Do you have any experience using it for targeting consoles? I think that it’s the biggest issue left… I would also be curious of support of stuff like Nanite from Unreal Engine 5…
Makes sense, as they correctly see that it’s the servers and the 🤢 marketplace that establish control in this space. I wish that open (federated?) systems had a better solution for the cloud/server/marketplace pattern. Self-hosting and benevolent patrons aren’t a real answer, but who’s going to build a bazaar they can’t control and profit from?
I think about this alot. It’s a weird problem because free and open source doesn’t mean you can’t profit from it. It’s arguably the other way around. You’re supposed to contribute so the market services are the value add to your platform. A marketplace is the answer for this servicing problem but it can’t be free because then the consumers are the product.
I feel like the solution is to build the marketplace platform technology INTO Godot so then developers can target the platform and the service providers are then able to provide the same product with their own partners and value. This would create competition in the space but allow for growth in development.
I think this is what flatkpaks are trying to achieve with remotes like flathub. It’s just supposed to be one of many marketplaces but the marketplace technology has been standardized unlike the snapstore. This also prevents platform lock in.
The technology then remains free but service providers need to be able to derive value from the hosting as hosting costs money no matter the platform. The consumer can then drive the demand.
Of course lock-in is the goal of all service providers… So there’s that …
I think it’s perfectly ethical to have a closed source plugins marketplace as compensation for releasing a fully open source engine. I mean, look at all the good the Blender Marketplace has done for that ecosystem!
Not a joke! The Blender Marketplace is a thriving plugin ecosystem that makes Blender a professional tool. Virtually every small studio I know runs at least two or three plugins from that site.
It’s not good for starting. Even though I know nothing better for the task, it’s unintuitive: Nothing is self-explanatory. You need to prepare pixel art in specific formats and place them in specific folders to use them in your new game. The UI does not tell you about any of those folders or formats, nor does it give hints or errors. You have to read the docs. You can place some stuff with your mouse, yes, but you can’t use your mouse for the difficult stuff like animation/movement coordinates; you have to enter coordinates into input boxes not even seeing the coordinates of the player or actors you placed. There is a very misleading coloring tool that isn’t really meant for drawing, but for palette selection and application.
It’s almost as difficult as blender: It’s more easy than coding all that in a programming language, yes, but it’s miles away from pointing and clicking and “people starting a game dev journey” need to use at least a tutorial and the docs in addition and prepare for many frustrating hours before they have something lame and ridiculous, that’s still many months or years away from something worth publishing.
I will go over a couple of the valuable tools I am aware of for this:
‘Landmarking’-- making a location have a memorable set piece, shape, interaction, etc. in the environment. These will serve both as navigational aids, attention directors, and reminders during backtracking.
‘Loops’-- creating hubs and spokes or a looping location inter-connectivity such that players are naturally always going to find their way to a ‘home’ location, or at least know how to return to the home with minimal need to maintain a detailed mental map. These can serve as navigational aids as well as emotional modulators.
Example of Setpiece-Based Landmarking: Super Metroid is the obvious place to see this in action all over the place. For one example, look at the entrance to Kraids Lair-- It has a giant scary-looking statue guarding the door that is unique and is intended to leave a strong impression of ‘wow thats cool but I can’t climb it yet’, such that when you get the hi-jump in the near future down in Norfair, you have no problem thinking of somewhere to try it out. The game even plops you out next to it from the elevator once you have the given upgrade. The graphics on it also scream ‘SOMETHING BAD LIVES HERE’, and naturally draw you to it-- it tells you immediately that it is an important location and you should go here as soon as you can.
Linear traversal is a bit easier, as you have set paths and can direct players with other overarching methods like lighting, color, enemy placement, sound, etc. to the obvious path. Where this gets more interesting is when you begin to hone it and spice it up and give players linear routes that are NOT obvious so as to inspire feelings of problem solving and exploration / mystery.
Example of Interaction-Based Landmarking: Metroid fusion and Zero Mission do a good job simply using existing assets to do this, like putting a zoomer (enemy that crawls on surfaces) inside of a hidden area of a room, such that when you enter the room and find it is blocked, you then see an enemy emerge from a secret or hidden entrance / pipe-- cuing you to explore it further. Simple, effective, and super cheap in terms of time/effort.
Example of Loops: Dark Souls 1 is probably the best game to study for this method. Most places you go take you back to Firelink Shrine somehow, or are directly accessible from it. It is both a ‘hub’ from which different ‘spokes’ of the world emerge from, as well as something that all the looping paths touch. As you venture further into the world, many places become more interconnected with each other without feeling trite / forced (like a fast travel spot or transport), and instead feel natural (you venture from Firelink to the Burg, and into the Depths and find your way back by going through a sewer canal, leading you to the canal you first entered the Burg). Through this, the player knows how to get most places, or at least an idea of where to start. This is great, but where Dark Souls takes this from a navigation method into masterpiece game territory is the game does not have a map (!) and it deliberately uses this to impose a feeling of homesickness by taking away the loops sometimes, and forcing you down long linear diversions in which you are isolated from everything you have learned and know thus far. These emotional changes can themselves serve as landmarks and reminders in themselves, delightfully complicating this further.
