L. Scofield
Veteran
There's always something 
LF: game engine recommendation (Unity etc)
- Thread starter Scott_Arm
- Start date
There's always something
I'm still really happy with Unreal Engine so far, from what I've played around with. They have excellent video tutorials.
So far, using blueprints, I have a character that runs around (mesh and animation provided as starter material) and I can move him by clicking the left mouse button on a location, and I can shoot pucks out of his feet by clicking the right mouse button. The BluePrint scripting is pretty incredibly easy. You can do a lot without programming.
Trying to get a directional indicator for passing to work, and then I'm going to work on a way of aiming shots at a net, both based on the mouse position on the screen. So far I'm having trouble getting the directional indicator for passing working. I'm not sure if the functions I'm calling do what I understand them to do.
I'm supposed to be able to see the blueprint activity when I'm simulating, but it doesn't actually do that for me. I'm not sure if I turned something off. I know some of my blueprints work, because I can shoot the puck and it fires in the direction my player is facing, but the blueprint for that does not show any activity when I watch it as I'm simulating, for some reason.
Trying to get a directional indicator for passing to work, and then I'm going to work on a way of aiming shots at a net, both based on the mouse position on the screen. So far I'm having trouble getting the directional indicator for passing working. I'm not sure if the functions I'm calling do what I understand them to do.
I'm supposed to be able to see the blueprint activity when I'm simulating, but it doesn't actually do that for me. I'm not sure if I turned something off. I know some of my blueprints work, because I can shoot the puck and it fires in the direction my player is facing, but the blueprint for that does not show any activity when I watch it as I'm simulating, for some reason.
I don't want to oversell it, but the Unreal Engine 4 Editor is maybe the greatest software package I have ever used ... ha ha ha. Mind you, I'm a complete novice so I might not pick up on issues because I'm using only the most basic features right now, but I'm pretty shocked at how simple it is do things. And I haven't encountered any bugs. The only drawback I forsee is creating models and animation. They have a plugin for maya to make creating skeletons easy, but maya is very insanely expensive. So I'd be forced to go with a free tool that will be more difficult because it can't make use of the plugin.
The last week I'd been playing around with different ideas, and last night I decided to go through the tutorial for making and setting up a third person game with an empty project. The tutorial does supply a mesh, skeleton and animations, but you learn about the animation editor, blend shapes, state machines, materials, the camera and setting up input. The people who do the videos have done an incredibly good job of making them interesting.
If you understand programming concepts, the BluePrint visual programming system is dead simple, and incredibly powerful. I haven't touched code yet. The nerd in me makes me want to code, but there's really no reason. I can probably do everything I've wanted to do with Blueprints a lot faster. At some point, I might hit a point where I need to code something. It will probably be a long time before I find something though. You can do materials, networking, physics, animation, ai, input etc etc etc with Blueprints.
The last week I'd been playing around with different ideas, and last night I decided to go through the tutorial for making and setting up a third person game with an empty project. The tutorial does supply a mesh, skeleton and animations, but you learn about the animation editor, blend shapes, state machines, materials, the camera and setting up input. The people who do the videos have done an incredibly good job of making them interesting.
If you understand programming concepts, the BluePrint visual programming system is dead simple, and incredibly powerful. I haven't touched code yet. The nerd in me makes me want to code, but there's really no reason. I can probably do everything I've wanted to do with Blueprints a lot faster. At some point, I might hit a point where I need to code something. It will probably be a long time before I find something though. You can do materials, networking, physics, animation, ai, input etc etc etc with Blueprints.
I've been looking at this for a bit, because I've been trying to find good software for modelling certain business processes and dependencies, and this is probably the closest I've come so far to fullfulling my requirements.
Very tempted to take the little time I haven't to try if I can actually make it work.
Very tempted to take the little time I haven't to try if I can actually make it work.
L. Scofield
Veteran
I hope you're not trying to make an MMO by yourself
I just downloaded 4.5 and 4.6 came out yesterday!
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-46-released
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-46-released
I hope you're not trying to make an MMO by yourself
I'm making an MMO where your character can shrink to microscopic size and travel through the body of any living organism, like the movie Inner Space. Sounds achievable by a single person.
L. Scofield
Veteran
Are you going for a minimalist art style or something more realistic?
It's unbelievably complicated...
[EDIT] Arghh that was the wrong link! - I meant this one:
...and extremely high speed. I think I read that the molecular machine that replicates the DNA strands spins at a rate comparable to a jet turbine.
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And this is a video with the DNA replicator. I'll shut up now
The rule of thumb with biological processes is that the smaller the scale, the faster they happen. The shortest biologically-relevant phenomenon is the oscillation of carbon-hydrogen bonds, which happens on the order of 10 femtoseconds, or 10^-14 s. Other, larger phenomena, such as the bending of a stand of DNA, can take about 1 ns, and up to about a second for a protein to fold.
But that's not much of a problem if you want to make a game inside the full human body, because these things are far too small and therefore too numerous anyway. Your character (or vehicle or whatever) would have to be much larger than DNA. In fact, it would have to be larger than a cell, because there are about 10 trillion of those in our bodies and there's no way you'd be able to manage this much information, unless perhaps you streamed it from a data-center.
But if your character were, say, 0.1mm, and you had access to detailed medical imaging data, plus some way to convert them to 3D meshes, it would probably be doable. You'd basically avoid most of the asset creation work, which I suspect is what takes the most time in the majority of games. You'd still have to add good gameplay, but I would imagine that mere exploration would be quite enjoyable.
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