A Writer's journey into game development

 

 O3DE is no longer the newcomer. From "why do we need another engine if we have Unreal, Unity and Godot?" we went to "Maybe I should consider this as a valid candidate". Version 24.09 offers a certain level of maturity, enough to make it worth the risk of trying it. In fact, there are people already working in serious projects, like Carbonated Inc. which is using it for a multiplayer mobile game. So, I am spending more time with O3DE. It is something completely different and requires more effort than other engines, specially because I have other projects to take care, and also because I have to learn Unreal at same time (it is one of my jobs now). But, despite lack of documentation and tutorials, I have advanced a bit, mostly thanks to the help of the community. Lets see what can I do with it in the future.  

 Took some time, but at last I managed to install O3De 23.05. I have no time to extensively test it, because there is a project requiring all my effort, but I took a couple of nights to work with it. I cant find any dramatic changes, this is not a big leap like 22.10 was. Im not sure if we will see another release like that again. Im not going to get into a proper analysis (a few hours are not enough), but here are some things that O3DE needs to improve: Project creation process now involves a build, that requires Visual Studio. That is annoying for artists. Project build is complex. And I mean complex. It takes 12 steps, and manually copying stuff. Lucky us, it is being fixed and I hope we will have the new building script in next major release. Animation workflow is annoying. As  a developer currently working in a project that requires several animations and retargeting, I dont see feasible switching to a workflow that produces separate files for each animation. By the way, ...

 We have finished the project and it is time tostart a new one. This time, I have convinced the team to work on a combat  prototype and try Godot 4. After a month, Im quite pleased with the progress. Specially, we have applied animation retargeting, which is a new feature in Godot 4. In previous project, our main artist devised a clever way to reuse animations, but now we have a native solution. Our first attemp didnt worked, but I found that remapping the armature starting by the feet solved the problem. Weird, isnt it? By the way, you can see the prototype here . WE are keeping it public to let people learn from our mistakes. And, if you need some animation retargeting tutorial, this is the guide we used:

 A quick upodate to post this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFN6YabFKg&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAKU8Neo5KsVmq8KtoDkfi4s&index=1 A great tutorial about creating a multiplayer game in Godot, with a dedicated server. Make your own MMORPG!

 After watching the Diablo Immortal gameplay video, I wanted to try something similar. Im not too fond of developing for phones, because I tend to avoind playing on my phone, mostly. It is not easy for me to replace my cell, so I protect it as much as possible.  But Diablo Immortal, or any Diablo game, is something I cant let go unnoticed. What if I try to do something that looks and feels like that? What if I do it in two days? Or two nights. And then, the Two Day Challenge was born. 

 Here is it! At last I have finished the long process of recording and editing. I apologize for the noisy background. And the second part: This is just the foundation to build you own, better AI system, based on Godot Resources, which are equivalent to Unity's ScriptableObjects. I have introduced a few changes to adapt it to my needs.

Took some effort and some of my sleep hours, but at last, I made it. Here is my first videotutorial: implementing an isometric camera in 3D, with Godot. Useful if you want to emulate the look of old classics like Fallout 2, but with some extra features. Considering that my voice is not so nice, and my english pronounciation is even worse, I also added texts to help you underestand what Im saying. You will also notice some background noise, but cant do anything to solve that. Any suggestion is welcome. Expect another tutorial soon.... or sor tof. This time, will be about my AI system.

Took me some time to discover that ScriptableObjects equivalent in Godot are Resources. After researching and asking a bit, I made a quick test last night that went surprisingly well. I wanted to test the OOP capabilities of GDScript, more specifically, if I could extend the Resource class for my own twisted and evil purposes, the same way I used ScriptableObjects in Unity. That is, to store items, skills, etc. It sort of works. Excuse me if I dont show any code, but Im still not sure that what I did was completely right and I dont want to point anybody in the wrong direction. But I do can show you at least this. Lets suppose I want to have my items stored as resources, so my first step was to inherit the Resource class: extends Resource class_name BaseItem export(String) var Id export(Resource) var mesh **** The base class contains all the info needed in all child classes, as usual. I can even store a Resource inside of another, in this case, the item mesh. Any item type in the game ...

Expect an isometric like camera tutorial soon! Or something like that, Im too newbie yet to make tutorials. Yes, Godot is rather limited in 3D, but I can restart my RPG project and learn all the stuff I need while the engine improves. The good news is that now, with the Epic Mega Grant, it will improve faster. I hope I can be using the Vulkan branch in april or may, even before first betas (much before). I have solved a couple of problems in the last week. First of all, I managed to use the terrain plugin with Navigation meshes. It takes a weird approach involving generating a mesh from the terrrain that can be quite complex and heavy, and then using it to generate the navigation mesh. So far, the perfomance in simple scenes sees to be normal, 60 FPS at 1080p, but I would be surprised if it werent so. I just confirmed that even when the perfomance is poor for modern standards, it is not plain terrible. Again, we should expect improvements in 4.0. Next week I will be posting some i...

