Game development career thread:

Ludum is 20 days off.

"Every 10 seconds" is the theme. Struggling to think of something I can finish.

Ok so here's my ideas thus far:

An adventure game set aboard a starship headed to investigate the great attractor. The player awakens from a 20 year sleep to prepare the ship for the switch from acceleration to slowdown. Basically the floor becomes the ceiling. The only loose tie to the theme is that I did the math and every 10 seconds of ship time is 2 years back on earth. 125 million years have gone by back there. No idea what the story or anything would be yet.

An RPG with magic powered by a 10 second pulsar in the night sky. Some bits of it would need line of sight, others could be prepared via circle similar to Ultima 8 sorcery.

A mystery game where a 10 second pulsar suddenly changes to 9. The player is sent to investigate. I'm guessing there will be alot of pulsar related games.

Hmm I have no idea how to do 2D stuff in Unity. 3D games are kind of my comfort zone.

But you are right, none of those are simple enough. I did do an adventure game or two for LD but that was back when I was young and could stay awake all weekend

So I've been trying to get characters working in Linux, and getting lots of explodey parts and limbs stretched out and such as is usual. So I wanted to check to make sure my assigned bones were right. Art stuff does the bones by name but I convert that into indexes and it's possible they could be off.

A fun abomination, even better animated:


So I load up renderdoc and I pick a random vert on the right foot and notice it is mapped to the left foot. I thought maybe my indexes were corrupted but I checked one on the left hand and it was mapped to the right. Checked a bit more and yes, everything was swapped left to right.

This started a 2 day debugging binge where I incorrectly remembered that I was using a left hand coordinate system, until I read my own documentation and realized it was right (after wasting a day). I'm still seeing left and right backwards in renderdoc, but I check the animation against blender:


And it looks exactly right. This hastily sloppily done animation has a quirk where the elbow bends backwards at a certain point only on the right side. I paused it at that point at they look identical.

So maybe Renderdoc is mirroring in X or something? That is a really common thing to do if you are switching from right handed to left. Most art packages are right and directx is left, but I dunno!

Yep, I dug through renderdoc's bugs on github. Someone eventually added a setting in the mesh viewer. You can see I set it to right handed, and with that vert with 27 bone index highlighted, you can see it is on the right foot.


Bone 27 is right foot for me. Mystery solved!

So a few weeks ago, I started trying to get my bsp map stuff working again. This is my sort of homegrown budget walmart great-value idtech. Anyway, the first map I made caused major problems. My tools would build but leaked and with large chunks of the map missing.

Id's tools threw lots of warnings and such but still built it at least visually fine. Then I tried one of the more recent up to date heavily worked on mapping compilers off github and it built it flawlessly with no problems at all.

A week of really intense debuggery damn near killed me. I never found the flaw (though I did find another bug with my portals) and eventually my brain was so cooked I decided to do something gamey. I fired up Unity.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I just can't seem to stay awake. Something about making stuff in someone else's engine just doesn't give you that same reward chemical mixture. I'm making things happen but it feels like I'm following a recipe instead of solving real problems. There's no creativity to it somehow. I end up falling asleep in my chair.

Cannot imagine someone breathing down my neck while I hustled to crank this kind of stuff out

I love this channel


Full of old war stories about Fallout etc.

I think someone in Rajah's crpg thread pasted one and I've been watching them all.

Look at this crazy mocap studio:

When I worked on a fighting game for awhile, we were super jealous of namco at the time. They had a great studio, but also a big talent pool of badass martial artists to work with.

For us on the cheap we just had one of the designers brother who was a "black belt" fly up to the old house of moves. I think it was like 10 grand a day and the results were pretty bad.

In today's episode of retarded companies doing retarded things, Unity decided to dramatically increase its price by changing to a royalty model... where they charge you per install...
and they're applying it to all existing games... Aside from the retarded, that doesn't even sound legal. The TOS that I'm governed by should be the one I agreed to when I installed the software. Under this logic, there's no reason they can't charge every Unity user infinite dollars at any point in the future.



edit: here's the actual price breakdown. So it won't affect mostly-revenue-less indies at least, but good lord... If this doesn't change, it basically kills f2p Unity games, which is most of the reason people use Unity. And even if they change it, trust is dead.

