[QUOTE=;101995]
It’s impossible?
But what I don’t understand is, why is it impossible?
Which part is impossible?
If I have a library of assets, and work on expanding it to get nearly all the assets I need.
If I learn more and work on the physics engine
If I then hire a coder and have a friend to help me, and learn myself how to code a bit and work on the game mechanics.
If I have a fully made game, a full list of assets needed, all the gameplay mechanics, storyline, scripts down, every name of NPCs, mobs everything down and made via Maya/3DSMax/Blender/ZBrush…
Why is it impossible? Can’t I hire someone for the networking etc? Which part is impossible?
Also why should I spend time learning to code 2D Games rather than take useful classes on 3D and learn to code straight in there?
Which part is impossible?
“Now my idea was to start learning while producing content that I can use in the game, by I mean for example, if I know I will need a specific sky or particle system in the game, I learn by making it from tutorials, then save it for later use for the project and move on another asset I will need.”
It doesn’t happen that fast or that streamlined. Expect to run into problems where you need to rework that asset/file from stage 1. If you learn everything about 3d and the graphics pipeline, that doubles up as things like knowing when to separate objects or lighting data in the models, or how to structure your game code in c++ and what features are fast enough to use. It all builds and complements other pieces of knowledge, so the sooner you learn the better.
“Also why should I spend time learning to code 2D Games rather than take useful classes on 3D and learn to code straight in there?”
2D is faster I guess. I never bothered with it. The math must be simpler.
***"- I couldn’t find much on how to design open-worlds for maximum graphics / loading times, things like triangles or zones around characters loading different polygon counts seems to be the basic way
- How to actually start creating environments etc?"***
It’s all in the details and knowledge and complexity of what your code is. Programmers switch pieces of code around billions of times to shape the most perfectly executing piece of software for what they wanted it to do. There are no limits other than your skill level, execution speed (Blueprints in Unreal 4 are 100 times slower than c++, I read today) and not much else. Advanced features are impossible to learn and add by yourself, for most people. And then the complexity of all is difficult to manage also, because you’re adding code everywhere and can’t support old file versions or code projects, since it changed so much that it’s too difficult to go back to the old stuff. Code is specific to what you want to do, vs. the actual visual representation of things like characters which can be in almost any 3d format. There is a web server that does very very fast GIF creation using its memory before it gives you the resulting webpage. There are tons of academic papers on computer graphics techniques that are not simple to add. Generally we stick to things that already exist for game development projects, and optimization can be done later for triangle based meshes… the software is what you worry about, as a developer using the CPU. The GPU side doesn’t need much work, and if you’re using Unreal 4 then closer-to-hardware stuff is all handled for you.
With editors like Unreal 4, the expectation is that you just go place things around the map and script/code/Blueprint it to completion using various mechanics and existing level design techniques.
A realistic game must do certain things better than other games, yet the same basic rules apply. All online games use some variation on the same networking code technology, roughly speaking. What can be reasonably done by an experienced team of developers will be reasonably comparable to the AAA/popular/blockbuster games in terms of performance, today, because you are going to be able to make smart choices about what technologies to use and when to switch.
all mostly hinges on your experience, wisdom, will, intelligence, and other similar ideas of what makes a person generally able to function well, adapt fairly quickly, and grow to meet new expectations or demands that have to placed on yourself for the project. If you’re not willing to sink time into learning a fair extensive amount about each facet of game development, for example, then you will not be able to create quality video games. You get what you give, in other words: be sensible and mature and honest with yourself, and you can get an idea of what the project will actually demand of you, roughly. But if you sit and expect things to happen at each stage, of course it will flop, and you won’t know what’s actually going on at any stage either, so you don’t learn from it. That’s why it can be good to just go dive into the deep end, and if you have the time which you do if you have the time to talk about having the time, then you can plonk those hours down in something a lot more useful than building your game concept: rather than ideas, you want to first know what you are even doing, and how to do it, and how to do it better.
“On a main map I’d need to be able to fit around 256 - 400 players to be able to make it successful.”
