armchair developers on reddit who are all going to tell me that I'm doing the lighting wrong, and that game whatever has fully dynamic light and shadows so why doesn't mine. One of the things I really like about the Codex though is that those guys are in the minority. Most of you are really good about providing helpful criticism and advice. Like barker did. I do have ambient occlusion set up. I'll see if I can bump it up some more. Thanks.

d1nolore Thanks. I thought I did a post about those mountains somewhere, but I can't find it, so maybe I didn't actually post about it.

So I started off buying these, which I thought looked fantastic in the screenshots.

f3d3d303-2032-494f-a16a-e9eb19dcaa6b_scaled.jpg


But the more I tried using them, the more I realized they just weren't what I needed. It wasn't my palette or my style. There's quite a selection, but they're all kind of lump-shaped, so they don't form realistic mountain ranges. And worst of all, the default textures just didn't scale well and they all looked blurry up-close. There's a reason why they're marketed as "background mountains."

So I fired up World Machine, made my own mountains, made some splat maps for them, made materials for them that use triplanar projection so the steeper faces don't look stretched, and made the tiling textures stay the same size regardless of the mountain's scale.

SplatMountains.jpg


HS_NewMaterials_optimized.gif

And if I want to reuse them in a different setting--a desert, for example--all I have to do is make another instance of the material, and just replace the grass with sand.
 

AdolfSatan

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Looks amazing m8, getting some strong LoM vibes out of it, which is always a good thing.

Shit you oughtn't be phased by:
>plebbitors
>muh hyper realistic ambiance and graphics faggots. If you want to see hd textures in the leaves of the trees, step outside.

Actual shit developers should care about:
>not making sewer levels
>cutting the crap with critters like spiders, bats, scorpions, or rats.

For fucks sake, what in the hell makes them think anybody wants more of that.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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Now is the best time to do whatever the fuck you want. Wanna test some crazy idea? Why not, you can make a small game on a limited/zero budget and see how it pans out. No publisher is going to bite you in the ass and demand shit because 'shit sells' and I'm sure you'll find a few people who enjoy this kind of stuff, especially on Codex.

Also the market is oversaturated with shit, so making something uncommon and investing some real effort into it can work wonders.

Actual shit developers should care about:
>not making sewer levels
>cutting the crap with critters like spiders, bats, scorpions, or rats.

For fucks sake, what in the hell makes them think anybody wants more of that.
Actually the demo includes 2 segments from the first chapter and one of them is an underground tunnels level.
And then you're greeted with spider bots equipped with submachine guns.

Fuck, I'm losing potential players faster than I can get them!
 
Last edited:

vlzvl

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Actual shit developers should care about:
>not making sewer levels
>cutting the crap with critters like spiders, bats, scorpions, or rats.

For fucks sake, what in the hell makes them think anybody wants more of that.

whoa, it seems this was written explicitly for my current game, which features a sewer level and lots of rats.
However, my answer is this: I feel safer with a bunch of rats rather a bunch of spider bots equipped with submachine guns.
What could possibly do a Long sword +1 to these guys, damn, and i have lots of long swords in my game
 

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