Does this kind of make sense? Apologies for the rambling but I hope its a good start. Feel free to follow up if needed and we can continue chatting.
I too like having sliders in my games but it takes extra time and effort to make these sliders work. You have to change the shape of the body without adding or removing polygons. And you have to get rid of the jank that appears (parts poking out weirdly/overlapping) when using the slider. It’s not as easy as you think. For something like the Sims, it means making each outfit three times for the three body types and a high and low version for every slider option. Not every game has time/money for this type of development. Swapping out body hair is much more doable. But swapping out breasts is not doable unless they make each outfit have a version with breasts and a version without.
I don’t think the games are doing stuff like this out of malice, I think they just didn’t feel a need to spend extra resources or doubling their work to cater to a smaller population that really likes sliders. It’s funny though when you see Baldur’s Gate allow female bodies to have a penis but not allow sliders for the boobs and butt.
The games are still very much an overlapping, janky, weirdly formed mess so I genuinely don’t take this as an argument, because it’s not avoided. I see tons of clipping and metal armors stretching like fabric in games with locked or no body type selection. Hair clipping through everything or your character being made very visibly bald to avoid the clipping. Honestly, I genuinely saw less of that in games with sliders growing up than in games without sliders now in my mid 20s.
It would be a lot worse if they tried doing what you want and make armor not bend/deform but have the arms bend with the skeleton anyway. I take it you haven’t done much gamedev when it comes to 3D modeling/animating? You should really get into it and try for yourself. You can even mod a game so you don’t have to make everything yourself from scratch. You’ve made up your mind that it is inexcusable without trying it for yourself.
Hair clips because it doesn’t have physics on it usually, preventing the clipping would mean calculating the hair colliding with whatever else which can be taxing on the engine. Video games need to have the least amount of taxing resources in order to run smoothly, especially on older hardware. Many games choose to make hair static instead because of this.
What games are you talking about btw? I’m in my 30s and I remember games always being like this. You might be having some rose colored glasses going on, I very much remember how jank early games were haha
Could you please explain how the inclusion of breast size sliders and body hair would affect arms? Because that was my proposal.
I grew up playing MMOs such as Perfect World, but also games such as The Sims. I believe Saints Row also includes sliders, but I may be wrong. Anyhow, I proposed a simplified approach of only slider for chest and then body hair options.
I was talking about the metal arms stretching, it stretches because it would clip horribly and wouldn’t follow the arm movement properly.
But for breast size, you have to make two versions of the armor with breasts and without breasts (flat like a man’s chest) that are basically swapping parts of the outfit out as a “slider” (these have to be remade completely). Then people like me will want breast sliders that are small breasts to larger breasts (these would be morphs so you can’t add or remove geometry to make them, instead you would try to mold them) and so you’re making quite a few different versions of the outfit just to make sliders work and high/low weights for them. The second set of sliders would be more popular but some games don’t even give us that lol. It takes development time for this stuff and making AAA video games is all about cutting corners, crunching, trying to do everything with as little money spent as possible, etc. Making sliders can easily double to triple the work required. Ever look at the baldurs gate 3 mod section searching for a larger breast version? You’re gonna run into clipping galore since every outfit has to be redone and the mods don’t redo every outfit. The Sims is the only game series I know that care enough about giving people sliders for everything.
I’ve played every major Sims game and they all had the clipping issue for hair and clothes. To make things like belts and pockets work they paint them on in the textures. Same way underwear is made. Saints Row had sliders but there was still clipping with it, for instance necklaces were floating on top of the outfits whether you had a shirt on or not (this also happened on Sims) just to try to minimize clipping. Another tactic used in games is to not have long hair, keep it above the shoulders as much as possible.
Body hair has to be remade for both character models, but that would probably be less work than sliders. Work still has to be done, it’s not as simple as copy + paste.
Anyway, that’s just my rambling. It takes a lot of development time to make sliders work which is why it gets omitted a lot. I hope more games allow more sliders, but I understand why a game wouldn’t do it.
It even still applies to representing women in games, which is just a sad state.
I worked on a game not long ago where we had lots of different characters. The men had three body types, but the women all had the same one. During a feedback round I mentioned it - all the women were totally behind me and vocal about it, but I’ll never forget the ‘rest of the studio’ just blankly staring at me. Of course it was totally ignored. I could’ve just as well have made a terrible joke.
I mean take characters like Brienna of Tarth or Bobbie Draper, they’re awesome!
These games are meant to be played by millions to be able to see any ROI, so I think it’s important to realize our responsibility in shaping culture.
I wonder if the lack of these options might often be due to a lack of representation within the development and product organizations at these companies.
Sure you can say there’s malice here and there and I’m certain it does happen, but by and large, if the developers and product people don’t have exposure or experience it might be difficult to nail it for all audiences.
I like it. I am learning it now! You can even develop it on android if you are out of home without your laptop, here how i develop on android with termux app.
I’d like to be learning more, but since I’m busy with work and family there’s not many hours to put in each week. I am new to coding so it doesn’t help much but I hope I’ll get there eventually. Cheers!
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