It's so weird when, after a long time working on the framework/engine, you start to work more on your game than on the framework/engine. I spent all the day making progress with the game.

Good! There is no purpose in making a game engine if you are not creating any game with it at all (except for pure fun) Make games, not engines

i think im going to play YAkuza kiwami this december

I've always wanted to play this Yakuza game, but as far as I know it's only on Playstation. . A similar game to this one that I liked is Sleeping Dogs. Also Mafia and The Godfather are great games imho ;P

If you don't mind old graphics and you have a gaming PC, you can play Yakuza series from the PS2 using PCSX2 emulator.

Also, I wonder if "dodge" is the proper term for the "roll attack".  To me, dodge would mean to avoid the enemy. However, it seems like, often the hero character and the skull are moving right toward each other and the hero hits the skull but the "Dodge" is displayed on screen.

You are correct, but for what I see, in the GIF it seems that the Dodge is not damaging the enemy, because there is no damage points removed + no red flickering.

I know what you mean, but my issue is related to "collision boxes".  If the game was a 2d side scrolling game, then I wouldn't mind the hero being able to pass by the enemies.  However, in the current perspective, especially in cases one character is moving up and the other is down, there's no ambiguity that the two characters can avoid each other.  It'd be similar to two cars playing chicken and moving "through" each other.  I'd expect it there to be some kind of contact.

Depends, if I remember correctly in Link To the Past after an enemy touched you, Link will take damage and flicker, removing the collision and enabling you to move through an enemy.

Probably it is indeed a reference to social networks.

Yeah, I've talked about it with a few others and realized that since you're probably going to be dodging often, having freeze frames trigger every time will get annoying.
For me, freeze frames are the new screenshake, use too much of it everywhere, and it loses its meaning and becomes annoying

Maybe are the white stripes that spawns for few frames when you are dodging that it is causing confusion. If so, you could leave the frame freeze.

Also, I wonder if "dodge" is the proper term for the "roll attack".  To me, dodge would mean to avoid the enemy. However, it seems like, often the hero character and the skull are moving right toward each other and the hero hits the skull but the "Dodge" is displayed on screen.

You are correct, but for what I see, in the GIF it seems that the Dodge is not damaging the enemy, because there is no damage points removed + no red flickering.

Interpolation between orhographic and perspective projection. I'm going to use a fixed value of interpolation for my game. Also had to make a lot of trickery to reduce the deformity of the plat planes in the 3D view.

The little ghost guy is a placeholder, bc I'm only going to show the real characters in action when I have a substantial gameplay. :D

Just for curiosity, the trickery you are mentioning is forcing you to not having a very high angle between the camera and the plane? Or you are free to angle the plane as much as you want?

Risen 2 is actually their worst game by far lol

Yeah, it could be true, but not much worst than the others. Actually there were some aspects in Risen 2 that can be seen as an upgrade after Risen 1 (graphics and fight melee system in primis).

I think that the reason an engine is not open-source is because technology is a resource, and you do not want to share it to your competitors.

We're not competing? It's reusable ideas! Something is really off with the community.

Ideas are free. Code. graphic assets, musics are resources made by people that, if you invested in the project, you need to pay. I like a community where open-source and free help is common not only on forums, but the world is ruled by money, and we should not forget that our hobby could also be a business like everything else. Or you would never play that Assassin's Creed or Uncharted or next AAA with super-uber graphics  

Im getting a little annoyed with elex. The progression system in that game is a mess (which is a shame since the system in gothic 1 and 2 was so nice and streamlined). You get stat points every level but they don't do anything on their own (despite descriptions implying otherwise). They just gate the skills you can learn and the gear you can equip. And because both of those tend to have crazy high stat requirements, it takes forever until you're just barely strong enough to kill tougher enemies. It's s also nearly impossible to create a "tank" build because your HP barely increase over the course of the game, forcing you to use the awful dodge mechanics. True, you're never "overpowered" in Elex but feeling constantly underpowered isn't great either

The good games of Piranha Bytes (which some could argue that their games weren't so great) unfortunately will never come out again, maybe there were some chance when Risen 2 came out, but seen Elex... mmm...

