Casey Hardman

(I feel great when I kept that one potion of resist frost in skyrim and suddenly encountered five frost .. ghosts (name escapes me))

I think they're called Ice Wraiths...if you mean the little icy things that are really hard to see against the white background of snow lol

But potions in Skyrim aren't very heavy...they're only like .2 or .5 weight, and you start with around 300 carrying capacity and get something like 10 more when you upgrade Stamina (approximate values).  The real problem that I see is the issue of lugging around specific armor, because it's heavier.

 

 

In Fallout 3 for PC, I carried different kinds of weapons around with me for different situations, but a big problem I had was actually switching to use those weapons.  It took like 10 seconds to switch to a different weapon, because you had to lift up your hand, look at your little watch (and freeze time in doing so), navigate to Weapons, and then scroll through your weapons (I had like 20 of them...) until you find the one you want.  It's kind of like that in Skyrim too.

 

My point is, if you're going to let your player bring around equipment that is situation-specific, consider offering some kind of quick method for switching to different sets of equipment.  I especially liked the way Guild Wars did it: you have F1, F2, F3, and F4 as hotkeys to switch to different weapons/offhands.  That way, players could put their generic sword and shield in F1 and their +25 energy staff in F2, and maybe add a generic sword with a shield that's especially good against Earth damage, or something.

 

 

Asides from these nagging issues, I actually would prefer it if I could carry as much as I wanted in RPGs.  It'd be a good break from having to worry about everything I pick up, and as long as there's a way to filter the items (e.g. look only at weapons/armor/potions) then I wouldn't mind having a lot of stuff to look through.

I never really cared for the "realism" that limited inventory brought into games.  It was usually just a nuisance.  I always felt like I could play a lot better if I just had enough space to carry around my situation-specific equipment, and proper methods of switching between my equipment.

Guys, I have a unique opinion to share about this topic.

How many lines of code you write isn't a good way to measure your coding ability!

 

...did someone already say that?

Not entirely relevant, but I'll post it here just in case the parties in question happen to stumble on by.

 

A few weeks back I downloaded Unity to see what people were talking about. I was summarily unimpressed by the website, which looked like an advertisement rather than a distribution point for an IDE.

 

I ran the installer and it told me I had to register in order to use it, so I clicked cancel and deleted it.

 

~fin~

Your loss...?

 

Seriously, what's so bad about having to register?

I have similar problems, and I think it's good to make sure you don't get to yourself too much.  It's like others say: you just have to do it, and push away certain feelings that you're doing it wrong, you don't know what you're doing, you'll never make it, etc.

 

I also won NaNoWriMo like Dinner mentioned (and I have to brag about it!), and it felt good (at times; sometimes it was exhausting, but worth it) to just push away "the censor" that tries to get you to do everything perfectly on the first try.  If you succumb to "the censor" then you'll probably end up crippling your progress.  Sometimes, you've just gotta do it and leave the polishing touches for later, or never if they're not really that necessary in the first place.

From the little I have tried, I have found that unity scripting is a big pain in the rear. Pong is definitly a good place to start, although it really won't teach you much about unity's extensive tools for 3D, which is really the only reason to use unity over a C based language.
This is the official documentation for unity scripting: http://docs.unity3d....criptReference/. Unlike normal programming where it is all in the code, unity painfully goes back and forth between visual elements and code. I am not farmiliar with blender, but I find that unity is a good choice for learning, as it has a large community behind it and therefore an abundance of user-made documentation.

I don't see what you mean about Unity3D being "painful". I've been using Unity for years and I never thought the scripting language (which is UnityScript, though you can use C# or Boo if you want) was annoying. UnityScript is easier and faster to write code with than C# from my experience, because it automatically does some things that you would have to do manually in C#. There are some minor things C# can do that UnityScript can't, but they've never bothered me much.

To the OP:
Personally, I started programming by using Unity with 3D games, and I only had very slight experience with 2D from years ago, so you could say I hopped right into 3D scripting. I can't say whether this was "good" or "bad", as I think it depends on the individual. I often hear the most important thing is to just stick with one language/engine and roll with it until you get experienced. Programming experience is fairly general, so it will be helpful regardless of which language you're using.

