Rorakin

Check this thread for many C++ suggestions

Yes, I've noticed this too. For Unity basically you have to buy a GUI package from the asset store, and your options are NGUI, EZ GUI, or iGUI. NGUI and EZ GUI are powerful and flexible, but expense, difficult to use for most, and require lots of custom programming. iGUI is the only one that is a WYSIWYG GUI editor and is pretty good, but it is pretty simple and still expensive.

 

I found I was spending way too much time working on the GUI than my actual game, so I decided to create my own GUI editor system. It's basically a WYSIWYG editor, where you can create your entire game GUI and save it as a prefab. It supports an arbitrary number of hierarchies, 3d animations through the use of a free Tween library, Photoshop like gameobject manipulations like holding shift / control to do different things based on which objects you have selected. Pretty much everything can be changed in the editor scene. I'm hoping to create my entire Game's GUI from the editor alone saved as a prefab, once I get that done I can possibly add content to it and sell it on the asset store.

You'll probably need to write your own GUI system or buy one of the GUI asset packages that people sell.

 

The good news is that it is not too difficult to create your own 3D GUI system from scratch. A 3D GUI is more flexible, since the entire GUI for your game can just be created at start and then disabled / enabled when needed in script (you'll need a good parenting / hierarchy setup for complex GUIs). The 3D GUI can also be rendered as 2D at anytime by simply switching the GUI camera from perspective to orthographic.

 

The GUI system I created for my own game in this video took me only a couple weeks, but I did use someone's free Unity Tween library for all the GUI animations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ2KRN5nuHg

The brute force method above by Olof is the fastest you can achieve for matching any random pattern to any random 2d grid during run-time.

However, assuming you have a finite set of defined dimensions for your pattern (3x3, 2x2, 4x4 for example), then you could create separate data structures for the large 2d grid at the beginning of your program. So, for example, you create a 4x4 grid of unique IDs from your 6x6 2d array for 3x3 pattern matching. The IDs calculated can be created from a hashmap function that you define to return a unique ID for a given 3x3 input, and then at runtime you simply pass in your 3x3 pattern to the function and then look to see if the ID returned is in your 4x4 grid. You would have to create separate data structures in the beginning of your program for the different dimensions of patterns you planned to support.

Hello, I was a volunteer programmer for a few months for a fairly ambitious fantasy mmorpg using Heroengine. If it is a serious project, you will probably need a business license and have the volunteers sign all the necessary agreements (NDA, proprietary rights, non-compete, and Software agreement).

Unfortunately it's hard to keep motivated for these large scale projects that will take a year+ to complete. I liked slayemin's motivation equations It's even more difficult to gather programmers because if the project will take a year+ and the project fails, the developer has very little show for it.  Ideally the team leader will also be the lead programmer, and already have a very good idea on how to implement all the core systems and features for the game.

Realistic goals and expectations is the most important. You can't expect to complete all the core features of normal full fledged triple AAA mmo with only a few volunteer programmers in any sort of reasonable time.

Of course the experience of these larger projects is valuable. Looking back on it however, it would have probably been more valuable to take Anri's advice and go with a 2-man reasonable project that will be completed and implemented well. Good luck!