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Indie Game Development Thread 3: Indie Jones and the Template of Doom

LordRaptor

Member
Does anyone here use Mixamo Auto-Rigger and Unreal Engine together? I can't retarget anything from the Animation Starter Pack to my autorigged mesh without twisting wrists or getting a humpback. I tried to tweak the retargeting pose on both skeletons but it didn't help much.

I havent used Mixamo with UE, but as a headsup, I got an email from Mixamo basically saying "cash in all your shit before the end of August" so I think its days are numbered
 

LordRaptor

Member
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595
tl;dr : Greenlight is officially dead, Steam Direct to launch next week.

welp;
If you bought the Greenlight Submission fee, but haven't had a chance to post a submission, or if your submission has not been Greenlit by the end of this process, you can use the Steam support site to request a refund of your submission fee.

that answers that question.
sort of interesting that Valve are eating the cost of whatever charitable donations those fees went towards rather than just giving a "one free game release" token or whatever
 

OBias

Member
I havent used Mixamo with UE, but as a headsup, I got an email from Mixamo basically saying "cash in all your shit before the end of August" so I think its days are numbered

I guess I will have to learn to rig my models myself after all.
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
If steam greenlight is dead, I guess that means the worrying about being accepted on steam is over right? Simply pay $100 and tadah! You're on steam, correct?
 
Been thinking about style and thematic stuff while I work on the more technical bits currently. I was originally going to go with a synthwave 80s inspired look and sound but something about the comparison to re-volt (thank you whoever that was) had stuck in my head.

I'm imagining it more like a micro machines, toy soldiers type world. The tracks twisting and looping around furniture and real world items that are huge in comparison. Will mean a lot more assets needed which isn't good but I think it's got more depth and a sense of fun to it than just virtual 80s environments
 

wwm0nkey

Member
Well I am about to leave my student developer job after 2 years (needed better pay) so now that I don't have to work with Unity every day I hope to actually make progress!
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Well I am about to leave my student developer job after 2 years (needed better pay) so now that I don't have to work with Unity every day I hope to actually make progress!

SCREW UNITY! /rant I actually like unity but whatev's. What engine's grass looks greener?
 
And with this piece of art, I think it's safe to say that REDFOXES has moved past the prototype-phase into what I can finally call "Early development" as I shift gears towards creating real content for the gameplay to interact with instead of rotting in 5-second debug rooms. I had meant to publicly release a playable prototype earlier, but at this point I'm going to go all in on making a more representative demo of the game before anything is publicly playable.

ke2w1u.png

...Though devlogging is going to be awkward, as pretty much all the visible changes (IE, replacing the Atari-2600 crewmen and level art shown above) I'll be able to show are going to be the work of the artists I've partnered with moreso than I, as the majority of programming I'll be doing from this point on will probably just be under the hood polish and optimization as I've put a hard lockdown on feature-creep. Literally anything that wasn't in my design document as of a week ago is officially not getting in the game, for any reason.
 
I kinda like Unity. Their pre-built features mostly have issues but in general it's not too hard to program your own. It really helps having so many great resources online.
 

friken

Member
I'm trying to get twitch streaming settings good enough where the audio / video are synced and high enough quality for people can see the fractal react to the music. It is frustrating how video compression and framerate can make the broadcast look far worse than it it does onscreen....Almost like it's lagged behind the beat. This is best I've been able to get it settings wise:

recording (finished live):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/150087813
 
Oh I like that idea, get some frankenvoxel action happening. I had to tackle conjoining random voxel pieces for the equipment generation system in my voxel game as well. Will the different pieces have defined characteristics/stats or is it simply cosmetic?
neat.... looking forward to seeing this progress

Thank you for the interest!

The pieces will be cosmetic.

Progress: Made a base monster with shading.

Oo3eJsw.gif
 

missile

Member
I've now combined reflection mapping with the double attenuation and it
works wonders. At grazing the diffuse component attenuates so softly with the
reflection setting in stronger and stronger. Damn. Will do some pictures later
on.


Great to see this thread going strong after all these years. I need o get back into game coding.
Where have you been?


...
Progress: Made a base monster with shading.

Oo3eJsw.gif
NicE! :)
 

Jobbs

Banned
In the past I had a couple of enemies that I would artifically disallow to die while airborne because it looked bad to me animation-wise and I didn't want to make a new animation just for that possibility. Now that I use ragdoll corpses it's not a problem. :)

4CgJhF3.gif
 

wwm0nkey

Member
SCREW UNITY! /rant I actually like unity but whatev's. What engine's grass looks greener?
With enough color correction Unity can have some pretty green grass! lol

I kinda like Unity. Their pre-built features mostly have issues but in general it's not too hard to program your own. It really helps having so many great resources online.