Unless you are a millionaire or an idiot (or more likely, both), understanding the tech comes first and the game design must be built around that. Stick to a well-known genre if you want to ensure technical familiarity or maybe ease of development or reference:
- Shooting games = no emotional depth; short and disposable level interactions; lazy plot writing; small predictable map areas
- MMOs / cash shops = tons of players with nothing more fun in their lives; turn based combat and <5 animation states; players provide most of the fun
“The MMORPG I want to create is fairly complex, but doesn’t require a lot of resources other than the ones I already have. I am wondering where to learn coding for Unreal Engine?”
Don’t rely on one single piece of software, unless you want its problems.
You can program in any language or framework, all the skills are transferrable. What you are looking at is the learning process, not the particular technology. The technology morphs and adapts all the time for the particular inclinations of how developers and artists are doing things in the industry. So, focus on building up knowledge and skills as fast as you can, if you want to learn the best way.
Your models/textures are most likely not going to be everything you need. There are free models online you can use as placeholders for now, or Unreal Engine in particular has its features to block-out levels, houses etc. you can play in. But if your focus is MMO/questing/combat/etc. then you will need to learn how other people do currently. The generic games will keep coming out no matter what, and there are entire companies in China waiting to replicate MMOs that sell and are fairly replicable. You have another one every month it seems now. It can’t be that hard, right?
“Which part is impossible?”
It’s not impossible, just highly unlikely for the average developer, and so the sentiments will follow feeling most people have. They get very tired of ignorant newcomers, so the advice becomes second to nature or something similar. I’ve seen someone make a GTA clone in a matter of MONTHS which really impressed me a few years ago, even more than things like planet renderers. But he explicitly stated himself that he’d been studying like mad for several years, and had no real exciting life to show for it, which is the same kind of path I took. I always wanted to push the limits, and so proving these voices wrong was a personal “rite of passage” for me.
Firstly, some context should be established, like I tried above. is a discussion forum for general advice, not the serious explanation kind, and all over the Internet you’ll find same pattern: people will most often throw off-the-cuff remarks without any real direction to their communication. There is no genuine and sinceremost effort to do what they may be talking about, and we find the binary difference between commercial projects and then the hundreds of thousands of hours that go into masterpieces of computer graphics or high quality software engineering like flight control systems, or in my case building a wealth of knowledge that there is no general (agreement of) understanding for.
The complexity in any project, whether business or iphone game, is what is so insurmountable or so impossible to get over, like a wall that you can’t climb. There is even a parallel between the idea of struggling as a challenge just to make a game, and the symbolic content/meaning of the modern games themselves. Many people suffer to make games these days. Technical roles are far more involved than in other facets of society. The inventor of Javascript said that programming is the most complex things humans do, and he’s wrong because thinking is, but the phrase serves a purpose.
Society is focused on generating money, first of all, so there is no real consideration on society’s part to the (regulation of the) kind of future you’re plunging yourself into . Certain things like Modeller applications, in their very visuals/branding, imply a very sinister undercurrent (e.g. classism: you work multiples of times harder than corporate CEOs for multiples less money) to some people, of pro-corporate leaning and all the rest that comes with obedience and servility to global power. So, while it seems on the surface that it’s your basic dealing with technology you may be able to get, the intuitive and detailed “mapping” that smarter people can sense as the “landscape” of the world tells something very different. Yet people never talk on level about life. That’s partly why there are so many “mysteries”. It’s impossible to be clear in communication if you have not spent time away from the world being clear in thought about everything and for some years. In the past these were called philosophers or mystics or shamans.
You will sink months and indeed years of your life into learning very specific technological details as a game developer, there is no doubt about that, unless you’re producing something non-complex which implies not being serious about having control over your creations, which implies they’ll be trash anyway. is not the context we are talking in; we are talking about the best and the most that is possible, which is the inverse to something like Reddit as a sphere or context in which to place the discussion. What is intuitive is the inverse and opposite to what is easy and for most people, so most of the information about general things will be useless to someone who has always wanted to “push the envelope”.
