henke on 1/5/2019 at 07:55
Best I managed was $21000.
Really good and unique concept, Pyrian! Simple to play too, could probably work great as a mobile game, tho I'd perhaps make it scrolling upwards in portrait-mode, with swipe to move. The graphics could do with some cleaning up for better readability tho. I occasionally got killed by enemies I didn't even realize were there.
Pyrian on 1/5/2019 at 19:49
Thanks! You got really close to the end, $23,000 is the maximum possible. Tracking enemies has been a problem, despite a couple iterations already. Basically ran into a lot of constraints that made it hard to do much more in the time allotted. While I can definitely darken and desaturate the vehicles a bit if I add more (well, any) variety in body types, and constrain their colors away from unit colors, I'm pretty sure that what really needs to be done is a fairly expansive idle animation to draw the eye. Like maybe have them each swinging a big ol' flail around.
demagogue on 2/5/2019 at 02:15
Cool. It's a souped up Frogger. I'd say awesome in a C64 kinda way, just because of how fast those sprites & feedback loop are moving.
qolelis on 3/5/2019 at 08:49
@Pyrian:
Well executed. Great name. I didn't get very far; my best was $3000, but that's on me. I agree about the enemies being a little hard to make out, though, especially from the corner of my eye since I was mostly focussing on my own character. Making them move slightly when idle would probably help.
***
I recently went back to using a scene capture component again for my in-game camera -- although for the right reasons this time:
The in-game camera has a second use in another player tool where the view is not centered, which made zooming a little awkward. I could compensate by moving the camera component, but the calculations for this also depend on the distance to the object being zoomed in on. This worked well enough in "selfie" mode, where I had a specific object to zoom in on, but I never fully figured out what to do in the general case, in which the zoom object might be missing or change while zooming. Moving the camera component sideways while zooming also felt odd, which could perhaps be used as a special effect for something else, but here I just want to zoom in around the centre of the view in a straight fashion.
(
https://i.imgur.com/nacZXnl.jpg)
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/nacZXnlm.jpgUsing a scene capture component and rendering the captured view onto an image in 2D UI space solved the problem and made away with the extra calculations. By default, zooming is now done around the view centre no matter where I place it. As always, though, every solution has its own set of problems... One is that of maintaining the aspect ratio (to avoid stretching). I haven't yet figured out if I can do that dynamically or if I will have to do it manually for each possible ratio (among the most common ones), and also somehow deal with unknown ratios.
To make all in-game camera views look exactly the same, I'm using the scene capture thing also for the normal, centered camera tool (although it's not strictly needed), which means rendering fullscreen. To keep the cost of this down I render to half the screen resolution (for now), and also switch to orthographic view with negative clip planes, which effectively disables the standard camera, (rendering only a black screen, which I think ought to be very similar to not rendering it at all!? (I have no real proof for that assumption (yet), but it does seem reasonable to think it would.) The scene capture component is then enabled and replaces the standard camera component whenever the player brings up their in-game camera. This is not without side-effects, but nothing that can't be handled.
For now I'm keeping the interface simple while working on the underlying code and finalizing the layout; all the fancy stuff will be done later. In the end, I might even try making the whole thing 3D instead (the easiest way of making something look 3D is to make it 3D, right!?).
The "selfie" mode is not really a selfie mode, but a consequence of making things work the same in all situations: this particular camera tool is used to scan things, like objects, NPCs,
and the player character, so I had to allow flipping the camera around. I might remove the selfie mode completely, though, because it does add extra work that isn't essential to the game in general (might even detract a bit). This would make things less consistent, but I think not unacceptably so. I haven't decided yet.
Body awareness is another thing I've been thinking about (in first person view). The "selfie" mode requires it, while the game in general doesn't. I added the default Unreal mannequin a while ago (together with a rudimentary set of animations) and it is nice having a shadow (adds to the immersion), so, if not full-blown body awareness, I might have at least something. What the player character looks like is not important and up to the player to either imagine or possibly customize (if applicable), but, again, allowing for at least some kind of nondescript/unisex shadow to be cast would be nice.
henke on 10/5/2019 at 19:07
Bought a laptop for work, mainly so I can show my game at exhibitions and stuff. Acer Nitro 5. i5-8300H, Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, 512GB SSD. 890€. Once I had it set up I immediately fired up the latest build of Stilt Fella, but to my dismay it was running kinda choppy. Oh no, have I bought a LEMON, I wondered. Then I tried out some other modern games and they ran fine. Good. It's just my game that's an unoptimized piece of crap then.
Renzatic on 11/5/2019 at 05:08
Yay? \:confused:/
henke on 11/5/2019 at 08:38
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Yay? \:confused:/
It was a classic WIN-LOSE scenario.
demagogue on 11/5/2019 at 08:49
Well my chat bot said it's first word: "ag'a".
Recall this chat bot is actually moving articulators of a simulated vocal tract that generates sound dynamically, chugging the actual math of simulated air flowing through the thing. The g' means it was a "g", the back of the tongue hitting the roof, followed by a glottal stop because I had the tongue actually move back to stop up the glottis before coming down.
It wasn't its own word yet. I plugged in random numbers by hand just to see if the command system is working
(i.e., numbers come in & things move like the numbers tell them to).
It is. So yay! Finally!!
One problem is something is making the whole thing freeze about 2/3 of the time, and I've lost mouse control...
I'll have to figure what's doing that at some point.
But it technically works. I knew it would, but it's nice that practice follows theory when you code a thing properly functionally.
Now I can finally start on the backend, the part where a bunch of tensors are going to (hopefully!) compute articulator movements themselves and send them to the online frontend sim over a web socket...
When that says its first word then that's going to be a big deal! (To me.)
I mean I'm going to have it do random babbling at the start but, you know, that's the "it's alive!" moment.
Stay tuned.
demagogue on 12/5/2019 at 11:21
Quote Posted by henke
Bought a laptop for work, mainly so I can show my game at exhibitions and stuff. Acer Nitro 5. i5-8300H, Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, 512GB SSD. 890€. Once I had it set up I immediately fired up the latest build of Stilt Fella, but to my dismay it was running kinda choppy. Oh no, have I bought a LEMON, I wondered. Then I tried out some other modern games and they ran fine. Good. It's just my game that's an unoptimized piece of crap then.
I just had the same problem. Brand new laptop with a GTX 1060 and Darkmod runs at 16 FPS. I looked into my graphics card settings and it turns out that the default setting is set so that apps run on the Intel integrated driver, and only specified games are set to run on the GTX. What you do is make a new setting profile just for Stilt Fella and you can set it to run on the GTX. I did that for Darkmod and the FPS immediately shot up to 150. I'm about 95% sure that's your issue too.
henke on 12/5/2019 at 13:29
Thanks for the tip, but making a profile for it didn't seem to do much. Still getting ~40FPS on FullHD, Ultra settings. Pretty sure it was using the GTX before as well.
However, what did help was that I added an option to turn V-sync off. With it off I get ~190FPS.