I really need to re-teach myself UE4...but mannnnn I just do not like BluePrints and have been putting off learning C++ for awhile hahaha. I hope UnrealCS (C# for UE4) becomes an official addition soon

Also here is what I worked on yesterday for about an hour, I was mostly messing with post processing and used a non crappy TP controller (Suck it Ethan!) the project is Phantom Dust inspired but I just started work yesterday

 

clashfan

Member
How does everyone feel about MonoGame?

If you like xna then monogame is perfect for you. If you are not familiar with xna then just go in knowing that monogame is not an engine. You use it to create your game engine. It's great for game developers that are c# programmers. It supports many platforms. I love it but unity/gamemaker may be better if you are more of an artist then programmer.
 
Well shit. I updated to latest version of 4.15 (ue4) today and it broke my project entirely.

Can't roll back minor version either so now I'm either left trying to fix things I have no idea of or starting all over again :/

EDIT: found and old copy of the game from when I got the driving working. Need to redo a bunch of stuff but the driving still works at least.

Lesson learned, backup stuff even if it's just a prototype
 

missile

Member
And now with some reflections on top of it!

The sphere and the box are diffuse reflectors. The ground has an IOR of 1.1
and the blue strips are self emitting. Next to double attenuation for diffuse
materials (having a dielectric property) I also implemented single attenuation
for emitting materials. When the emitting light is about to come out of the
ground it undergoes attenuation due to Fresnel. Because the IOR being 1.1 some
of the light will be reflected back into the material (not accounted for) and
some will be transmitted through the boundary but gets attenuated somewhat.
That's cool, because it plays nice with the reflection of the sun giving some
smooth transitions.

In the animation below the box and the sphere both have an IOR of 1.0, hence,
no attenuation of the diffuse component nor any specular reflection to see on
the box.

AuV0cUB.gif


In the following animations the box now has a material of IOR 1.5 (you can
see it a diffuse one with a shiniy finish on top of it) with the diffuse
component now undergoing double attenuated and with the specular reflection
mapped on top of it in the exact right proportion with respect to the Fresnel
reflection law producing these cool reflections esp. towards grazing.

UbdEFZN.gif


2BNU2IJ.gif


(Don't mind the pixelization. That's all subject to change.)

Next I will improve on my glossy reflection and will throw it all together.
I will also work on some additional attenuation effects next to Fresnel, for
Fresnel only holds for smooth surfaces. The reflection can be further enhanced
by incorporating roughness which will attenuate the reflection once more due
to diffraction interference. For example, if you stand next to an object
reflecting an image in a rough ground you'll see (next to some gloss) that the
reflection dies out more and more the further "down" you look. That's why my
reflection in the animation above for the ground plane looks a bit, well, too
perfect, for the surface finish behaves like an ideal specular reflector
making the reflection feel a bit unnatural despite Fresnel being already at
the works here. xD

This stuff brings me a bit closer to my stylized rendering. No, I'm not going
to use the reflection as shown here but will apply them partially (textured)
etc..
 

EDarkness

Member
Hey folks, I have a bit of a question.

I'm looking to upload some video of my game with commentary, but I'm unsure what to use to do this. I'm using a Mac, and I've always used Quicktime to capture video and iMovie to edit that video. However, recording voice has been a huge problem. I'm not sure what people use to record good quality voice since the mic I have doesn't do that. Everything comes across as too low so I have to crank up the volume to 11 just to get some half-decent sound. Anyone have any suggestions on what would be a good way to do this? What are some setups you guys use?
 
In the past I had a couple of enemies that I would artifically disallow to die while airborne because it looked bad to me animation-wise and I didn't want to make a new animation just for that possibility. Now that I use ragdoll corpses it's not a problem. :)

4CgJhF3.gif

Oh wow! Is GS still being made in Stencyl?
 
Dedicated a day (ok just three hours, the rest of the day was making preparations for adding Controller support) solely to eviscerating programmer art. I'd get the Crewmen too, but my sense of anatomy is fucked, so I'll leave that to Carrill to handle for me. Should also serve as a decent template for further tilesets.

aa7cbbf92e.png


Also, some WebMs, because holy crap they compile on my PC so much faster than GIFs. Seriously I used to dread creating GIFs because they murdered my CPU, which was kinda bad when I was programming.