You could definitely use Unity to make a Pong game, if you had an orthographic camera looking down on the paddles and didn't use the Y position of the paddles (the Y is up/down in Unity, the Z is forward/back, and the X is right/left). That way, you'd basically be "not using" the Y dimension, and you could just focus on the two that you need.

Unity also has built-in collisions and other such physics that you could learn the basics of by making a pong game.

If you're getting into Unity, I would suggest you bookmark this page, which has a search bar where you can look at classes and functions in the Unity engine, as well as a short little tutorial to get you started:
http://docs.unity3d....ence/index.html

Also, this website below is where you can go to ask specific questions about problems you're facing while using Unity:
http://answers.unity3d.com/

With some practice, I think you'll find that Unity is very powerful and flexible. Stick to the website and look through the documentation there, because it's very detailed and helpful!

Good luck!

I think it has to do with immersion and feeling more involved in the combat. As you said, first-person view means you have to turn to look behind you, whereas you can tell if something is coming from behind in the third-person view. Thus, first-person view provides an "in the moment" feeling, like you're the hero, not the commander of the hero.

Imagine games like Modern Warfare 3 in third-person view: it would make it easier to see people without endangering yourself. Third-person games usually allow the player to approach a corner and then turn their camera to view what's past the corner without putting themselves in danger, which I'm sure would be something FPS players would constantly use to check for enemies (those dirty campers!) before rounding a corner.

In my opinion, more tactic-based combat might benefit from third-person cameras, because you'll have an easier time telling where your enemies are, if you're close enough to hit them, etc.
Also, third-person and overhead views allow for area target spells and such, like you'll see in DotA 2 and League of Legends, where you can place specific effects here and there on the field, like calling down a rain of fire or a circle of vines that slow enemies down, and other such effects.

First-person games don't have an easy time with this kind of stuff. They're more for feeling in the moment and immersed, in my opinion, because you can't always see what's happening around your character. If you want a player to explore a world and you don't have a deep combat system in place, then it might be a better idea to go for first-person. If the player's positioning matters and they have to throw out a bunch of spells in different positions, then they'll want to have more control over this, and be able to see the battlefield from a third-person/overhead view.

For example, in Fallout 3, I played in first-person because I spent a lot of time exploring the world and when I fought, I basically just shot people a lot until they died (and deeply enjoyed the ways in which they exploded). I didn't have to decide which enemy I had to drain mana from, and which one would be best to use my frost spells on.

However, when I play DotA, I have to know where my enemies and allies are and I have to be able to place my spells in the right places, or use them on the right people (though one of my biggest problems is casting on nearby creeps instead of enemy players...)


Hopefully this helps!

Thank you all for the advice. I appreciate the time and effort!

I'll be compiling the information from this post and the "so you're a programmer" post into a document, so I can have it as a reference if there comes a time where I want to start a team.

If anyone has any other advice or links to possibly helpful threads/articles, I'd appreciate seeing them, too.

Can you post the code you're using that causes the error?

What did you do to the input settings when you say you "tried to change it"?

Hey,

I've been scripting/programming for a few years now, and I seem to be progressing rather well. I can do things comfortably and a lot easier than I could before.
I've used C# with XNA a bit, and UnityScript/C# with Unity. I'm familiar with the Unity engine.

However, I didn't really go by the suggested routine: make a simple game and move up. People here frequently suggest that new programmers make a small game, like a Pong game, then move on to something a bit harder. I didn't do that; I just stumbled around making some pieces of a dozen different projects without ever finishing any of the projects. I didn't focus very well, and got sidetracked on lots of stuff.

Now I'm wondering if maybe this entire time, I've been making a lot of mistakes in programming that I couldn't notice, due to my indirect approach at programming.


