Posts by AlexM

Quote from Warby

Yes Alienbrain ... Alienware makes pcs good catch

and exactly dropbox isnt a subversion system.

Steppenwolf its not the complexity that bothers me but the usability.

The photoshop plugin for example doesnt load automatically so if you forget to load it manually (which i do practically always) it will not tell me that i have to check out a file until i am done doing my edits and what to save it and than I might find out that it has been checked out/locked (btw why isnt that one button/prompt that does both !?!?!?) by someone else the whole time.

The Maya plugin on the other hand does load automatically but it doesnt care what repository/stream/workspace/branch a file is in it will try to check it out from what ever repo the P4V tool last used and more often than not that file doesnt exist in that repo giving you a cryptic error msg and NO OPTION TO SWITCH REPOSITORIES.

The windows explorer shell extension has the same problem + its missing a fuckton of functionality D:

Perforce on a whole is also oblivious to new files having been created inside your repo folde until you run that "reconcile offline work button" which btw takes AGES to analyse our project ( tortoise svn does practically the same thing as its default behavior and its near instant ) and not a day goes by without me having to track down some person that hasnt committed all of their source files because perforce ignored their creation ... so yeah I hate the manual "mark for add".

There is a million other small shortcomings ... I could rant for hours or days about how much I hate perforce.

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The part I bolded sounds like a usage error. I've never seen anyone have to do that. Just use perforce add.

As for maya/photoshop. I've never used the stock maya plugin (always something custom) and for photoshop I've always just seen people use P4V.

Quote from laminutederire

I will take you up on that help offer when i'll have covered the basics I guess. Currently I am struggling to set up correct workspaces and correct file mapping, but I tried to set those up when I was really tired, so that explains!

Are there things to look out for on the server side, like particular specifications?

Having no server myself I'm using the cloud based service from Perforce to begin with, which, from what I understood, is like Assembla but with more space storage on the free versions (5Go should be enough for that game since it is supposed to be a lightweight game usable on mobile devices, or maybe I'm completely off, it's the first game my team is doing to be honest)

Ah ok. With perforce cloud you have to use streams. That's probably why you can't see anything. When setting up the workspace you need to make a stream for it as well.

streams are not something I've liked about perforce. When possible I don't use them but I also have a perforce cloud account and therefore have to use them.

Quote from Warby

Alienware: have briefly used it at IO-Interactive not enough to really have an opinion though. ?/00

Tortoise SVN: its got a kind of ghetto reputation but it always gets the job done so yeah ... I like it 8/10

Perforce: I can not share your guys enthusiasm I think all of their front ends (p4V, that windows explorer shell extension, maya & photoshop plugins ... you know the parts that me as an artist actually gets in contact with) are pure and utter vile gutter trash 2/10

Dropbox: not exactly a "subversion" system but I use it right now to sync files back and forth with a coder friend and we have our entire unity project just sitting in there in the dropbox folder and i am SHOCKED how well and fast that works ... or that it works at all really ... 9/10

Do you mean alienbrain? If so I thought that was discontinued years ago.

Also dropbox. They don't have a secure history. You lose all concept of revision control using it.

Perforce is amazing for game development. It should always be your first choice. The only issue it has relative to other SCM's is it can be a little harder to setup but once you have it setup it's way easier for non-programmers to understand relative to other SCM's.

Dont use git for games! It's meant for plain text repositories (and it's amazing for those types of projects). It should not be used projects with huge amounts of binary assets. Git large file storage will silently fail when trying to branch. I've heard people have had some degree of success with git-annex though. If your coders absolutely have to use git, perforce supports a git repo in a perforce repo via git-fusion.

Sorry for the opinionated post. I've had to manage various build systems and SCM's for a few years now and have felt a lot of pain.

EDIT : The perforce C# (other languages also supported) api is amazing when writing tooling. There's many engines out there with such a high level of integration the artists never even use the visual client.

Some day I would like to try out PlasticSCM (comes with semantic diff/merge) and ClearCase (just because I've never tried it, no idea if it's good).

If you have any SCM issues or questions I can try to help out. Regardless of whether you choose git or p4 (or otherwise).

Quote from Steppenwolf

Perforce is my favourite of the ones that i've worked with. Currently we're using Plastic and i think it's pretty horrible for art/design people. Coders seem to love it tho.

Ah you've used Plastic?

So it's not as good for artists as it claims to be? I had a feeling when I read their site that it might be too good to be true. They are essentially claiming they have the best of git and perforce with semantic diff/merge (albeit I think only for C#, C++ I guess might be a lot more difficult to do).

What did you not like about it relative to perforce?