Great news! Unity Editor will be officially supported in Linux . Maybe I will be able to recover that Linux installation I no longer use. 

A bit late I knew that Godot team has decided to abandon OpenGL 3 in favor of Vulkan. Read the whole details in the official post . Not going to do an in depth analysis of this. They previously  avoided OpenGL 4, Vulkan and DirectX 12, arguing several reasons, now the offer different reasons why they should change to Vulkan, discard OpenGL 3 and GL ES 3, and go back to GL ES 2. Anyway, the switch is welcome, I am sure it will bring improvements to the 3d rendering quality (which was getting better lately). If I weren't so used to Unity I would be seriously thinking moving to Godot. Keep an eye on it!

This is the game that hurt my wrist again! Lately, free games are killing open source games. Nobody cares about source code and compiling when you can get all the free games you want in your phone. I have to admit that I haven't been paying attention to open source scene since a couple of years. 0 A.D. was on my wishlist since long time ago, but I always delayed it, waiting for a better AI. Playing an RTS against a weak AI is one of the worse experiences a gamer can have. Also, I'm playing about 2-3 games per year, plus  the occasional DOTA, or Warzone or Freeciv match. Writing and programing are eating most of my free time. But last week I decided that I had waited enough, and downloaded the latest alpha. To my surprise, the AI is good enough most of the time to beat me if I'm not quick enough. Not only AI is decent and poses a real threat, graphics are great, even commercial quality, and when you get used to game philosophy, you can have lot of fun. Seems that the mo...

Last monday, after the year's end/new year torment finished, I went to visit a friend. For paying the due congratulations and such, but mostly to see if I could put my hands on latest Deus Ex game. I had to remove the hard drive from my PC, but the game worth the risk and I was extra careful while carrying it. We copied and even tested the game from my drive, before I took it home. And then I found that there were no signs of the game in the hard disk. I even had the same 90Gb free. Ok, if you copy 75 gigabytes to a drive, use those in some way, and they they dissapear, there is somethign really wrong with your disk or OS. I forced Windows to do a drive scan, just to find that I had 75 gigabytes lost, without any way to find where. But, no panic. I had Linux Mint. After booting to Linux, I found the lost files, which were hidden for Windows. Of course, the game was useless, but at least I could recover 75 Gb without formatting the disk. It is good to have a serious OS for...

Just a few days after release, I downloaded and installed Linux Mint 18 Sarah. Im usually not eager to try distros as soon as they are released, but it has been a long wait. Since 17, there have been some minor releases (17.1, 17.2) and I wanted to see some real change. But specially, I wanted to see what side did they take on the Wayland vs Mir issue. My question about that on the forums some years ago didn't received an answer, it was too early. But Sarah demanded a decision. And the answer has been to offer both. So, probably you will be able to use Mir and follow a more Ubuntu line setup, or follow the rest of the community and use Wayland. In this case, Im not in a hurry to test Wayland, not yet. At least, not until Cinnamon and all the desktop is 100% ready for the new graphic server. I have to say that Im pleased with the change. One of my biggest complaints was the Windows network browsing, in Mint 17 it was slow and most of the time it freezed Nemo, the file explore...

Andreas Essau has published the 11th episode (episode sounds good) of his Godot videotutorials serie, which I have been saving since I found it, but just started to serioulsy watch it yesterday. It makes me think twice about my choice of engine for the project. Also, my 3D artist wondering why arent we using Unity3D doesnt helps. I have to admit that I didnt studied Godot enough before choosing Urho3D. There were some developer choices in Godot that I didnt liked (will mention only one: the mesh importer supports only obj files), but right now seems to be the only open source engine that aims for efficiency. To say it clear: it is like an open source Unity3D. Im not saying that Urho3D is a bad choice, it is simply that the engine architecture is different, the whole goal is different. It has been a great experience to use Urho in the project, but seems that Ill have to squeeze my time at office to the max (no PC at home for some time), and start to seriously study Godot. And Unit...

Some months ago I created a video using OpenShot and it was easy. Well, the task wasnt too complex: just cut and assemble pieces of a few captures. Im now working on the game trailer and seems that OpenShot is not well suited for the job. First I found that the titles were quite limited: I could not place the text in arbitrary screen positions, only at some predefined locations. There is not much I can do with title format, unless I use Inkscape. Cant create 3d titles unless I use Blender. Well, I dont need too fancy titles, I just wish I could have them. Not essential. Then I started to test timing with the soundtrack and found that at some point the video is getting garbled, removed the part, and the new first seconds became garbled again. At some point, OpenShot no longer plays the video preview, just the audio, I have to close and open again. Also the program freezes. Doesnt seems to be lack of memory, I have 4Gb and conky reports that only 1.3Gb are being used. Im thinking...