However, I'm not entirely sure how to go about figuring out if I actually am making mistakes that I don't notice.
I can't just dump a bunch of code on the GameDev community and say "Hey, is there a more efficient way of doing all of this?", and if I try to show smaller blocks of code, how would I know which pieces to show?


So the question is, am I just being paranoid, or should I be worried that I might be doing things wrong without even realizing it? If the code works, does it really matter if I could have done it in 3 less lines, or with 1 less 'if' statement?

Hopefully this doesn't sound completely stupid...I'm just fretting because I've been coding alone for a while, thinking I've been learning and getting better, without really having any 'confirmation' of that by more experienced coders.

Thanks for reading, any help you can give would be appreciated!

I don't like it when I'm given a list of things to say to an NPC, but I don't have a clear recognition on just how each choice will affect me. If I'm going to have the choice to be evil, neutral, or good, I'd like to know clearly what I get from each choice. If I'm a mage and I choose an evil path, then I'm given a knife and a thief hoody as a reward, I'm going to wish I'd chosen a different path that would hopefully have given me something I can actually use.


This applies to responses to NPCs as well. I'd like to know how they're going to react. Sometimes, the tough army veteran dude will get angry at me if I say something too soft, so I should say something badass and rude to get his respect. Other times, he'll just get angry if I try to be badass. There's really no way of me knowing for sure how the NPC is going to react...and if saying the wrong thing permanently makes that character hate me, I'm going to be pretty irritated if I make the wrong choice.

When I played Fallout 3, I would take so long just to make a choice on which quest path to take, or which conversation path to take, because I was constantly quick-saving and loading to try different things and see what happened...

I usually go 10% Killer, 15% Bargain, 35% Pudgy, 20% Crooked, 35% Cultivation. I like using it this way because all of the random words can go together, even though they ultimately add up to 115% instead of 100%, so my game is like 1 game + 15% of a game. I hope they don't fix the glitch soon, because I like having games that are 1 game + 15% of a game. They're so special, and everyone has a lot of fun playing them (15% more fun than they would have playing a regular game).

But no, honestly, what does your OP even mean? You're going to have to clarify if you want a serious response.

Are there any more details you could give? Have you thought of anything yourself yet that we could build off of?

You're kind of leaving us shooting in the dark with basic things like genre and setting.

If programming was a pool of water, I see you as a person at the edge of the pool staring daggers at the water, too afraid to go in because it looks too cold.

Have you tried Unity with UnityScript (aka JavaScript)? It's a fairly simple language and won't bother you about syntax as much as C# might. You could try using Boo as a language instead. It may be easier/more similar to DarkBasic, but I've never looked into it.

Once I got used to Unity's interface, it proved to be very intuitive. It allows you to pull around views to wherever you want, and add new ones wherever you want. Maybe try some customization to make it more comfortable?

Otherwise, if you still dislike it, try UDK and the Kismet system out (which someone else mentioned above). I don't use UDK, so I can't give you much advice there.
More about UDK's licensing can be found here.

Maybe I'm just biased, but it seems like relying on a 'no programming alternative' would limit how specific you could make your game, and if it doesn't, then it seems like it would just be adding a lot of unnecessary GUI to what could just be a text file.

This is a question that's asked quite a lot. In the Game Design forum, there's a box to the right-top of the list of threads. I suggest reading the first article there:

"I have a game idea! ... What now?"

In short, the answer is no. People usually don't buy GDDs, even if they are very detailed. The problem is that making a game is hard work. The GDD isn't very valuable to developers, because there's so much more to making a game than the design: programming, art, music, sound effects, etc.

The article pretty much sums it up. I suggest you take a gander at some of the other articles on that site as well. It answers a lot of frequently asked questions.

I meant to ask there, would the 2 years I've invested in XNA not be wasted if I decided to switch platforms now?

I would assume they wouldn't be wasted, since you'd still know how to program. You'd just be using a different language.
I'm not even a professional programmer, and I didn't find it very difficult to go from UnityScript with Unity3D to C# with XNA, as far as general syntax goes. I believe it's general programming stuff that's most important, and you'll still use that even if you're using an engine.