Quote from SenturaWhat sort of knowledge does it provide?
It goes over all the major features introduced from C#2 to C#5 and explains how things are done at the language level and behind the scenes. I'd say that after reading it I know more of the implications of coding something a particular way. Also there's some stuff that was fairly new to me such as expression trees and the await async stuff introduced in c#5
Quote from ThrikWent and checked out the iPhone 6 today, I have to say the iPhone 6 Plus is definitely too big unless you have huge hands. I literally couldn't get my thumb within a couple of centimetres of the top of the screen, it's pretty much a dealbreaker for one-hand users.
That almost looks like the new sony phone. 6 inch phone lol. Even in the commercial they only use the bluetooth thing to talk.
Cool that it's waterproof though
Quote from FrieChampDisplay MoreI guess this could also go in the „Do you enjoy your job in the games industry?“ thread or “MapCore Job Census” but I haven’t shared in this thread yet, so here’s what’s up: I quit my job on Friday.
To give some perspective to those who might not know: I’ve been working for an investor and assisted the gaming start-ups (online, social & mobile) in their portfolio for the past 2 years. My title was “Business Intelligence Analyst” but my assignments went beyond the scope of data analysis. Big companies have different roles/people for these tasks: BIs, Product Managers, Monetization Designers, Online Marketing Specialists, Business Developers, … I switched between these roles depending on the problem at hand. I supervised a Data Scientist who helped me with the number crunching, optimized marketing campaigns, studied the theory and best practices of Casual & F2P game design - basically supported the developers in any way I could. On the positive side I’ve had a lot of freedom on what to work on, there were no hierarchies and corporate BS. But it also meant little guidance and no advice from somebody who had successfully built a free-to-play gaming company yet. I learnt a lot about game design, data analysis, online marketing, entrepreneurship and investment deals. But some of you I’ve talked to individually recently already know that I wasn’t very happy anymore and have toyed with the idea to go back to level design for the past 6-9 months or so.
Why? There is something extremely satisfying about coming up with a vision in your head, sitting down to craft it (often for hours without a break) and at the end of the day see what you’ve accomplished. Somebody posted a link to a TED talk about the secret of happiness being “flow” and while I don’t think it’s the only answer I can resonate with the idea. If you constantly jump from one construction site to the next (in my case: even disconnected from the actual teams, because you’re in an advisory role, often in a different location) you go home wondering what you’ve actually accomplished that day.
Secondly it takes a certain mindset if your primary responsibility is to make the company more money. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, mind you, but it’s a different perspective that e.g. a designer has, who needs to ensure that the experience is fun. It takes both voices to create a successful product in my opinion, but right now I don’t think I can be a good spokesperson for the monetary-side when I don’t feel passionate about it. My biggest passion still is to build worlds and create fun experiences. This is why I decided against pursuing a Product Manager role, which would probably fit me best if you take a glance at my resume and which would probably also be better paid than an LD job. Yet, when I did some low-poly modelling in Maya and whiteboxing in UE4 for the hell of it this summer, I remembered, why I got into games in the first place.
So when I heard that local Goodgame Studios had licensed UE4 and are building a team to develop games for the Core Gaming market, I applied, passed the design test + interview and got an offer. I’m going to commence working there on December 1st. It also means that I won’t have to move further away from my family and my new girlfriend, which is also very good. I know that the industry is very volatile and this is a challenge that I’ll probably face later down the road, but when I thought it over and over again, about where I want to take my career and what could happen, I realized that it doesn’t make sense to be afraid and work a job that I dislike till the end of my days because it is supposedly more stable and brings in a few hundred more bucks.
I've tried a bunch of different things over the past years, peeked behind the curtains of different departments and companies in different segments of the gaming market (talked to a bunch of folks, too). I've pretty much come full circle and feel like the creative side is for me. I just see a lot of people burning out or not being able to keep up. I hope that won't happen to me. I hope I can maintain a healthy balance between a passion for my job, social life and financial income in the future. But right now I’m just stoked to get mapping again
Nice man 
On the topic of flow etc. I read a book where the guy made the point that fatigue isnt from working too hard. It's from having too many unfinished projects and loose ends. I personally started to get more energetic when I started finishing existing projects and more importantly, started saying no to new projects.
The best C# language book there is by far. Intermediate level though. You definitely want to be very familiar with the language before starting it.
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I cant even believe this would sell well in Japan. WTF
Remember when FF was a good series? I barely can either. It died after the SNES for me.
Quote from Sentura
The actual original price was 150$ US but I ended up paying 220$ after shipping and money conversion. It also comes with a pretty sweet EVO backpack that perfectly fits the stick. Even then it's a great general purpose backpack.
My Madcatz has the Sanwa buttons which I still prefer overall. The sanwa buttons are insanely loose. The Qanba buttons on this one are great though, slightly stiffer but still great. I'm actually having a bit of an easier time pulling off evil ryu's ridiculously small link time combos over the madcatz TE. Not sure why yet, I'll have to play more.
Either way the madcatz TE and this one are both great and I don't have a clear winner yet.
Which store was this? And do they ship internationally? I'm really tempted if they still have them in stock. Right now I fear some of my buttons have loose connections - especially if I hit them at an angle.
http://www.canadianjoysticks.com/
Also you can get functionally the same stick from eightarc but I don't like the color schemes as much.
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weird how you shaved and did the nails on only one of your arms
Quote from Senturaholy crap Alex, how much did you pay for this one? I'm in need of a new stick, I've grown weary of mine.
