franknine

4 years agodiscuss

Another great devlog thread on TIGSOURCE is Leilani's Island by Craig Forrester, it's a treasure trove of 2D platformer development:

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=46289.0

franknine

4 years agodiscuss

It's unlikely for a small indie to roll a mobile game engine But if you are talking about companies with millions of dollars of income from gacha games like Hearthstone, most of them have already attempted to roll their own or even used in production already. (NeoX from NetEase, Cyllista from Cygames and Supercell’s unnamed engine…) For mobile game engines, they are not striving for crazy visual fidelity since mobile hardware is really limiting. Those who stick with Unity now because it’s cheaper, but if Unity tries to charge way more, they will definitely spend that markup to push their own tech onto production instead of surrendering money to Unity.

Unreal has technology moats like Lumen and Nanite to justify the royalty while Unity doesn't.

franknine

4 years agodiscuss

People Make Games made a video about this Infiniminer/Minecraft story and they interviewed Zach Barth. When Microsoft was reviewing the 2.5B Minecraft deal, Zach was working for Microsoft and was on those meetings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__Nq2vNcpIo

franknine

4 years agodiscuss

And implementing Sign in with Apple in Unity is one of the worst experience in my career that I dedicated a blog post talking about:

  - Native Sign in with Apple button not working in Unity
  - Official Sign in with Apple plugin provided by Unity also not working
  - Hooked up API with help from GitHub and created Sign in with Apple button by myself ended up getting `4.0 Design` rejection without explanation
  - Trying crazily to contact Apple reviewer for weeks only to find out you have to use system font on that button
  - Unity cannot support new Thai system font after iOS 13 and they mark it won’t fix
  - Ended up building a native sample app and screenshot Sign in with Apple button from it in 12 different languages into PNGs and ask the my designer co-worker to remove background for me to import them into Unity
  - After all these the update is finally accepted by App Store
  - Casually downloaded games by other companies a week later, saw a totally malformed Sign in with Apple button not being nitpicked by reviewer and just went live like that

franknine

4 years agodiscuss

Sometimes they just force you to implement feature for them, like “Sign in with Apple”

> We’ve updated the App Store Review Guidelines to provide criteria for when apps are required to use Sign in with Apple. Starting today, new apps submitted to the App Store must follow these guidelines. Existing apps and app updates must follow them by April 2020. We’ve also provided new guidelines for using Sign in with Apple on the web and other platforms.

> 4.8 Sign in with Apple Apps that use a third-party or social login service (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login) to set up or authenticate the user’s primary account with the app must also offer Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option.

franknine

4 years agodiscuss

Working on games with Unity for nearly a decade, the standard approach is to defer upgrading Unity as long as possible. Generally we stay on the old LTS (Long-term support) version until it’s no longer supported. Latest version and new LTS are very unstable with game crashing bugs on certain platforms that I had to spend weeks to track down and spend weeks to convince Unity QA there is actually a problem then wait for months to get it fixed. It’s better to just stay away from the latest and greatest, having other people do the demining.

franknine

4 years agodiscuss

There's another episode from Gaming Historian specifically for Tengen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA_d9q6ySs It talks about how Atari abuses the copyright system to gain access to Nintendo’s protection system source code.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

You are forced to use IL2CPP on mobile since the Google/Apple mandated ARM64 build is not available through Mono. (Mono itself does support ARM64, just Unity doesn't bother to port it) I recently had a bug which erroneously stripped functions in generated IL2CPP code, and I had to trace generated IL2CPP line by line, it’s so much fun.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

This is worse than I could possibly imagine. Did your studio at least get credited for the work on timeline tools?

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

The paid support is not cheap and mostly useless, at least in Asia region. We still need to go through normal bug report system, create reproduction steps for them, and get denied for back-porting bug fixes every single time. The only thing changed is that there's a "bug fix progress update" to make you feel a little bit better. We terminated the support right after the term expired.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

Part of it is also due to Unity3D sticked with the ancient stop-the-world mono GC for a very long time and discuraging developers from doing allocation in official talks.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

I think it's just a matter of different industries having different situations.In game industry performance is a real business advantage thus it’s a goal. On consoles, every game developer works on the same machine, the one who can get the most computation out of the box can cram more visual effects or more complex AI behaviour into the game and win the race. (I know not all developers are into this photorealistic madness, but some big studios are still fighting over it) Even if you are working on mobile games, better performance means less battery drain (longer player engagement), less overheating, and being able to deploy onto older or weaker devices. (The performance scaling characteristic of the new Doom is so good that it can run on Switch) Again, these are real business values.