I'm about to go on 3 weeks leave to recover from crunch time. I don't know what to do with myself. Obviously 1 week will be me with no pants playing all the video games I didn't have time for but outside of that I'm not sure. Probably going on a diet and exercise regiment to make up for the time but I was considering working on a personal game. Whatever it is though, I'm planning to focus on make it tight and fun. Something arcady.

On a side note, here's John Vignocchi talking about the game I worked on. Disney Inifnity 3 Marvel Battlegrounds.

Well a combination of deadline extension, 12-14 hour work days and the worst bout of sickness I've ever experienced in my life (a combined case of food poisoning, an ulcer and chemical inhalation symptoms) caused my jam entry to go off the rails but I've been getting up every morning at 5am so I can spend a couple hours completing the entry.

I managed to complete it today. It's not fun or pretty but it's complete and more importantly I learned a shitload about systems in Unreal I haven't used before. This includes

• Character animation state machines
• AI - Blackboards
• AI - Tree editor
• Matinee (worst part of unreal)
• The C# build system
• Input abstraction
• Blendspaces
• UMG (although I just realized the matinee video recording removed all my UI stuff @#$@#$@#)

Anyways here's a video of a quick playthrough of the game.

I get my copy in a couple days. I figured the servers would have issues day 1 (which they are) so I could wait.

The letter of the wording implies you can't use steamworks but I'm betting they will let you use it at a practical level. I would guess that you can use the steamworks api for friends and related functions but you couldn't use any steam multiplayer server hosting (if that feature even exists) . The big money would be in server hosting.

EDIT : They actually address this. Looks like that's exactly the case

Q. Can my Lumberyard game connect to services like Steamworks, Apple Game Center, Google Play Games, or console social services?Yes. Your game may read and write data to platform services and public third-party game services for player save state, identity, social graph, matchmaking, chat, notifications, achievements, leaderboards, advertising, player acquisition, in-game purchasing, analytics, and crash reporting.

Quote from DrywallDreams

Wait, what does that entail? Any streaming of the game at all? Developer streams? In-game streaming support? Better yet, how do you enforce that?

No idea. I'm looking at their FAQ now and it has no mention of it. It's all very vague on that front. Hopefully they will clarify soon. It will be interesting to see what happens if someone adds a ustream support plugin.

As for AWS it's very clear. This is from their FAQ

Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?No. If your game servers use a non-AWS alternate web service, we obviously don’t make any money, and it’s more difficult for us to support future development of Lumberyard. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.

The licensing agreement for their engine says that you HAVE to use AWS for cloud integration and you HAVE to use twitch for streaming. That's their long term plan for profitability.

Epic/Unity would never let them impose a monopolistic restriction like that.

Quote from tr0nic

Amazon owns Twitch. Amazon seem to be the type of company with a long term vision. They are placing 1 pawn at the time.

I know that's what they are doing. Integrating twitch and cloud services into your engine is super easy to do though. Not something I'm looking for when shopping for game engines. I want to hear about what differentiates the engine. Not AWS and Twitch.

It's open source but not an open license. There's probably a ton of stuff preventing you from using the engine in ways that conflict with the contract.

Yeah it's a little weird since my impression is that adding twitch support is not a hard thing to do.

They also require that if you use the engine and use a cloud service you can only use AWS. I'd guess the rules for a streaming service require twitch as well. Not a huge deal but I don't really see much reason to use this engine since they haven't spent any time really talking about features developers actually care about.

Holy shit they talk about Twitch a lot in that video.

Got a good amount of work done on the character animation and melee system. Long devlog about how I did it here http://levelism.com/towerjam-004-setting-the-character-up/

Here's a video

Ahhh I'm already in the gamejolt towerjam and it overlaps the GDC jam

Began the setup and early parts of the combo system. This is an example of the player cancelling into the second attack by pressing attack at the right time in the first attacks animation sequence.

Animation notifies are used to tell the animation system if the player can validly move to the next attack in the combo. The animation blending system in unreal is really good.

Yup sounds like Jon was freaking out too early. Looks like he'll be making his money back no problem

Quote from (HP)

lol... at the same time, it's also Steam's top seller since they opened pre-orders last week http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=topsellers

When Jon posted on twitter about it, steamspy was reporting 23000 copies sold. Steamspy still only says 38k copies sold.

http://steamspy.com/search.php?s=the+witness

Man I hope I never run into that. Someone saying "We'll ask the questions here" would be an instant walk-out for me. No wonder they aren't in business anymore.

I tend to only talk to first party recruiters. They don't take pay because they are paid by the hiring company. Third party recruiters are generally NOT incentivized to fight for a higher salary and benefits for you because it's easier for them to take a shotgun approach and go broad. I've heard the average is 20% of YOUR salary.

Basically if they get 3 people jobs at a low salary with little effort that's more money than spending a lot of time negotiating for 1 person to get a higher salary.