A visual Novel? with a 2d battlesystem, instead of a 3d engine? I'll have to look on you tube to see what you mean. Well Had a look as master of Orion 2, looks like a turn based game to me with still screens a little bit of animation. like a sim city type of game. In my game you don't build the assets, you buy them from other people in the game but maybe i might think of adding in the option to build a new asset if you want by inputting an asset builder vendor in the game in the systems, I'll think about it., and if you buy an asset, like a mining ore facility, or something that produces some goods, it will earn some credits for you which is deposited in your bank which can be accessed from any system that has a bank that supports Alliance Credits but some systems won't have alliance credits or accept alliance currency so you would have to go to a system that has a bank that is friendly with the Allance unless of course some rogue faction sends in some raiders in to destroy your asset.
If it gets destroyed, it will pop up in the daily interstellar news telling you all the bad news of it being bombed. of either losing mining stock you invested in if the stock market you invested in on a particular system has a turn or when you lose an asset.
So the first thing you learn is not to invest in anything from Vinus when shady little cheeky aliens come to you with tempting offers because that planet's economy is unstable... But there will be other systems that will be unstable as well with their economies so it will be a mxed bag. So trading will have some risks that could pay off, but if you do it too much and with the wrong type of systems with the wrong type of traders who work more like the Ferengi do in trying to sell nothing but interstellar junk, might not pay off and sell you all short and lose alot of credits instead.. So it can work for you or against you if you pick the wrong traders.
This is what I wanted for my close-up cutscenes..
FULL SCREEN close up Cutscenes that you walk up to the person on to have small but not too tiny crisp clear looking font and look cinematic with a modern look, blur the background if necessary so the text dialog can be read more easily on the screen or just stick the text on the top and bottom borders of the screen out of the cutscene movie altogether which i did in batch, but in Unreal, the text is put directly in the cutscene. What I don't want is a 1991 Japanese Aime style cartoony speech bubble interface, I need the futuristic modern 2015 wide cinematic paranoma look in my close up cutscenes when talking directly to people in the room with me.
WHAT I WANT FOR THE GROUND SIMULATOR
A mini small little 2d animated portrait of the game character speaking to you from a certain far location away while you are still walking or running around on a planet's surface or like talking to your ship pilot Skinar from time to time over communications but when a party member wants to speak to you you then you will have an automated audio only dialog conversation back and forth with them while you're on the move if you have subtitles text turned off you won't see the dialog. (no need for text subtitles or animated pic showing) for these type of scenes.
And when you are in idle mode with them when you walk up close to then you get the full blown cutscenes of them to talk to and just speaking audio to you if subtitles are tuned off or they have their subttles text turned on so you can see all their text. This is for the more important stuff of the game.
FOR THE SPACE SIMULATOR
This 2d mini portrait pic with no text would be necessry if you do the game in a 3d space simulator when communicating to other ships or aliens in the area when they are far away from you while you are still flying round the systems in your ship... You hear their audio and see just a tiny moving 2d animated pic of them talking. Might be hard to make in 2d to make them lip synch the audio dialog.
So I know what I want in my game for the 3d version. but its alot of work involved
Well think of it this way, with Unreal 3 UDK, you are already spending many hours waiting for lighting to be all rebuilt and doing nothing else, So yes I welcome spending many hours of actually doing something in an engine instead of putting up with many many hours of re-building crashed lightmaps all the time with swarm everytime Unreal 3 decides to crash and burn on me.
I think you would need a program to render the planets, the nebulas and so on, if doing 2D system charts for the smaller systems, and for the larger important systems, need to find 3d models for the planets as well as the textures for the ship, render also the gas for the cloud nebulas. You would need quite a few resources. For I don't know what program will rende Gas Nebulas Yet that you canfly your ship into.
I still to decide whether to just let the t6unit drip feed the starcharts out from his frozen memory from time to time, I know I said he suppoed to have 2,000 but I might give him 200 star chart systems and have the rest stored up in a damaged slipstream drive which is found on planet Spoak and get the T6unit to extract all the star charts data from the damaged drive to add in another 700 more to his memory banks to make it 1,000.