Ahah, same here! When I showed that plugin to the others, they replied that it could be a pain if someone wants to edit something and does not have the plugin, but I do not think that 3-more spacebar on your keyboard will hurt your finger 

I agree 100% with writing your own code. It's the only way to improve tools and your fundamental existence on earth!

I think it's a bit sad that the code is not open-source though.

I wonder why that's so rare when it comes to game engines?

Making games is mainly a business, making a game fast with less budget as possible is the main choice if you do not want your game unfinished. If you are making a game in the free time beside you main job, then a game engine could speed drammaticaly your development if you want to release your game.

I think that the reason an engine is not open-source is because technology is a resource, and you do not want to share it to your competitors.

oohh I see what you mean. I've felt that pain a bit. I used to align all my member declarations using tabs but auto format would mess all that up or someone would autoformat and submit it to source control.

It's too bad I really liked that formatting for members and variables. Kind of looked like a spreadsheet.

If you make that plugin for VS I'd be interested

I found CodeAlignment plugin:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cpmcgrath.Codealignment

but I did not try it yet, and I cannot find if this works for comments. But in this one:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wwm.better-align
the GIF shows that works for comments also.

What about re-implementing an array structure from scratch instead of using the STL std::vector? It should not be too hard to re-implement std::vector even for a simple project.

I do not like very much Google Comment style:
https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Comment_Style

I would use /* */ instead of a double backslash every line, and commenting how the function should be use forces you to have a massive block of comment, when I can just look in the code how that function is being used.

My go to rule has always been that you should be able to understand what the code is doing in less than 15 seconds.

Yup. And this is one case where comments can actually hurt code readability. Having explanatory comments peppered throughout your code can break your understanding as you pause to read them. Docstrings are great, constant in-line comments throughout functions aren't.

I just write a comment at the top of the function explaining what it does, and the variable names have descripting name of what they are doing, helping the readability. I would just add a single-line comment inside a function if I do something "strange" that it is not intuitive.

Hi, just discovered this thread and read back a few pages.

Jumping in to the middle of the conversation, Ill say that I'm a fan of stl, but hate the syntax. To get around this, I created a wrapper class that accesses the stl functions. The initial motivation behind this was so I could easily adapt to anyone's memory system. All I need to do is modify the wrapper to adapt to the new system. In use, I always access my wrapper class and not stl directly.

I've been working on a destruction engine which I'd like to adapt to other systems so the approach has worked well.



Cheers,
H
 

I do not know if wrapping STL just for changing the syntax it is something I would do. Personally I am not convinced about the trade-off to add an other layer of abstraction and increase the probability of making an human mistake, also the library is platform-indipendent so I would not have any beneficial. Just my personal idea, eh. Probably other programmers are doing STL-wrappers and do not have any problem at all  

Playing Baldur's Gate because a friend was playing it recently. I played Planescape: Torment a while ago, so it's not too daunting, but it's still very different to modern RPGs. Like I can't just sell all my loot in one go, I need to choose the character who has stuff to sell, and quests don't point you straight at the objective, you have to find where the quest giver was talking about sometimes.

Fans suggest to play directly to the 2nd, because the first was good, but not great like the sequel, and for the story you can just read the plot on the wiki. If you like the genres, I suggest to you Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin II, they are old-school RPGs.

TBH Switch is the only one I'm really interested in. Will be happy to make any changes necessary if that day comes. I know about PS3 and I'm not touching it.

Switch compiler is more "fussy" than Visual Studio about variable shadowing, order of variable in construction list and other errors that VS compiler by default would forgive.

Thank you both! Yeah, I was thinking since most of these will usually be processed together (rendering needs both the transform and the animator and the renderdata for example). But the second is still better?

(and just for some context since you said "likely fast enough", this is a full 3D game which I possibly want to run on mobile and definitely on consoles)

Another tip: a thing that a lot of people struggle with is "both rendering and physics need a transform" and then they try to figure out how to share that data in the most efficient way because it doesn't even occur to them that they could just duplicate the data in both systems.

BTW if you really really seriously want to get on consoles you'll need to lose STL and also get comfy with the idea of ditching opengl for those builds. And if you want to target the last generation (Xbox 360, PS3), especially PS3 requires a whole different way of designing your data transformations due to it's unique architecture.

Or I think that now we have less constraints due to the fact that PS4 and XONE have a more PC-like architecture and we can start to forget the unique PS3 hardware.