On the other hand, premium games generally generate little to none revenue after release. The gameplay and hardware would likely be different for the next title. For instance the rendering architecture changed from forward, deferred, to cluster in response to new hardware capabilities. Which means the maintainability and reusability of the game codebase is less important compared to other software projects. Also there is a tendency that game programmers receive less compensation compare to other industries (Higher supply of junior devs), so the calculation of man * hours would be different as well.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

Quoted from Bartosz Milewski's 'Category Theory for Programmers chapter 20:

Let me set the record straight: The whole mysticism around the monad is the result of a misunderstanding. The monad is a very simple concept. It’s the diversity of applications of the monad that causes the confusion. As part of research for this post I looked up duct tape (a.k.a., duck tape) and its applications. Here’s a little sample of things that you can do with it:

- sealing ducts

- fixing CO2 scrubbers on board Apollo 13

- wart treatment

- fixing Apple’s iPhone 4 dropped call issue

- making a prom dress

- building a suspension bridge

Now imagine that you didn’t know what duct tape was and you were trying to figure it out based on this list. Good luck! So I’d like to add one more item to the collection of “the monad is like…” clichés: The monad is like duct tape. Its applications are widely diverse, but its principle is very simple: it glues things together. More precisely, it composes things.

===

Also would like to recommand: Functors and Monads For People Who Have Read Too Many "Tutorials" http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2958

I got a feeling that Monad has no good metaphor to real life objects. Trying to make up an analogy just makes things worse.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

https://twitter.com/anticheatpd/status/1412024189561851904?s...

There are cheats doing CV on video stream and they work on consoles. I guess they would also work on cloud gaming services.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

Reminds me of the great video from Nick Robinson talking about Ubisoft pulled Driver: San Francisco from all digital storefronts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkxzQDo0ng

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

Semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan are mostly around the Hsinchu area. They paid a premium to truck water from other areas and the government limited agricultural activities in Hsinchu as well. They almost got affected, but then there was a heavy rain in late May and the water rationing was lifted for Hsinchu.

Currently COVID poses a larger threat to semiconductor production as multiple COVID clusters are detected in packaging/testing plants.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

I think in the GTAV case, they kind of dropped the ball by not doing profiling when players complained. The exact same thing happened to our game as well, it was also a Json deserializing library that caused the problem. At the first release, the player’s save files were small, so we didn’t notice the library was written poorly. After several expansions, the save data grew, some players contacted support complaining about start up loading time. We did a profile, found the culprit, migrated data to Bson format, done.

Back to the question. If there is a limited amount of time before release and I have to choose between fixing load time and fixing framerate. It’s definitely going to be framerate, some console platforms will reject your title if you frame drop multiple times within certain duration. Frame drop is also a deal breaker for most players especially for VR games. Stuttering can cause serious motion sickness in VR and make people throw up.

Overall I think the constraints of game projects are different to other domains like web and business. So we game developers tend to think differently. Like bugs are bad, but as long as not game breaking/save corrupting or happening way too often, players are kind of ok with that. People even found bugs in game entertaining and compiled a weekly reel of bugs https://kotaku.com/c/video/highlight-reel. On the other hand, performance is critical to us, if a game plays sluggish then no one can enjoy it. Compared to the web where users have more tolerance about rending speed.

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

There is a game about turning the universe into paper clips: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

It has one of the most beautiful endings in my opinion

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

He kept a very detailed devblog on TIGSource, documenting all the aspects of making the game including sound, modeling and shader programming. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?action=profile;u=3073...

Also there is an interview from Ars Technica talking about his story from Naughty Dog to Indie and why he like to work as one man team. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/from-uncharted-to-obr...

franknine

5 years agodiscuss

There are a lot of pro-CCP and pro-reunification organizations in Taiwan. Such as Patriot Alliance Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Alliance_Association and Chinese Unification Promotion Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Unification_Promotion_.... Both of them have headquarters in capital Taipei. They often hold rallies around Ximen area.

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