At 4/1/12 04:27 PM, Wolfos wrote: What you can create in 2 hours, if you're awesome:
http://wolfos.org/resources/flash/hyperspace/Hyperspace.html

Nebula background not made by me, but rights reserved.

Need some feedback, I'm planning to make it into one of these upgrade games.

Make the laser more noticeable. It's hard to trace its path to know if another shot is needed.

Move the ship a tad faster, but that's just personal preference.

The explosion physics are a bit off. Some asteroids will get flung really fast by explosions that aren't very nearby, while asteroids close to the explosion will get slowed down and spin rather than anything dramatic like the former.

Really cool for 2 hrs though!

At 3/31/12 11:21 AM, raidthewood wrote: Seems as though adobe is going to try and squeeze every last penny out of flash. Its sad really, they've doomed flash to a certain death..

Maybe its a good thing... if Flash dies.. it gets to live out its destiny of becoming retro. Its been used enough to make retro games, retro sprite movies.. its personified by simple graphics, simple but fun ideas... maybe it's time for Flash to let the dust fall on itself.

No doubt it'll boom again; but in a more niche way, kinda like how GIF's have.

So, Ludum Dare everyone, who's in?

Yesterday I hooked up my MIDI keyboard to my computer and started playing around with some Processing MIDI libraries. This is the result after playing "Fur Elise".

What cool things are the rest of you working on?

Smoke more chill out.

At 4/6/12 02:46 AM, 4urentertainment wrote: So, Ludum Dare everyone, who's in?

I'm in. I will be doing the jam with a friend this time.

Holy crap! This place still exists?

At 4/10/12 02:17 PM, PSvils wrote: Time to keep exploring this bad-assery that native apps are!

Yeah, haXe is beautiful, I just compiled my first iPhone app with it a few days ago, and it actually took a lot more time getting Xcode to compile an .ipa without a certificate than it took to learn haXe and make the sample project.

Also, you know how in most flash games, all path finding AI is either crappy, or if it works, it's pretty obvious it's following nodes? Well, I just wrote up this smoother that takes a path like one that would be produced by A* and produces a new, smoother path. Deviation from original path and smoothness can all be controlled by a parameter.

http://4urentertainment.org/storage/Smoothing.swf

Click on nodes to create path. Space to start.

Pretty cool

At 4/11/12 02:41 PM, 4urentertainment wrote: Also, you know how in most flash games, all path finding AI is either crappy, or if it works, it's pretty obvious it's following nodes? Well, I just wrote up this smoother that takes a path like one that would be produced by A* and produces a new, smoother path. Deviation from original path and smoothness can all be controlled by a parameter.

http://4urentertainment.org/storage/Smoothing.swf

Click on nodes to create path. Space to start.

As long as I make tile-based games, I'm cool with A* :)

Still pretty cool, though. Can you decrease the deviation or add a debug for it? Where it's at now, it seems like it's just tweening to the final position with a slight curve to where the other points are. At the moment, it could walk through buildings and stuff that the nodes are there to avoid.

At 4/11/12 04:06 PM, PSvils wrote: P.

I attached a picture below to show how it's supposed to work.

It doesn't actually create any new nodes, just moves the current ones.

MSGhero, I updated the demo with a slider to control the smoothness and deviation, so you can lay out a path and play around with the slider and see the path changing.

Here's the demo again: http://www.4urentertainment.org/storage/Smoothing.swf

This was actually part of a class at Udacity where if you have a robotic car that you're laying out a path for, and your A* has gotten the path, but the path is pretty rigid, as in the picture, it goes right, then suddenly down, then left etc.. And a car obviously can't rotate immediately like that.

So the path smoother makes it so that these turns are smoother by minimizing the distance between nodes. So technically, the higher the smoothing parameter, the more the path will be direct and ignore the twists and turns of the original path. But of course you don't want that so you set it to something low.

I really think it could work pretty good. I mean how awesome would it be for an enemy to not go up the wall, turn to pass it, then turn around to go to the player, and instead smoothly go around this wall?

Also:

At 4/11/12 04:06 PM, PSvils wrote: Got my Android compiling today. BTW, could I perhaps use you to compile iPhone apps? (Whenever that will happen...). Not having Mac sucks for that shit :)

Sure! I'd be happy to help.

@4ur: That pic explains it a lot more, thanks.

@P: If the game is tile-based, no one cares so much if the player hits a hard turn, while that would look glitchy in a free-roam game.