“If I learn more and work on the physics engine”
—Like one;- can you imagine learning every current technique and keeping up-to-date? How about if we throw rendering in? C++, pointer exceptions, memory page handling, and the several layers of Operating System, language, compiler and build system management. That’s for the technical ability to have something up and running, but we’ve not covered content yet or the renderer or network code or game development itself (and the gradual experience thereof) or having time to look towards the near-future and manage a project. Or maybe there are further platform or renderer (DirectX vs. OpenGL) specifics that will become important for other, seemingly random reasons. Nobody has figured stuff out, things like how to draw all the technologies together. The complexity is like some kind of curse that has everyone under wraps. Code is difficult to maintain, and then there is also elements like licensing/legality to top it off. People also really like to be opportunistic and patent troll so they can sue the individuals out of the ambitious ones who happen to be the successful ones, for ideas that weren’t even demonstrated until such a time.
Then there is motivation, as a huge weight for the long-term. Teams can break apart as fast as they come together, especially if there’s no common ground, and lack of money is also a problem . The popular/commercial game industry pumps out very similar titles one after the other, and you only have to look at the Dynasty Warriors series to start seeing the cash cow for what it is.
The people managing the big game companies, by and large, are just the same as with any other venture like Hollywood movies, music, fiction novels and reality TV and all the rest of it, “content” that is being consumed so fast everywhere. Where does it come from? There must be a steady stream of it. If the emphasis and priority was on quality, games could never come out that fast, and the same is said for popular music of all kinds, cat or fail videos, gossip and sexualized images in a sidebar of shame on traditional media websites, and anything that draws such a lot of attention regularly. They do not need quality. Think on whenever you see examples of what could be something quickly thrown through a “creative” process. The inspiration is part of getting it done so fast. But modern video games hold no weight against books written in the same amount of total time invested, and you can see where goes when scaled to a global industry level. The gaming community has a short memory, like society does for general problems, so bad practices are quickly forgiven, mostly because of issues like the fact that they don’t have the know-how or tools to create stuff for themselves, or to even have genuinely happy or meaningful experiences with other human beings. If wasn’t the case, and games weren’t an escape, then teenagers and young adults would not be sitting in their apartments alone all day playing games in places like Korea. So: to reiterate in paragraph: is not about quality, and quite the inverse. Therefore, to invert for yourself and do much better, you have to find a method that is different somehow.
If you want to get a lot of experience, you will have to go some of it alone, to be doing it and exploring the territory, of things like expectations and what your time does in the global economy, and to get to grips of course with life choices you will have to make- again, is all skimmed over by the typical surface assessment done on [MMORPG dream] question and the people offering that would call post overly complex or unnecessary. The intelligent person will question why thinking is seen as a bad thing. How can more difficult, rational, smart thinking ever be bad? But nobody has given these lessons, so like how I began, let’s be straight and upfront about what the reality is, because there’s plenty of people ready to confuse the discussion at the first opportunity, whether they mean to or not.
You need experience to know what you are doing. Managing a team cannot come before knowing what the team is doing, the nature of commitments, the nature of stress and multitasking and so on. The people at the very top of the big companies have no idea about stuff, definitely not at the detail where they can apply it to all the many people who work under them. You can go a certain length of course having someone else make a network library or even smarter, grab an opensource one- but like failed advert campaigns and gimmicks and products, the failures you will have always have a coherent chain of causes, so you can have complete gaps of knowledge of what others are doing, and can quickly get out of hand through assumptions you’d just made about another person, and although not everyone is untrustworthy, confusion does happen, again whether intentional or not, and the intention is hardly the problem;- if you just made a promise to 8000 gamers you can deliver a new next month, then find an inconsistency in what you thought was going on, you’re going to have a ton more work, or maybe you’ll apologize which is always bad for trust. And think of the stress and the personal psychological/mental battle . When the project is all you do, it can and probably will seem much more difficult than it really is. Smart people don’t get stuck in negative thought patterns, but again many people have come into the life and full adulthood without being told things like !
And since everyone else is at odds with you for the various reasons, whether copyright or fame or because they really just can’t imagine a brighter world where people decide on their own to change for each other and be helpful wherever they can (traditionalism; preserving the status quo; conservatism), you are going to have a hard time even getting sound advice because it eventually gets so frustrating that other people can’t see clearly what they’re doing to themselves and what they’re a part of, with their ideology and dogma, that I even smell from forum very strongly. And yet, there is no conversation about all of ! It is truly amazing to witness all of .