I can compromise, for not all star systems have to be full blown in a full 3d flight simulator modules some can be just simple 2d flat mini simulator to move around on the star chart to mine stuff from certain systems ect, and the bigger more important systems can use a full blown 3d space simulator if necessary to fly your ship through gaseos cloud nebulas and stuff, to get to certain areas so a full blown 3d simulator is just an optional thing, just gives a nice touch to the game if you can have that for the larger systems, so for the small systems with ony 1-2 planets, , no need to have a full blown 3d simulator you can use a mini 2d chart one instead on the screen.
the systems will have the planets in them. some system might have 2-3 planets, some might have 4-6, 3-5 moons and all the other stuff. BUt not every planet in every system has to be a full blown 3d model, it can be just a 2d pic on a chart you fly our ship around to if its not an important system.
and you jump from one system to another through the gates if you can find the gates that lead to them.
Yes, doing ground simulator and a space simulator is alot of work. No, You dont make the whole universe with 1,000 planets in it, the computer cannot render all those objects, unless you portal it with gates but you just load it in a module at a time when you go from system to system .But Unreal might not be suited for the game I'm trying to do. Plus I had quite enough of all its lightmaps crashes.
and audio speech files (don't forget the dialog audio that goes with it). The type of game i made needs a 3d engine for the ship to fly all around in to vist the varioius systems and a 3d engine also for the surface of the planets for walking around on to walk through all the different parts of the city and docking ports, shops ect..That's the type of game I wanted to do and walk around in your spaceship as well talking to all your ship crew ect..
Make 3d Sound for my game? That's a Good question if I make a 3d space sound effect for my game then I would build a simple sounds up by just getting two or three ambient space sound files and play them all together to give the space ambient more depth and atmosphere and volume and playing more than one sound file to create the 3d ambient effect,
I also wanted to see if this could alo be pulled off in a 3d game engine as well. to make 3d models all spawn in on the edge of your camera view FOV so it give the illusion the place is all filled up with thousands of people.when its only just a few dozen models that are walking in different waypoints directions being spawed in at random places to walk into, and fade away on the edge your camera field Of Vision View and the trigger be as big as area that you want the busy people to be walking around in to start spawning in. So this effect would suit large open city areas and also the busy shopping areas to create the illusion you have got a big city of thousands of busy people.o
And please don't tell me that making some busy city people in games are patented because I am getting tired of these companies going out of their way to try to cripple everybody's creativity.
No, the c64 was used just as an example to show how you can use the ram for storage of your code I think this other guy is trying to tell me that I can probably do it using the ram with a game engine instead of using the dos interpreter to just run my script from that so he may know a way of making that batch script work with the game engine scripts if he can access it from the ram. That's why I mentioned it. He might be onto something.
I don't like unreal 3 for all its constant lightmaps crashing problems and black screens. Here's the pattern. Bulld New Geometry, Unreal is stable, Build some new Geometry, all of a sudden the lighmaps just pop out the window and crash to a black viewport window saying 'cannot buld lightmaps. Lighmaps must be all rebuilt." So you start Swarm up which takes 15-20 minutes to rebuild the lighting again . Lights are back on again. Buld new Geometry, lights are ok, Build some more new Geometry, Crash out go all the lightmaps again. Rinse and repeat.
Its not normal behavior for the engine's lightmaps to go pop like that everytime you try to add in some new geometry to your level.
For with Red Faction red editor, I never had these kind of problems with my lighting because the game engine rendered the lightmaps all last, not first.. . But unreal is trying to render both at the same time which is causing the lightmaps on my machine to keep on busting. and I haven't even done a big map or strained the unreal engine at all and it lightmaps keep on busting like that everytime you try to build geometry not normal.
Oh well, no surprise that the Armageddon Mass Effect game will not be out on pc until 2016 if this same problem still exist in the latest engine.
What interests me is how Bioware managed to fit 40,000 lines of text dialog in the Unreal 3 Engine with Mass Effect 3 in their level maps. so I think they built their dialog tree up in Kismet using the node system using that text announcement system,
This other guy is telling me to forget running my game one line at a time, just load the whole script into the computer's memory banks and just execute the goto labels in memory (I don't know how to execute batch goto labels in ram yet or from game engine scripts yet if it can be done, I don't know.
And then I will have faster execution speed and everything will be all nice and smooth with no lagging of windows to read in the file from the HDD because it will be already all loaded up into the memory. So I can see the benefits from keeping the code in the memory instead of reading it from the disk. He also said the main game code is only small in size about 10% when compared to the separate file game assets 90% that the game uses. So he makes a good point. And that is true, because my game script file is only 1.8 megs in size, the game assets are over 1.3 gigs. of all the sound Foleys, and audio dialog files, and some music.