The actual original price was 150$ US but I ended up paying 220$ after shipping and money conversion. It also comes with a pretty sweet EVO backpack that perfectly fits the stick. Even then it's a great general purpose backpack.
My Madcatz has the Sanwa buttons which I still prefer overall. The sanwa buttons are insanely loose. The Qanba buttons on this one are great though, slightly stiffer but still great. I'm actually having a bit of an easier time pulling off evil ryu's ridiculously small link time combos over the madcatz TE. Not sure why yet, I'll have to play more.
Either way the madcatz TE and this one are both great and I don't have a clear winner yet.
My third fightstick. Only 500 of these ever made. Managed to track down a Canadian distributor that still had 3 left.
Funny I also have the madcatz limited edition fightstick from about 4 years ago. When I was shopping online I saw a new one for 1200$! I originally paid 250$. Even the used ones appreciated in price.
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I've had this week off so I've been bumming around doing various different hobbies etc. Found some time for cooking:
1) Leftover crepes used to make dinner crepes. Steamed spinache sauteed with onion & garlic. Combined with tuna, mayo, lemon & cheese.Also roasted beets.
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2) Burrito! Cabbage, beef, homemade chipotle lime sauce.
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3) The night after I made the burrito I made a quesedilla cabbage salad with it because our tortilla skins were really roti and they worked better as quesedillas.
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Man the amount of work needed to get a basic fighting game up and running is staggering compared to other types of games I've worked on. I spent a good portion of the day today setting up game data and the character state machines.
I've just finished setting up the first schema for defining a character state definition. Which is basically a animation that drives gameplay. It has segments (which are like frames but they can exist for more than a frame so I called them segments to avoid confusion). Each segment has sprite animation data, hitbox data and attack hitbox data. I'm sure more data will be needed as I work on this.
The data definition is done in Json. Since it's a fighting game and it needs to be really tweakable quickly so I took a lot of data definition out of code. Ideally you'll be able to edit the file while the game is going and have it update without needing to restart the game when you save the file.
Here's an example state/animation definition (tried to use the code paste but that didn't paste very nice) :
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yeah scaleform works in windows but it has to be in a direct3d context. It can't work via the win32 api. I meant it was the way to go for source engine games though. One of the reasons being UI people tend to know flash.
I think the guys reply about IE was correct at the time because the post was in 2010.
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Really addicted so far. Last one I played was part 1. This one seems to be a total improvement. Nothing I saw in 1 that I missed. A lot more stuff to do it seems as well.
It also has an overworld which is one of my favorite things to see in a game like this.
Quote from SjonssonYeah I like it too! Don't retire it entirely though, you should like add the games there in a list. Or maybe I can do that here? Just make a list of Games of Mapcore, the name of the game and the creator?
Damn, that's a pretty big undertaking, looking forward to see some screens coming up! Good on you doing all that paperwork, I think it could save (programmer) lives if people just sat down and did that before starting. Maybe programmers do that all the time, they don't tell me, I just assume they don't. Seems like you're going to go really deep on the gameplay mechanics too, I'm quite sure someone wrote a theorycraft breakdown on Street Fighter if you do some googling, so you don't need to break it down all yourself. Unless you want too that is.
I haven't heard the term theorycraft before. Interesting I'll see if I can find anything.
Also realistically I don't really write stuff down that much. Usually only when it's some sort of big state machine is when I have to really plan something out on paper.
great to see this thread up. Now I can retire my jams thread. I much prefer this way of handling it
Currently working on a fighting game engine from scratch. I have this week off from work where I plan to put a couple hours in each day. I'll post some pics when I have something going.
Currently I just finished the basic rendering code and gui implementation for debug stuff. Also finished up the first phase of the virtual input system (mapping input devices to a virtual controller). That has taken the longest so far.
Right now I'm starting up on the state logic and it's been a little tough. I've spent about 5-6 hours on paper and have kind of been avoiding programming it because I'm a little fearful of implementing it. I think it's gonna be a series of failures before I get something decent working. I'm trying to focus on studying the intricacies of Street Fighter to try and get some theoretical knowledge of what to do.
Ohh that would explain why big picture mode is so much more responsive.
And yeah going to scaleform is the way to go. The source engine gui stuff is brutal. That was one of the really tough things with Firearms Source when I worked on it. In fact one of the coders tried to implement awesonium on top of the source engine because they hated it so much (awesonium is a way to basically render web pages in hardware for those that don't know).
Qt is ok. I've used it a lot in the past. I'd say it's the best of all the frameworks that attempt to do native gui's but it can be a bit of a pain to work with. IMO much better than GTK though. Qt Creator is actually a really good general purpose IDE even if you aren't doing Qt specific C++.
It looks like valve also made their own system.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2389…e-use-for-steam
I'm not sure if that's still the case though. Some answers on there indicate the whole thing might be running inside a browser.
Is epic using GTK? I thought they developed their own Ui library.
And yes I'm currently a fan of having the engine or hardware context drive the gui. Doing that totally bypasses OS specific gotachs related to their UI's. There's a fair amount of downsides like you cant have floating windows outside of the hardware context screen (well maybe you can but it would be tough) but I think it's overall worth it.
Hell maybe even developing your app in scaleform or Iggy would be a good solution for a tool.
Also lately I've been using something called imgui for my hardware context gui's. It's pretty awesome, it interfaces with pretty much any renderer that uses buffers.
Also if anyone is interested here is a list of editors and game tools made with ATF. The list is very large and there's some very interesting projects in there.