People will give advice that they think fits at the outermost level to your current situation. But the truth and the reality is that there is no explanation, no answer, for what you should do right now or the limits of that. And it couldn’t be the other way around.
Specifically, if you are already going to jump into c++ development, then you will need to come to understand the fundamentals of computing. You can learn any language to start with, and C# might be much better for game development. There’s also Java, Haxe and others. Look at game libraries and what other people start with. You need to move onto things like pointers, arrays, and other difficult concepts for beginners. Once you know the basic knowledge there for programming, it helps to have looked and played with lots of code libraries and examples. You don’t have to be extremely intelligent about it, or know much math at all, or have money. What you need most of all is dedication, patience, the hunger for knowledge, inner drive, passion,—or these things all start to roll into the same thing, and it goes by many names. But get some real experience behind you, maybe look at Irrlicht and try to build it from source, get familiar with Visual Studio, that kind of thing. Work out things by googling everything you can’t quickly figure out, because it’s faster. Videos are very slow for learning, so one extremely intelligent technique is to read something first about the program/thing you are learning and then later go to try the basics out, could be Maya//Blender or anything really. Then there are programs for terrain scupting now, like Scape, which is the fastest by far that I’ve found. For me, getting something new on the screen was always my favourite thing with game programming, and it really motivated and pleased me to see new stuff on the screen, and working. I learned XNA, and is all about 8 years ago now, I learned C#, HLSL, and the C#/C++ interop which lets you call c++ code from c# and vice versa. There’s lots of XNA example code, but you need the specific version and there are several. So, Unity is probably better. The thing you want to stay away from is things like the popular University courses, physically and online, which pretend to be giving you knowledge that they somehow are the experts of, yet is so slow to be given. There’s thousands of people coming out of these courses with no job, and it’s been going on for years, it’s a huge joke really. So, stay away from the easy stuff—is what programmers sometimes do. But hackers and hardcore programmers aren’t made; they rather have a particular personality type from the beginning. So, do not expect to compete with these people, because unless that’s all you want to do, you are going to be more interested with your time in other things.
"If I had 100,000$ to spend over the course of 2 years into project who would I hire? A programmer? "
It might work to save up money and spend some TIME off of work or other major commitments, and focus on learning. But learning is faster when you spread it out over time, and don’t expect to learn faster than people who use X Program every night if you are squeezing more time in. You get fed up and tired (unless you’re experienced and so on) eventually, or you burn out which is a well-known problem in the games industry. Remember L.A. Noir? Their studio burned through new employees for 7 years straight in the making of that game. One of the worst examples, sure, but it goes to show the utter slavery-like conditions people put up with, and again, at minimal criticism or self-awareness from the wider developer culture. was one of the things that I realized pretty early on about the wider software industry. Do you want to set yourself up for a life of crushing boredom, that is also so complex and tasking on your mind? Many people give up or lapse into destructive or cynical behaviours and worldviews, because there has to be some place to move on from not handling that you didn’t handle the stress, complexity, personal strength or whatever it was. And there is nothing wrong with giving up on a project if that’s the best and only choice for the long term benefit generally; indeed you only have a certain amount of time and cannot avoid mistakes completely.
If I had some money for a game project I would put it into game assets, since everything else I can get with my own time— the intelligence of choice is that experienced TurboSquid(.com) modellers who have refined their work for years are living on the same money as everyone else, so they are really cheap if I find good value models! Similarly, I might outsource development work to India or somewhere poorer than my country because my money from a rich country appears to be worth more there. These two are fundamental aspects of how I have thought about spending money the smartest way. Time is what I spent to get that knowledge. So many people writing advice think that the answers can only be within the guidelines I hinted at above, where no real hard difficult thinking is even expected. There is a low expectation, as I already explained. Staying away from the mediocre- is something to feel good about!
I also took some money out to buy food I don’t have to cook lately. I though about hiring someone to do specialized work that I REALLY can’t get open source code for and all the rest of it. 3dsMax 2010 is FREE from the official website, so why would I bother with a shinier new version? These are the traps set for everyone else. You have to view life way if you want to fully take advantage of the situation- cannot be denied.