Oh, and they aren't using your numbers for installs. They track it themselves and bill you... and reinstalls from the same user or on multiple machines owned by the same user count. no word on how they'll avoid charging you for pirates other than "trust us".

Control said:

In today's episode of retarded companies doing retarded things, Unity decided to dramatically increase its price by changing to a royalty model... where they charge you per install...
and they're applying it to all existing games... Aside from the retarded, that doesn't even sound legal. The TOS that I'm governed by should be the one I agreed to when I installed the software. Under this logic, there's no reason they can't charge every Unity user infinite dollars at any point in the future.

View attachment 490426

edit: here's the actual price breakdown. So it won't affect mostly-revenue-less indies at least, but good lord... If this doesn't change, it basically kills f2p Unity games, which is most of the reason people use Unity. And even if they change it, trust is dead.

Oh, and they aren't using your numbers for installs. They track it themselves and bill you... and reinstalls from the same user or on multiple machines owned by the same user count. no word on how they'll avoid charging you for pirates other than "trust us".

View attachment 490427

Click to expand...

Unity lawyer responds to understandably upset users:

i.e. "Fuck your prior agreements, your 5 years in development, and your game that's already been released for a year. Pay us these new fees or stop letting people install your game, including (somehow) all of your beta, demo, and even fucking WEB versions that you may not even be in control of."

Jesus fucking christ...

Control said:

Unity lawyer responds to understandably upset users:
View attachment 490433
i.e. "Fuck your prior agreements, your 5 years in development, and your game that's already been released for a year. Pay us these new fees or stop letting people install your game, including (somehow) all of your beta, demo, and even fucking WEB versions that you may not even be in control of."

Jesus fucking christ...

Click to expand...

Welp, EU studios have 3 months to get lawsuits ready. With as popular as Unity is, I would expect them to be burred in lawsuits. This sounds like it's going to kill the Indie scene.

Will this make Unity engine more expensive than Unreal? What other alternatives are there?

Burns said:

Welp, EU studios have 3 months to get lawsuits ready. With as popular as Unity is, I would expect them to be burred in lawsuits. This sounds like it's going to kill the Indie scene.

Will this make Unity engine more expensive than Unreal? What other alternatives are there?

Click to expand...

Unreal takes a 5% royalty on revenue over $1M, so Unity is probably still cheaper if you're making a game that sell a reasonable number of copies at a reasonable price on Steam. IF all goes well. Although since Unity is using their own DRM to calculate the number of installs and is basically saying, "if you disagree with our numbers, open a fraud case" and pirated copies can easily be downloaded 100x more than your actual sales, even the best case may still be shitty. And then there's the possibility of people install-bombing you.

Even in the best of cases, mobile/f2p games are fucked, and web builds are so fucked it's not even funny. And crowdfunded models where you do lots of incremental releases and/or have free or timelocked builds might be fucked.

This thing is catering to the top percent of a percent of devs who might look at it and go "well, it's still cheaper than Unreal" and is actively, dramatically hostile to everyone else. Plenty of mobile devs are posting their actual numbers in the Unity thread, and it's very possible that some of them end up owing Unity more money than they make. I mean, I would sort of understand if they just said "look, indies aren't worth the trouble", but even if you're a top end Unity dev, how would you be able to sleep at night spending years of work to publish something knowing that Unity is ready and willing to change your royalty rate on games you've already fucking published.

I mean, I expect a lot of this to get walked back to something less absurd, but the damage may already be done. I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably invest in their ecosystem after this. Projects that are already launched or are in progress are probably stuck, but I don't see how anyone really starts new Unity projects now.

Unreal is the only other real option for a mature 3d game engine afaik, but I haven't actively watched the space (since I was using Unity ). People have been making lots of noise about Godot, but not sure if it's a real alternative.

There is literally no way they are not getting sued into oblivion.

The whole "we reserve the right to change the ToS at any time" schtick has been shown to have limits and all the sudden bankrupting games that were developed under a completely different fee schedule is probably too far.

This would be such a great time for the courts to finally say no more to this "change anything at all at any time" bullshit that tech companies do. It is fucking ignorant that it was ever allowed in the first place.