But you say if I load my batch script all up into the memory and execute the code block from memory instead of breaking my code block down into these little script classes then nobody can port my code into their game engine or have a hard time trying because its all in one big file not in separate little class scripts that those engines like UNreal and Unity like using.
You want me to create Seaparate text files of my game?
What do you mean by this, are you suggesting I break my text dialog tree down into hundreds of little text files? Well for starters this game will have over 60,000 lines or more of dialog text because of all the many system that I have to still wire up in the galaxy.
I agree with this rule that the 90% of game assets like graphics, sound, your game dialog streams and videos should be separate files, but the main script code shouldn't be all broken down into hundreds of tiny little script classes (pieces) like they did wth Unreal, because then you're just cachng the crap out of the HDD (oh no that's UDK 3 I'm thinking of) where you had to wait for lighting to be all rebuilt each time you build something new to the level and it won't surprise me if the UNREAL 3 engine has busted more than one or two HDD's with all that heavy caching that that engine does. Unreal 4 says my comptuer is crap and recommends that I can only render the game on the lowest production setting, yet its got 16 gigs of memory and that to Unreal is low?
I think of the poor little guy who sits with Unreal 3 engine spending 10 minutes caching the rubber all off his HDD just to get Unreal to build all the lighting and i Unreal 4 I watched a guy put a dozen blueprint nodes togeher just to build up a text shader to display a small little piece of text on his screen. And how long does unity take to build its Lighitng?, as long as Unreal does?
When you're doing a game with over 60,000 lines of dialog text, it might be better to access the dialog text directly from the ram instead of relying on the HDD, That might help the frame rate stay low once you add all the other game assets to it so you need some kind of dialog tree database file..
Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - 05:48
If you wrote 50k lines of batch script then I suspect that you included the output text in those scripts? That's a mistake you're now paying for when transitioning technologies. Imagine if all your text was instead in a text file that your batchscript read from? Then you could just write a new c#-script in unity and reuse the same asset. That's why we always try to separate data from logic, I learned that the hard way myself many many years ago...
Well my game Is written as one big massive text batch script file. 1 big long long batch file not a series of mini little scripts. The Assets of the game (the audio dialog is embedded by file pathnames into the script file itself....I don't know enough knowledge with Unreal engine to fix the T-poe problem with the models but the planet will have to be fixed at a later time.
A visual Novel? with a 2d battlesystem, instead of a 3d engine? I'll have to look on you tube to see what you mean. Well Had a look as master of Orion 2, looks like a turn based game to me with still screens a little bit of animation. like a sim city type of game. In my game you don't build the assets, you buy them from other people in the game but maybe i might think of adding in the option to build a new asset if you want by inputting an asset builder vendor in the game in the systems, I'll think about it., and if you buy an asset, like a mining ore facility, or something that produces some goods, it will earn some credits for you which is deposited in your bank which can be accessed from any system that has a bank that supports Alliance Credits but some systems won't have alliance credits or accept alliance currency so you would have to go to a system that has a bank that is friendly with the Allance unless of course some rogue faction sends in some raiders in to destroy your asset.
If it gets destroyed, it will pop up in the daily interstellar news telling you all the bad news of it being bombed. of either losing mining stock you invested in if the stock market you invested in on a particular system has a turn or when you lose an asset.
So the first thing you learn is not to invest in anything from Vinus when shady little cheeky aliens come to you with tempting offers because that planet's economy is unstable... But there will be other systems that will be unstable as well with their economies so it will be a mxed bag. So trading will have some risks that could pay off, but if you do it too much and with the wrong type of systems with the wrong type of traders who work more like the Ferengi do in trying to sell nothing but interstellar junk, might not pay off and sell you all short and lose alot of credits instead.. So it can work for you or against you if you pick the wrong traders.
This is what I wanted for my close-up cutscenes..
FULL SCREEN close up Cutscenes that you walk up to the person on to have small but not too tiny crisp clear looking font and look cinematic with a modern look, blur the background if necessary so the text dialog can be read more easily on the screen or just stick the text on the top and bottom borders of the screen out of the cutscene movie altogether which i did in batch, but in Unreal, the text is put directly in the cutscene. What I don't want is a 1991 Japanese Aime style cartoony speech bubble interface, I need the futuristic modern 2015 wide cinematic paranoma look in my close up cutscenes when talking directly to people in the room with me.