If any of you have played Final Fantasy Tactics or even Fire Emblem, I'm making that. I'll put up a demo soon, got the whole turn-based thing down, movement and jump height restrictions, and attacking is in the works. I'm using a finite state machine, and it's saving so many switch statement headaches :D

At 4/12/12 12:32 AM, 4urentertainment wrote: It doesn't actually create any new nodes, just moves the current ones.

It looks great, and seems to work, but surely, if you're moving the nodes, you're undermining the purpose of them. For instance, if you cut a corner created by A*, wouldn't you be creating the risk that you'll bump into the wall that A* was avoiding?

Since you've got an adjustable parameter for the system, perhaps you could make it so that it starts with the parameter = 0 and increases it in a while loop until the path hits one of the objects that A* was avoiding. Then you could find the perfect parameter to create the smoothest possible path without hitting any objects. Or to get even smoother, split the path into smaller sections and make it so that each section can have a different value for the parameter.

Alternatively, you could modify A* so that if a node is next to a wall, it records it as a 'special' node. Then in your code, it could make sure it only moves the nodes that aren't 'special'. This still runs the risk that if you move a node too much it could move next to a wall without being recorded as a 'special'. Perhaps you'd have to make it so that the maximum distance a node can be moved is the distance between two nodes.

Hey guys. Speaking of Ludum Dare coming up, I recently finish a remake of my game from the previous Ludum Dare. I could really use some feedback. Would anyone feel up to giving it a run through and giving me their thoughts or bug findings? It's a short game only about 3-5 minutes.

At 4/13/12 11:50 AM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Hey guys. Speaking of Ludum Dare coming up, I recently finish a remake of my game from the previous Ludum Dare. I could really use some feedback. Would anyone feel up to giving it a run through and giving me their thoughts or bug findings? It's a short game only about 3-5 minutes.

I'll give it a shot.

At 4/12/12 12:32 AM, 4urentertainment wrote: This was actually part of a class at Udacity where if you have a robotic car that you're laying out a path for, and your A* has gotten the path, but the path is pretty rigid, as in the picture, it goes right, then suddenly down, then left etc.. And a car obviously can't rotate immediately like that.

I'm taking that class for this next session of Udacity; I ended up enrolling in the search engine class because I thought it sounded cool, but I ended up ditching the whole thing after the second week because when they said they didn't expect any previous experience, apparently they really meant it.

At 4/13/12 11:50 AM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Hey guys. Speaking of Ludum Dare coming up, I recently finish a remake of my game from the previous Ludum Dare. I could really use some feedback. Would anyone feel up to giving it a run through and giving me their thoughts or bug findings? It's a short game only about 3-5 minutes.

Sure.

At 4/13/12 02:10 PM, Archawn wrote: I'm taking that class for this next session of Udacity; I ended up enrolling in the search engine class because I thought it sounded cool, but I ended up ditching the whole thing after the second week because when they said they didn't expect any previous experience, apparently they really meant it.

A friend of mine was in the same boat actually. He got frustrated at the point where they were explaining what a variable was over a couple of a videos or something like that.

I hear the final exam was actually challenging though. Unlike the robotics class which had really challenging material and homeworks but the exam was retardedly simple except for the final programming question. They also have a contest for the search engine to see who can make what with what they learned.

Anyway, back to Ludum Dare:

I'm really, really excited about this. It's like the glorious awesomeness of NG game jams...but like 1000x bigger. Last time they had like 800 games submitted or something like that, and that's not counting people that entered but didn't manage to finish a game, and more than one developer working on the same game, and that's like, more than a thousand people entering.

I mean really, game jams have always really, really fascinated me. Just knowing that over the course of 72 hours thousands of people from all over the world, of all kinds of talents are toiling away, abandoning everything else in their lives to focus on one thing, creating a world. Everyone would be creating a world in only 3 days in which collectively millions of players will be immersed in and will experience globally afterwards. It's artistic and it's beautiful.

Only thing missing is random teams which made the NG game jams an incredibly memorable experience. Perhaps we could make an unofficial "random team maker" to coincide with Ludum Dare eventually, or maybe just make more NG jams.

At 4/14/12 04:17 AM, 4urentertainment wrote:

At 4/13/12 02:10 PM, Archawn wrote: I'm taking that class for this next session of Udacity; I ended up enrolling in the search engine class because I thought it sounded cool, but I ended up ditching the whole thing after the second week because when they said they didn't expect any previous experience, apparently they really meant it.

A friend of mine was in the same boat actually. He got frustrated at the point where they were explaining what a variable was over a couple of a videos or something like that.

I hear the final exam was actually challenging though. Unlike the robotics class which had really challenging material and homeworks but the exam was retardedly simple except for the final programming question. They also have a contest for the search engine to see who can make what with what they learned.