I would hire whoever is smartest for the task, like a legal advisor for example, if I was seriously publishing a game- but only at the right time. (Artists are many and flexible- a programming team is more tightly connected on a long-term project. Simply, programmers are more important, and is reflected in there being multiples of re-uses of programming knowledge over art). Having money doesn’t mean you need to spend it, and is as important a consideration as any expenditure itself. Because the whole point of money, to begin with, is to keep most of it and to have the most of it- money is for labour in financial economy and so it’s sometimes a lot more valuable than what you might be willing to trade it for. An example is not buying ready-made models and animations, since there is MakeHuman and similar cheap solutions for GENERATING characters rather than buying each one separately. Again- pay attention to the fundamental patterns which rule these aspects of life, the world and indeed existence. The thinking is the important part to get down. Any fool can plant down some money. But it still takes a genius to understand something, no matter what that something may be, and there is no shortcut or substitute for , and so it is that a lot of the thinking that gets done is internal and specific to us introverts. The other vast majority of the world may never know how intelligent the world could have been, tragically, but that is going off-topic. However everything is related and interconnected.
You can’t put a good programmer to good use just starting out. Learn first, and buy expensive software/etc. last also. It’s not magic, and it’s not better than your best hard work. Experience will always mean more than tips, no matter how good they are. There are no shortcuts to knowledge and experience. It is impossible. Yet adverts will lie right in your face every day only because they cannot say these claims directly in words! What is consistent? What is smarter? That is what you should be asking yourself about every choice you make, unless of course you want to waste your time. If you can waste time, then of course choices won’t matter, and of course you can just go along and follow any old advice or service of our society, because the goal is not quality or getting the best from life.
Even if you had something like $15m, which companies do, and Valve I remember spent $25m in marketing L4D2, you can order some people around in an office environment and they will create a bland game like APB ($15m initial investment if I remember right). An incredible example of failure, but then, lots of money is wasted like and at much faster rates because of other reasons far too deep to go into . Yeah, you can invest in something like that, but even then it only lasts about a year with the full team of people who eat expensive restaurant meals and get their garbage collected very frequently and all the rest of it. is what you’re paying for;- the expense of modern life; rather than just the time of these people: you are paying for an economic weight, which has a relation to the way in which the world is run. It’s important to realize that is not just time, but a particular lifestyle or “implementation” if you will of how time is spent by those employees. The $15m is quickly wasted in comparison to hiring people only when they’re needed, but hey, I’m not about to suggest a solution to capitalism and I definitely wouldn’t indicate that. But know what your money is actually doing, if you want to use it well. And of course you do.
***"Actually my plan was to host a blog, since I do have a channel with a few million viewers, I would be creating a blog on the whole process, and over years I am sure I can build a fanbase and eventually open a kickstarter. That was kind of my plan.
is all the same story and universe that I’ve thought up. I think it would make a great MMO. But I understand that making short episode might be an easier learning experience and investment. Therefore what if I create a show, and then pitch that show as a game to get funding? "***
Look at Wolfire Games’ blog and do a lot of searching for stuff like that, indie games, how to publish games, all those sorts of issues in investment bracket. Indie game the movie, Idle Thumbs podcast- it’s a lot to manage. And then go and find all the failed MMOs with their anime forums, the noob projects like mine and my team from years ago, buried amongst the millions. Hope is cheap and so is a mistake. I am writing from the point of view of being incredibly serious about all of and wanting to make quality games even though people happily buy complete intellectual garbage with zero exceptions today, as I see it. And with little to no money, at that. Partly for myself, it was, wonder of making something truly better than all the rest that’s out there. But if you’re then acting on only a vague feeling with a lot of money, well then, you’re digging your own grave already, so to speak. There’s lots of failed examples on Kickstarter, and various thousands of online spaces, not just limited to creative or graphics stuff either but attempts to connect and build with other human beings. Far too many to name. They all share ambition incorrectly applied onto the real world and its challenges. If you understand life, then you respond to it rather than staying in the darkabout everything.
