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Plasuma!!!
 Novice Member
Joined: 9/19/05
There's a formula for everything, even famous quotes. |
5/08/11 11:00:11 PM#41
Originally posted by Corpse-Core I might have agreed if we were 15 years younger, but after you've failed enough, you stop getting frustrated. You just start looking for other solutions. The only thing you have to look out for is risk management - will failure put me on the streets and deplete my life savings (if it will, can I recover from that)? Will failure literally cost an arm and a leg or cause my face to melt off? Will failure cause me two or more days of stress over an unsolved problem that I could probably have avoided if I just tried a different approach? Also, a search for discovery can fend off demoralization, at least until your ex texts you and tells you how terrible of a person you were and still are and always will be. |
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5/08/11 11:17:22 PM#42
Originally posted by Corpse-Core
Pick a language and become an expert in it, learn everything there is to learn about it. Master it completely. After that, if you need to pick up another language, you can do it in a matter of weeks. What is your ultimate goal here? Do you want a job in the gaming industry? Do you want to do coding for someone else? Do you have a vision for a game that has to be made no matter what? Do you want to head a team, or be part of a team? |
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Originally posted by madeux
Your are right, its all about learning the fundamentals of programming as a whole rather than any specific language. Thus, I have my answer, thank you sir. |
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5/09/11 9:24:00 PM#44
If you want to build a game than build a game. Don’t think you need a fukin team because if you have a love and passion it will get done eventually or you die and know you put forth the efforts into what you believe in.
Personally I never really wanted a ‘game’. I had a vision of a virtual reality that was more about adventuring and socializing with a look and feel that suggested one was part of the whole. I could never find such a ‘game’ so I took on the task of making it a reality and I learned something about human nature in the process.
I had a team once and that team wanted paid but they wanted the rewards NOW not in the future. Even with most working a couple hours a week at it they wanted it to complete so they could get the reward. The real task was beyond a couple hours a week PPL. I had been working on it for thousands of hours already and I expected it to take 5 to 6 years with 10 members so that team fell apart. It seems that if no one believes in the project, no one really wants a part of the project unless you can buy their interest or they are sure it is going to return BIG rewards in a very short time frame.
I decided to shit can the project as a commercial endeavor and work on it as a hobby. There will never be another team because this is a passion of building something different and not about money. To bad no one gets to see it but me. I will put up a video once in awhile just to tease though because I have become a bit cynical.
Now that this project is in its 12th season and is a personal project, it has progressed further than all past work by a team because it is being done with a love and passion for the vision.
No you don’t need a team if you want a personal project but if you want a commercial ‘game’ then you need MONEY to buy others because very few will ever invest time into something unless there is a monetary reward.
----------------------------- The internet - 9th wonder of the world. Mankind's greatest achievement for the sake of humanity yet the most profound because it seems to bring out the worst in everyone. |
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I couldn't help myself and started looking around at game engine spec's. I particularly took note of Blender (while primarily a 3d modeler its still an engine) and Panda3d. While doing so I noticed that both softwares use the Python Scripting language with a backdrop in C++. Would it be possible to integrate the capabilities of Panda3d and Blender into one package? Or would one have to literally tear the two apart and start from the ground up as a new engine? I realize Panda3d can import models from Blender but to my knowledge and understanding thats such a hassle to do. I'm not aiming to do this beastial task, but rather asking out of simple curiousity. Anyway, thoughts? |
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5/11/11 10:09:46 PM#46
Originally posted by Corpse-Core While it could theoretically be accomplished, it wouldn't be practical and would probably as much work as creating your own engine. Creating your own engine is definitely possible, there are several books that guide you through doing it. And if that's the side of gaming you want to be invovled in, it would be a great way to learn. But if you want to make games, as in bring your own ideas to the screen, going with a prebuilt engine, or having someone else create it, would be more appropriate. |
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Originally posted by madeux
Interesting, I would imagine that it's not entirely a very big leap from creating game engines to programming games. After all who better to program the game, than one who created the very engine which the said game uses? However, while a tantalizing idea we would be talking some serious software engineering coarses here. Being not a man of great wealth, college is not an option for me at the moment. So I'm limited in resources to self teaching methods via books and tinkering. Granted I will need schooling when all is said and done but for now I only have so much to work with. At any rate, given my current situation learning the in's and out's of a premade engine would be a far more reasonable approach. |
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5/13/11 7:19:45 PM#48
Originally posted by Corpse-Core Programming still remains one of the few trades that while it is easier to get jobs in the field with a degree, the majority of those who are VERY good at the trade often have no formal education in it. Also working with lots of developers myself (although not for video games) you might be amazed how many times they just google the answers... |
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Plasuma!!!