God damn. I've noticed a lot of you talking about robotics, and I feel belittled by the amount of knowledge you all seem to have. I'm currently at college in the UK and I'm doing a "Games Development" course (bad move, I know, luckily I got into one of the top Universities for CS so all is well), and I'm doing a robotics module at the moment. It's really basic stuff, we've spent the last 4 weeks playing around with Lego Mindstorm. Literally, playing.

We're split into 3 teams and we have to built 3 different robots to achieve 3 different tasks: line following, maze solving and a shooter robot. For 4 weeks work I feel as though we've gotten nowhere and our lecturers say "the hardest part is building the robot". What makes it much worse is the fact our outdated systems run XP, and the Lego Mindstorm software that allows for C# development will only run on Windows 7 so I'm stuck using a drag and drop interface to create some shitty and buggy robots.

Robotics interests me more than a lot of the modules we've done so far, but seriously it's just so tedious waiting for them to set a date for us to do the tasks, and in the mean time we're playing with Lego and using software designed for people with little to no programming knowledge.

Hey guys thanks for sending me feedback on my thing. You made some really good points. I'm going to see how much of it I can take into account and integrate into the game.

If you're going for a games development course in the UK, at least check they are Skillset approved

This is apparently an industry recognized quality tick for these types of courses. Doesn't necessarily mean the 12 courses in this list are actually any good, but I guess it does mean the legions of courses that are not on this list are utter junk :p

I went to Abertay in Scotland for Computer games technology, I thought it was a bit meh at the time but in the end it got me a job so I can't really complain! There's been too many times when i've now thought "shit wish i paid attention in that module, would come in handy right about now" So they where teaching the right stuff! If you have prior experience with programming I believe you can skip the first year.

Where I'm at now has a bunch of cool looking CS classes like AI and machine learning and stuff, but they're all 6000+ level (and big numbers scare me :( ). CS isn't my current major either, so I'd be here a while as well trying to fit both in. I'm almost done with stupid MATLAB, then I'll try to get Java next** semester, then whatever after that. I also wish they had a class for people who know what they're doing already, or at least just a cursory overview of the basics (less than 2 weeks, not 3 months...). I'm not even sure if minoring in CS will even lead me to those 6000+ classes, but we'll see...

**My roommate just farted, and it smells bad...

At 4/14/12 05:28 AM, PSvils wrote:

At 4/14/12 04:34 AM, Sam wrote: I'm doing a "Games Development" course (bad move, I know, luckily I got into one of the top Universities for CS so all is well)

As soon as I saw Games Development as a course in university, I couldn't it seriously.

I don't really enjoy it at college and I don't think I could do it at university, personally.

At 4/16/12 04:37 PM, SantoNinoDeCebu wrote: If you're going for a games development course in the UK, at least check they are Skillset approved

I felt like I didn't want to limit myself to just games development in University, so I've taken a computer science course.

This is apparently an industry recognized quality tick for these types of courses. Doesn't necessarily mean the 12 courses in this list are actually any good, but I guess it does mean the legions of courses that are not on this list are utter junk :p

I went to Abertay in Scotland for Computer games technology, I thought it was a bit meh at the time but in the end it got me a job so I can't really complain! There's been too many times when i've now thought "shit wish i paid attention in that module, would come in handy right about now" So they where teaching the right stuff! If you have prior experience with programming I believe you can skip the first year.

I did apply for a games development course and the University wasn't on there, at least yours is, though! Even if I didn't get into any of my other choices I don't think I'd have gone there, it looked really bad. I suppose if games development is something you want to go into then there's nothing wrong with following that route - I just feel like if I do I'll be confined to games and won't be able to broaden my horizons.

At 4/16/12 08:18 PM, MSGhero wrote: Where I'm at now has a bunch of cool looking CS classes like AI and machine learning and stuff, but they're all 6000+ level (and big numbers scare me :( ). CS isn't my current major either, so I'd be here a while as well trying to fit both in. I'm almost done with stupid MATLAB, then I'll try to get Java next** semester, then whatever after that.

Computer Science and AI looks really interesting,

I also wish they had a class for people who know what they're doing already

Yeah, me too. I went to the open days and the first years all seem like a breeze. They all seem to teach Java as well, so it'd be good to get learning now, although as anyone knows, once you've got a couple of languages under your belt it's never difficult to pick up more.

At 4/17/12 05:07 AM, Sam wrote:

At 4/14/12 05:28 AM, PSvils wrote:

At 4/14/12 04:34 AM, Sam wrote: I'm doing a "Games Development" course (bad move, I know, luckily I got into one of the top Universities for CS so all is well)

As soon as I saw Games Development as a course in university, I couldn't it seriously.