Strolling around the ISV Ironside (Still WIP): https://files.catbox.moe/drsp6y.webm

Same conversation as before, but animated: https://files.catbox.moe/bmyt3v.webm

Also what happened to WebM embeds? I coulda sworn they were a thing a few years ago here.

PS. Set up a proper Devlog thread for REDFOXES on TIGSource, which also has a nice rundown of just what REDFOXES is that I didn't want to wall-o-text this thread with.
 

missile

Member
While doing effects you better check if the old ones are still working. So
I put defocus on again and it still works, but needs some further improvements
nevertheless. Anyhow.

YB0HOzp.gif


I also switch on photographic stuff again. Camera setup is;
sensor: full format
f-stop: 2.0,
focal length: 46mm,
CoC: 0.0288
mode: AF

So at a set focus distance of 1m the DOF is about 5cm. But the DOF's range
will appear a bit larger in the animation, because the resolution is a bit low
to resolve the "edges" of the DOF.
 

LordRaptor

Member
Hey folks, I have a bit of a question.

I'm looking to upload some video of my game with commentary, but I'm unsure what to use to do this. I'm using a Mac, and I've always used Quicktime to capture video and iMovie to edit that video. However, recording voice has been a huge problem. I'm not sure what people use to record good quality voice since the mic I have doesn't do that. Everything comes across as too low so I have to crank up the volume to 11 just to get some half-decent sound. Anyone have any suggestions on what would be a good way to do this? What are some setups you guys use?

Have you tired something like Audacity to clean up your audio track?
Ultimately GIGO, and if you are doing a lot of voicework you'll need better equipment, but if its just adjusting levels and maybe removing some pop/hiss/background noise, you're probably better off doing that in post-production that trying to get a perfect take
 

Timeaisis

Member
Looks like my greenlight submission was in the last batch to go through. Hurrah. It's funny, because I submitted like a couple of weeks before they announced it was getting scrapped. Got a decent amount of traffic, then it just fell off a cliff. So I'm happy I didn't have to worry about the refund thing, and I guess I get an extra week before they open the floodgates.

Question is, when the hell do you release when there's ostensibly a million games waiting in the wings to be released?
 

EDarkness

Member
Have you tired something like Audacity to clean up your audio track?
Ultimately GIGO, and if you are doing a lot of voicework you'll need better equipment, but if its just adjusting levels and maybe removing some pop/hiss/background noise, you're probably better off doing that in post-production that trying to get a perfect take

I have Audacity, but don't really know how to use it. I had been messing with the audio in Garage Band, but I don't think that's been helping much, which is why I was looking for a better solution. I watch a lot of Youtube videos and they seem to have great sound, so I'm wondering how they're able to get that level of sound and what kind of equipment people use to do it.

I'm currently using a Pioneer mic I got while I was in Japan, but I wonder if it's purpose was for something else as the sound it records is sooooo low and I have to be right on top of it to get any real sound. I'm thinking it is supposed to be used for singing or something which is why it requires so much to talk.

I do have a good mic for my iPad, but the biggest problem there is finding a good piece of software to record the sound. The old software I used to use has been crappy after an update a few years ago and I haven't been able to find another solution. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
 

DemonNite

Member
I'm currently using a Pioneer mic I got while I was in Japan, but I wonder if it's purpose was for something else as the sound it records is sooooo low and I have to be right on top of it to get any real sound. I'm thinking it is supposed to be used for singing or something which is why it requires so much to talk.

sounds like you need a preamp to boost the signal for that type of mic you bought
 

LordRaptor

Member
Hmm...I hadn't thought of that. Thanks. I'll start looking through Amazon now to see if I can find something.

I mean, give Audacity a try before spending money you might not need to - you should be able to set your microphone as an audiosource and record directly to audacity, and for a simple volume increase (its under Effect -> Amplify) a software solution might well be enough.

(I'm assuming Audacity is basically the same user experience under different OSes, I'm on windows)
 

cbox

Member
Anyone have any insight towards audio and audio quality when it comes to Unity? Our games will output to both TV and Phone so I want to make sure I'm exporting and creating the sounds in the right environment. Using unity.

I've poked around google and after reading and experimenting, i'm pretty much just keeping to "Don't let it go over 0db". Using a mixture of Adobe audition and Audacity for our audio production.
 

JulianImp

Member
Anyone have any insight towards audio and audio quality when it comes to Unity? Our games will output to both TV and Phone so I want to make sure I'm exporting and creating the sounds in the right environment. Using unity.

I've poked around google and after reading and experimenting, i'm pretty much just keeping to "Don't let it go over 0db". Using a mixture of Adobe audition and Audacity for our audio production.

