KickBack

I wrote a new blog post, for those that are interested in reading almost coherent musings that are loosely related to gamedev :P kickback-studios.com/blog/connection

@DoctorGester @BarjiYT Animator has too much overhead for simple animations (think camera movements and doors opening).

@KickBackStudios @BarjiYT Not sure about old animation, but what are the problems with the current animation system? We use it for some high dozens mid detailed entities on the screen and it hasn't been an issue. For RTS scale of thousands of units no generic solution will work anyway.

Unity’s biggest asset is its assets. I really hate “engine elitism” but seriously, at this point why would anyone but hobbyists, put their livelihood in the hands of this company when they’ve screwed over their user base endlessly. Runtime, Ironsource, weta digital, calling you stupid. Have they added anything useful, or fixed the glaring issues with the engine, over the past few years? I mean a large portion of the community is still on 2019. If you haven’t already, you should try Godot there’s almost nothing missing at this point, you can use C#, and it’s so easy to switch. People just reiterate the “it needs a few more years” but it’s been a few years!! Not to mention, when you look at the current pool of popular engines, who’s the most likely to position themselves as the vibe coding engine? Maybe that’s your thing, each to their own, but for better or worse that’s where it’s going. It’s also nice to use an engine that doesn’t slow down the longer it’s open, or take 30 seconds to load everytime you want to test. Unity used to be my biggest sponsor, they’d fly me out to events. I had all the reasons in the world not to switch. Try Godot.

@DoctorGester @BarjiYT Old Animation became legacy and abandoned while Animator wasn't performant enough for simple cases, then Animator was abandoned before they had a replacement (and they still don't?). Many such examples. DOTS still seems half assed to me.

@KickBackStudios @BarjiYT I feel like that's a greatly exaggerated statement. Are you talking big picture stuff, like DOTS and UI Toolkit, or in general?

@DoctorGester @BarjiYT With the rate they are abandoning their features what isn’t legacy stuff these days with Unity? All of its features, with few exceptions, are either “well that’s an abandoned feature, of course it doesn’t work right” or “that’s a new feature, of course it is undercooked”.

@KickBackStudios @BarjiYT Unity has its own fair share of jank, it’s just related to more advanced scenarios and/or legacy stuff.

@DoctorGester @BarjiYT “Janky and undercooked”. So you’re saying it’s on par with Unity.

@BarjiYT Unity’s biggest asset is, believe it or not, maturity and platform support, neither of which godot really has. That’s why people say “few more years”, because godot is clearly janky and undercooked.

@zanyzenzone Thank you. Hopefully Resonance will be worth the wait…

@KickBackStudios I've fallen in love with the story of Lost Echo myself ever since I've finished it in the midst of summer 2014. I come back to it every few years,discovering something new each time. I want to make a videoessay about your game one day, but I'm making myself wait until Resonance!

Some days are good and make you feel like what you’re doing has meaning.

@AntonHand Feels like VR market is going the mobile market way? Mobile reviews also tend to have a lot of: Free Game: "Well, it has annoying ads, but it's sort of kinda like a real game and it's free! - 5/5" Paid Game: "Well, it's pretty good but it has at least one flaw therefore : 3/5"

@BTHBcRMY @halcyontweeter @SamNChiet You could do that with just direct lights to great effect, or sealing lightmaps or a bunch of other techniques. I haven’t seen a game where dynamic bounced light is an integral part of the game.

@KickBackStudios @halcyontweeter @SamNChiet Any setting with dramatic lighting changes being a possibility (dynamically)

Even today, Half Life: Alyx feels like it came from an alternate game industry we never got. A hard overcommittment to the tech and techniques of 2000s-2010s gamedev, instead of just accepting the expected modern pipeline at face value.

@BTHBcRMY @halcyontweeter @SamNChiet And yet I haven’t really seen any games where dynamic gi is integral to the experience (maybe part of a game mechanic?).

@halcyontweeter @KickBackStudios @SamNChiet Baked lighting restricts what can be done in a game by a lot.

@siernaner Good to know

@KickBackStudios Sorry i'm late on the response, I just watched Resonance trailer and came here for more info on your profile and saw this tweet. Here in Brazil it has 2 meanings but one way to write, that is "Did i give?" It means you gave something to someone or you gave your 🍑to someone

Omg the right wingers are right DEI is everywhere.

Seems I picked a bad time to start incorporating em dashes to my writing...

@keaukraine @TylerGlaiel Opaque geometry depth is rendered first on tiled rendering devices so for opaque there is no overdraw. It needs to handle more vertices, but that is not a lot of vertices anyway. And it’s not like culling methods (especially occlusion ones) are free. Overdraw isn’t an issue.

@KickBackStudios @TylerGlaiel Because meshes are not drawn from the closest to the furthest triangles, the order is dictated only by indices. There are even algorithms to partially alleviate this (by placing the largest/least obscured triangles first, etc) - github.com/zeux/meshoptim…

these numbers aren't even that crazy, drawing one large model is way more efficient than many small ones

@keaukraine @TylerGlaiel Why would opaque meshes cause overdraw?

@TylerGlaiel In this case it is clearly not efficient. Viewing from the ground, buildings occlude each other and this will cause excessive overdraw issues. Hell simply splitting it into random 20-30 chunks and do the simplest frustum culling on them would significantly improve performance.

@SexpertCoder @FR3NKD No because that would still be using Unity. Btw. Unity used to have JavaScript support (called it UnityScript).

@KickBackStudios @FR3NKD In Meta Horizon Worlds, TypeScript is the primary scripting language for adding complex behaviors to objects and creating advanced interactive experiences. Do you think the best way to use Unity is to run a Javascript engine to run the code for the game?

Meta got tired of Unity 🤣🤣

@SexpertCoder @FR3NKD I love how using Unity properly is using it less and building your own stuff. Seems to me like meta are the best Unity users.

@FR3NKD My guess is they didn’t use Unity properly. It’s kind of advertised as all these things working out of the box, but if you want a performant game you nearly always have to tailor your setup and code to the use case. This is advanced and most devs don’t know how honestly.

Downloading and playing some Mobile games for the first time in years has really driven home the collapse of modern indie games into the exact same dopamine sludge that mobile games started optimized for first. What the fuck is this medium now.

@MarikoRawralton @AntonHand I get your point, but this proves the opposite for me. The Beast version looks better and performs way better, so where's the actual progress here? It's "neat" we can do this without baking, but also... why?

@AntonHand Reminds me that someone dropped an ME map into Unreal 5 with Lumen a while back. Wild that we can do what BEAST had to bake in real time these days. youtube.com/watch?v=qe-Pcg…

The thing everyone misses about why this game looks so good is that the Specular Term ISN'T a reflection of the environment, but a bullshit 2-highlights-per-face blurry cubemap. It's what gives everything a unified ethereal feel. It's beautiful because it ISN'T "realistic".

@SamNChiet Feels like we need a lot more time until dynamic GI reaches baked quality and the cost is trivial. I also haven't seen many games actually make dynamic GI integral to their games (maybe make a game mechanic? Needing to see stuff with indirect light could intersting)

some are still protecting candles from the wind

@noor_supernova7 .

- Israel has actually begun a ground operation, and I'm here in northern Gaza, threatened with death at any moment. If you're browsing, please leave a dot. It's just a dot.