WHAT I WANT FOR THE GROUND SIMULATOR
A mini small little 2d animated portrait of the game character speaking to you from a certain far location away while you are still walking or running around on a planet's surface or like talking to your ship pilot Skinar from time to time over communications but when a party member wants to speak to you you then you will have an automated audio only dialog conversation back and forth with them while you're on the move if you have subtitles text turned off you won't see the dialog. (no need for text subtitles or animated pic showing) for these type of scenes.
And when you are in idle mode with them when you walk up close to then you get the full blown cutscenes of them to talk to and just speaking audio to you if subtitles are tuned off or they have their subttles text turned on so you can see all their text. This is for the more important stuff of the game.
FOR THE SPACE SIMULATOR
This 2d mini portrait pic with no text would be necessry if you do the game in a 3d space simulator when communicating to other ships or aliens in the area when they are far away from you while you are still flying round the systems in your ship... You hear their audio and see just a tiny moving 2d animated pic of them talking. Might be hard to make in 2d to make them lip synch the audio dialog.
So I know what I want in my game for the 3d version. but its alot of work involved
Well think of it this way, with Unreal 3 UDK, you are already spending many hours waiting for lighting to be all rebuilt and doing nothing else, So yes I welcome spending many hours of actually doing something in an engine instead of putting up with many many hours of re-building crashed lightmaps all the time with swarm everytime Unreal 3 decides to crash and burn on me.
I think you would need a program to render the planets, the nebulas and so on, if doing 2D system charts for the smaller systems, and for the larger important systems, need to find 3d models for the planets as well as the textures for the ship, render also the gas for the cloud nebulas. You would need quite a few resources. For I don't know what program will rende Gas Nebulas Yet that you canfly your ship into.
I still to decide whether to just let the t6unit drip feed the starcharts out from his frozen memory from time to time, I know I said he suppoed to have 2,000 but I might give him 200 star chart systems and have the rest stored up in a damaged slipstream drive which is found on planet Spoak and get the T6unit to extract all the star charts data from the damaged drive to add in another 700 more to his memory banks to make it 1,000.
I can compromise, for not all star systems have to be full blown in a full 3d flight simulator modules some can be just simple 2d flat mini simulator to move around on the star chart to mine stuff from certain systems ect, and the bigger more important systems can use a full blown 3d space simulator if necessary to fly your ship through gaseos cloud nebulas and stuff, to get to certain areas so a full blown 3d simulator is just an optional thing, just gives a nice touch to the game if you can have that for the larger systems, so for the small systems with ony 1-2 planets, , no need to have a full blown 3d simulator you can use a mini 2d chart one instead on the screen.
the systems will have the planets in them. some system might have 2-3 planets, some might have 4-6, 3-5 moons and all the other stuff. BUt not every planet in every system has to be a full blown 3d model, it can be just a 2d pic on a chart you fly our ship around to if its not an important system.
and you jump from one system to another through the gates if you can find the gates that lead to them.
Yes, doing ground simulator and a space simulator is alot of work. No, You dont make the whole universe with 1,000 planets in it, the computer cannot render all those objects, unless you portal it with gates but you just load it in a module at a time when you go from system to system .But Unreal might not be suited for the game I'm trying to do. Plus I had quite enough of all its lightmaps crashes.
and audio speech files (don't forget the dialog audio that goes with it). The type of game i made needs a 3d engine for the ship to fly all around in to vist the varioius systems and a 3d engine also for the surface of the planets for walking around on to walk through all the different parts of the city and docking ports, shops ect..That's the type of game I wanted to do and walk around in your spaceship as well talking to all your ship crew ect..
Make 3d Sound for my game? That's a Good question if I make a 3d space sound effect for my game then I would build a simple sounds up by just getting two or three ambient space sound files and play them all together to give the space ambient more depth and atmosphere and volume and playing more than one sound file to create the 3d ambient effect,
I also wanted to see if this could alo be pulled off in a 3d game engine as well. to make 3d models all spawn in on the edge of your camera view FOV so it give the illusion the place is all filled up with thousands of people.when its only just a few dozen models that are walking in different waypoints directions being spawed in at random places to walk into, and fade away on the edge your camera field Of Vision View and the trigger be as big as area that you want the busy people to be walking around in to start spawning in. So this effect would suit large open city areas and also the busy shopping areas to create the illusion you have got a big city of thousands of busy people.o
And please don't tell me that making some busy city people in games are patented because I am getting tired of these companies going out of their way to try to cripple everybody's creativity.
No, the c64 was used just as an example to show how you can use the ram for storage of your code I think this other guy is trying to tell me that I can probably do it using the ram with a game engine instead of using the dos interpreter to just run my script from that so he may know a way of making that batch script work with the game engine scripts if he can access it from the ram. That's why I mentioned it. He might be onto something.