Novice Member
Joined: 9/19/05
There's a formula for everything, even famous quotes. |
5/13/11 7:22:13 PM#49
Originally posted by Corpse-Core The everyday run-of-the-mill game engine is not a huge undertaking. If one good programmer just set out to make an engine that does what he needed it to do, no documentation or modularity / expandability, they could probably have something presentable by the end of a month or two No, you don't need to take courses to learn programming. You'll learn far more from dissecting the source and examples from places like NeHe than you will from the standard dictation you'll get from most computer science professors. The only reason you'll ever need to go to college is to get connected with other people, so if you do decide to go, you will have to be picky about where you attend (if I were going to blow a wad on "education", I certainly wouldn't want to throw it at DeVry or Westwood or FullSail). Unless, of course, your life has no structure and you need a school to tell you how you should spend your time. In which case, by all means consider college your first goal. Just don't expect to be happy with all that debt you'll never be able to pay off. Learning the ins and outs of any current engine is good practice, yes, since you'll learn about the pitfalls you might encounter with your own software later on. But if you're doing this mainly for the sake of game design, I believe you should reconsider the importance of video game technology. You won't learn the principles of good design by studying complex creations first, as that will only confuse you in believing that genres and systems as they exist are somehow useful to you. You'll best learn by studying the minimal work of pioneers to learn some rules of design, and applying (and then breaking) the rules they chose to follow. |
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5/13/11 8:52:52 PM#50
Originally posted by Corpse-Core Someone who can make a great engine isn't necessarily someone who can make an even remotely decent game. It's different disciplines.
A hundred million years ago - or sometime in the 90s, I forget which - I worked on the UI, technical documentation and support for Indigo, a stock analysis program. The main coder was a kickass programmer and equally amazing mathematician. His wrote the code that sorted through decades of historical data, and he did all sorts of wizardry with moving averages and stochastic oscillators and all those cool terms for putting dots and lines and candlesticks on graphs. There's no way I could write code as efficient and complex as he did, let alone how effortlessly he did it. That beign said, if the UI was left to him, it very well would have had buttons and inputs for every option (needed and unneeded) and required two 500-page manuals to learn how to use any of it. Many talents are needed to make a good client/server-based, 3D, often story-driven, virtual world RPG. A master in one area isn't necessarily a master of all the others as well. Sandpark: The MMO gamer's way to say "I have no clue what I am talking about." |
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5/13/11 9:01:11 PM#51
Originally posted by Loktofeit For example.
You want to play games only made by Epic on the Unreal Engine?
UT3 and Gears of War, oh yeah...
And to also note. Only mmo to be using Epic's Atlas MMO plugin presently is Mortal Online, so that's your approximation on performance as all the engine development is done by them(seeing as Starvault had no real programmers last time I checked).
EDIT: Not that those are terrible games.
Its just that if those were my only options I would take a hammer to my own skull. As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. - Vaarsuvius |
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5/13/11 9:10:01 PM#52
Originally posted by Loktofeit This. Very, very this. id Software is a great example. The make amazing 3d engines... and mediocre games. |
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I think you guys missed what I was getting at here. Game design and programming are different and I agree one could be good at one but suck at the other. The point is, that programming a game engine and programming an actual game (NOT designing) wouldn't be out of the question here. Also, "programming a game isn't the same as designing one," this I already knew. |
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5/13/11 10:03:35 PM#54
Originally posted by Corpse-Core It wouldn't out of the question... but perhaps it should be. Programming a game engine, doing it efficiently and doing it well, is very difficult and very time consuming. You really have to think about why you would want to do that. The engines are already out there, programmed by teams of people who know what they're doing. Spending your time reinventing the wheel might not be the best use of your time and (eventual) talent. |
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5/13/11 10:05:41 PM#55
My idea for a zombie survival sandbox game has recently been taken by people more qualified than me. I have no more ideas. :( |
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5/13/11 10:29:23 PM#56
I'm actually confused a bit...
Programming a game as opposed to programming an engine?
I know there's a lot that one has to code beyond just the game engine, but the core aspects that influence the performance of a game are the bits that will be found in the engine. Much of how a game plays is dictated by the way an engine is built as well.
It's part of why one has to go and modify an engine and create plugins to flesh out a game. If you want to take the Unreal Engine and make an RTS, you have to code in those RTS bits. You have to add new code to the engine that the people who made the engine didn't account for.
And alternatively you have many things you'd be streamlining, like there's a lot of code in the Unreal Engine that just isn't necessary for making a standard RTS. Which means you can spend quite some time reworking an engine to remove bits without breaking it so it can run faster.
Which like my example of Epic and the Unreal Engine. They make action shooters more or less (with some tinkering). Their engine was developed by in large to cater to that kind of game development. A major point for a long time has been using the Unreal engine for large scale games, which originally Epic actually wrote off as impossible with their own engine.
Then Sony made MAG. Epic had to go back and rethink their own system, making the Atlas plugin as a solution. Yet, that plugin is pretty buggy still and the only MMO/game that uses it presently has plenty of little problems to show for it.
But yeah...programming a game engine and programming a game for and in the engine is pretty close. There's a lot about game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine that are designed more so as a toolkit for developers to port code and assets as executables into the engine. It's still on the developers though to modify the engine to acheieve performance.
Point here being that game engine developers are very much so in the game boat as game developers who use their engines. It's a matter where they're spendig their time and money.
So can an engine developer make a game s they d their own engine? Yeah, happens a decent amount. But it's a very finite scope of performance that they operate in. And like my example with Epic and Atlas, when they step beyond that comfort zone defined by the engine they make, they frequently lack the knowledge necessary to make it perform. As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. - Vaarsuvius |
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Originally posted by madeux
This thought was more out of a curiousity than actual consideration. Programming in order to create game engines is not what I want to do but did find the topic interesting none-the-less. Your also right in that reinventing the wheel is basically a waste of time and talent. |
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