Here's the one tip I think I can give you: AFAIK Unity always compresses audio files to ogg, so it might be a good idea to export directly to that format to prevent quality loss from Unity compressing other audio formats by itself.
 

missile

Member
Metal doesn't have any equivalent of ARB_texture_swizzle / VkComponentMapping.

Also, single component textures with sRGB conversion only on iOS.

So annoying. ...
Yeah, annoying. I somehow can't get in touch with Metal. Don't know but my
current state of mind for iOS is to just open up a native OpenGL (or Vk if
that is possible) window and draw everything myself. There will be some
disadvantages in communicating with iOS when using plain OpenGL, but I don't
need system features like UI etc., I will draw my own one. Will see how it
works out.

However, what I really need for my engine is just the possibility to execute
some shaders on the GPU scheduled by the CPU.

... If I wrote own renderer I wouldn't have to deal with any of this API stuff. ...
Oh thx, giving me some hope here! xD
Well, yeah, sure, but you would die many other death.

The cool thing doing your own rendering, for me at least, is that I really can
focus on the core rendering problem first. No need to think how to crank an
already approximated algorithm onto a limited hardware using any limited API,
saving a lot of time in the process, really. That way I can experiment a lot
until I have the look and technique ready which I am after. Then some target
renderings will be rendered with the software and then the mapping onto the
hardware will begin to accelerate all stuff (perhaps doing some further
approximations) to reach the target rendering. The big advantage doing it that
way is that I can compare the hardware accelerate/approximated rendering with
the pure software one (reference). So I know how the image should look like.
This becomes very important if the rendering is physically/energy based. You
really need to tell, for example, how half-precision (or even lower) offsets
the rendering such that you can take counter measure to still retain the
intended effect.

...
Although then I would be competing with missile in a battle I would be doomed to lose.
Hi hi.


Edit:
Oh, did I said that my images look stunning at 4K? :) The whole (light, DOF,
volume etc.) rendering improves with the screen resolution without doing more
work per pixel because of the way I've spilt the rendering of many of the
effects over multiple pixels. With more pixels the effects resolves better,
automatically (more or less). But I'm still refrain from posting such, well,
bullshots, but will post one or two in the near future to let people tell me
how good or bad they can see the raw pixels when watching from a distance
(sofa). It's my believe that one can't differentiate the single pixels (under
normal viewing conditions, i.e. distance, screen size, screen resolution) esp.
not given the pixels/effects have a Poisson-Disc character (nor when in
motion). If that's the case I could save the smoothing/filtering of the image
or refrain from any multi-sampling to make the image softer but may be an
option if there are still resources left (to further increase the resolution
by doing more work per pixel).
 

Pehesse

Member
HandsomeBlackandwhiteKissingbug.gif


Gfycat strikes again: is "Handsome Black and White Kissing Bug" the best name for a B&W animation ever, or what?

Also: ONE MORE WEEK OF CLEANING (if all goes well). The last few steps are always the hardest but the finishing line is so close...!
 

Pehesse

Member
So good, Pehesse

Many many thanks :)

I've said this a number of times, but it bears repeating: I'm really grateful for the feedback, since there aren't really any other forms of payoff for doing that work apart from others' appreciation, so... basically, I manage to keep truckin' because you keep likin', as I suspect many of us do (or if you don't and truck on either way, kudos :-D). So... yeah! Thanks :-D
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Many many thanks :)

I've said this a number of times, but it bears repeating: I'm really grateful for the feedback, since there aren't really any other forms of payoff for doing that work apart from others' appreciation, so... basically, I manage to keep truckin' because you keep likin', as I suspect many of us do (or if you don't and truck on either way, kudos :-D). So... yeah! Thanks :-D

Everyone loves your work, should know that by now. Must feel good to hear it all the time though :)

As to my work, I took some days off to do some contract work, a day off to relax and now the week is almost gone with almost no progress on my game to showoff for screenshotsaturday! ><
I'm getting REALLY close to getting my inventory system to finally completely mesh with my equipment system (created a script to make thousands screenshots for icons for all my possible mesh combo's, hooray) and hoping to get that completely up and running with monsters dropping loot before I go to sleep tonight.
 
rZdHUzkyH5l15B7rVFl1ghc5YNmtSbQnMKQbw8_RNmBMeWar7SPRuWwnVRvmeifAPnbEaMFc=w2560-h950


little gameplay clip we've put together!
just a bit more info: we're a 2-person team. 1 art, 1 code (and design between the two of us). we started working on the project full time in January- before that it was just evenings/weekends.
 
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