I don't like unreal 3 for all its constant lightmaps crashing problems and black screens. Here's the pattern. Bulld New Geometry, Unreal is stable, Build some new Geometry, all of a sudden the lighmaps just pop out the window and crash to a black viewport window saying 'cannot buld lightmaps. Lighmaps must be all rebuilt." So you start Swarm up which takes 15-20 minutes to rebuild the lighting again . Lights are back on again. Buld new Geometry, lights are ok, Build some more new Geometry, Crash out go all the lightmaps again. Rinse and repeat.
Its not normal behavior for the engine's lightmaps to go pop like that everytime you try to add in some new geometry to your level.
For with Red Faction red editor, I never had these kind of problems with my lighting because the game engine rendered the lightmaps all last, not first.. . But unreal is trying to render both at the same time which is causing the lightmaps on my machine to keep on busting. and I haven't even done a big map or strained the unreal engine at all and it lightmaps keep on busting like that everytime you try to build geometry not normal.
Oh well, no surprise that the Armageddon Mass Effect game will not be out on pc until 2016 if this same problem still exist in the latest engine.
What interests me is how Bioware managed to fit 40,000 lines of text dialog in the Unreal 3 Engine with Mass Effect 3 in their level maps. so I think they built their dialog tree up in Kismet using the node system using that text announcement system,
This other guy is telling me to forget running my game one line at a time, just load the whole script into the computer's memory banks and just execute the goto labels in memory (I don't know how to execute batch goto labels in ram yet or from game engine scripts yet if it can be done, I don't know.
And then I will have faster execution speed and everything will be all nice and smooth with no lagging of windows to read in the file from the HDD because it will be already all loaded up into the memory. So I can see the benefits from keeping the code in the memory instead of reading it from the disk. He also said the main game code is only small in size about 10% when compared to the separate file game assets 90% that the game uses. So he makes a good point. And that is true, because my game script file is only 1.8 megs in size, the game assets are over 1.3 gigs. of all the sound Foleys, and audio dialog files, and some music.
But you say if I load my batch script all up into the memory and execute the code block from memory instead of breaking my code block down into these little script classes then nobody can port my code into their game engine or have a hard time trying because its all in one big file not in separate little class scripts that those engines like UNreal and Unity like using.
You want me to create Seaparate text files of my game?
What do you mean by this, are you suggesting I break my text dialog tree down into hundreds of little text files? Well for starters this game will have over 60,000 lines or more of dialog text because of all the many system that I have to still wire up in the galaxy.
I agree with this rule that the 90% of game assets like graphics, sound, your game dialog streams and videos should be separate files, but the main script code shouldn't be all broken down into hundreds of tiny little script classes (pieces) like they did wth Unreal, because then you're just cachng the crap out of the HDD (oh no that's UDK 3 I'm thinking of) where you had to wait for lighting to be all rebuilt each time you build something new to the level and it won't surprise me if the UNREAL 3 engine has busted more than one or two HDD's with all that heavy caching that that engine does. Unreal 4 says my comptuer is crap and recommends that I can only render the game on the lowest production setting, yet its got 16 gigs of memory and that to Unreal is low?
I think of the poor little guy who sits with Unreal 3 engine spending 10 minutes caching the rubber all off his HDD just to get Unreal to build all the lighting and i Unreal 4 I watched a guy put a dozen blueprint nodes togeher just to build up a text shader to display a small little piece of text on his screen. And how long does unity take to build its Lighitng?, as long as Unreal does?
When you're doing a game with over 60,000 lines of dialog text, it might be better to access the dialog text directly from the ram instead of relying on the HDD, That might help the frame rate stay low once you add all the other game assets to it so you need some kind of dialog tree database file..
If you wrote 50k lines of batch script then I suspect that you included the output text in those scripts? That's a mistake you're now paying for when transitioning technologies. Imagine if all your text was instead in a text file that your batchscript read from? Then you could just write a new c#-script in unity and reuse the same asset. That's why we always try to separate data from logic, I learned that the hard way myself many many years ago...
Well my game Is written as one big massive text batch script file. 1 big long long batch file not a series of mini little scripts. The Assets of the game (the audio dialog is embedded by file pathnames into the script file itself....I don't know enough knowledge with Unreal engine to fix the T-poe problem with the models but the planet will have to be fixed at a later time.
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