I don't really enjoy it at college and I don't think I could do it at university, personally.

At 4/16/12 04:37 PM, SantoNinoDeCebu wrote: If you're going for a games development course in the UK, at least check they are Skillset approved

I felt like I didn't want to limit myself to just games development in University, so I've taken a computer science course.


I did apply for a games development course and the University wasn't on there, at least yours is, though! Even if I didn't get into any of my other choices I don't think I'd have gone there, it looked really bad. I suppose if games development is something you want to go into then there's nothing wrong with following that route - I just feel like if I do I'll be confined to games and won't be able to broaden my horizons.

Yeah thats a better move in my opinion too. At the end of a day as a prgorammer you'll expected to be flexible and able to pick things up, so doing a Comp Sci degree and simply doing games projects in your free time if you're interested will probably keep you a bit more flexible.

I just posted that info for anyone who may be thinking of doing a games development course, there are a lot of QA in my company who did a games development to become programmers course and only realised too late that they weren't being taught the correct skills (or any at all!) to be at industry standard when they graduated.

They might seem like the right way to go to get into games.. but when some of the courses use game maker for a module, you gotta wonder...

I agree. Forget any course that claims to teach you how to make games. You can learn all that yourself. If you're interested in programming and want to maximize your chances of building games for a big company find a job in it then go for computer science, and build successful games on the side. In fact, I would say that building a successful game on yourself would be way more impressive to any game industry employer than a college degree.

Sorry I sounded autistic in that post. It's early.

At 4/17/12 06:50 AM, SantoNinoDeCebu wrote: I just posted that info for anyone who may be thinking of doing a games development course, there are a lot of QA in my company who did a games development to become programmers course and only realised too late that they weren't being taught the correct skills (or any at all!) to be at industry standard when they graduated.

They might seem like the right way to go to get into games.. but when some of the courses use game maker for a module, you gotta wonder...

Must really hit someone hard that they've potentially wasted a lot of there time as well as a lot of money not being taught skills that'll help that in the workplace.

If ANY university even thinks about having a module based around Game Maker, they need to close down the course.

At 4/17/12 11:31 AM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: I agree. Forget any course that claims to teach you how to make games. You can learn all that yourself. If you're interested in programming and want to maximize your chances of building games for a big company find a job in it then go for computer science, and build successful games on the side. In fact, I would say that building a successful game on yourself would be way more impressive to any game industry employer than a college degree.

Pretty much what I'm planning to do, if I'm honest. I enjoy building games as a hobby as it's one of the main reasons I originally got into programming but it's not the reason I want to continue. And yeah, being able to build up a game that's successful would be really impressive to someone in the industry, experience shines a lot brighter than grades - I'd expect.

The problem is that a study and universities are becoming more and more commercial. There are more studies to choose from and for a study 'to sell out' it is good if it gets a lot of participants regardless of whether the market is interested in new people with that education. This is especially of larger concern in America since studying there is more expensive fro the student (in Holland for example the government pays most of the costs).
For example in Holland there are a lot of studies where you learn to 'work with animals', people find it cool/cute to do and pick one of those studies. But after that they can't find any work because there is no interest in people with that education.

Same thing goes for games. There are a lot of people who like games and want to make them ever since they were a little kid (me included). Educations tap into that by offering a wide collection of 'game developer ' educations. Reality is that in the real world only highly specialized people are being hired (like a high end programmer). You cant come there having messed a bit with gamemaker / flash. Second option is to begin something on your own but without funding (and you wont get it considering the economy and the fact you and your business have no name) things get tough.

Truth is that in the game development world things are scaled so big that you need tens (hundreds?) of different professions to make a big game. And there are so many crappy game developer educations that they have a bad name in general.

A slightly outdated but still true article on the matter:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/08/why-your-gaming-d egree-may-be-a-waste-of-time.ars

At 4/17/12 12:28 PM, Sam wrote: If ANY university even thinks about having a module based around Game Maker, they need to close down the course.

I disagree. My course had a Games Maker module in the first year and (as much I despise Game Maker significantly more now that I've had to use it) there are a lot of useful things taught in that module. The module was more focused on game design, working in a team, creating/conforming to coding standards, dealing with a publisher (if the module was anything to go by, this is a terrifying thing), and many other ideas. As well as that, most first year students aren't ready to program the kind of game required for the module, at least not in the time that is available.
Not a single aspect of Game Maker was taught because, although that was the primary tool used in that module, it wasn't the focus.

11.2 is already out, I have it on my computer. It's really awesome to have the right click being functional.