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steve_coral | 3 years ago | on: Cytopia: Open-source city simulator with pixel-art graphics

I'd be very interested in a city builder where there are meaningful social, cultural, and political dimensions. Games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines have robust, detailed models for aspects like traffic and power distribution, but the actual social modeling is relatively basic. At points they seem more like complex cellular automata than cities (see Magnasanti in SimCity 3k)

steve_coral | 3 years ago | on: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

Absolutely. I actually compiled my own version of Godot in order to enable a speech-to-text module (https://github.com/menip/godot_speech_to_text) for a project. While some might see that an overly arcane technical annoyance, the fact I was able to do so just shows the promise of a powerful open-source libre engine. Hope to contribute a patch to Godot proper someday. I also find it so cool that it's bootstrapped - that is to say, Godot is created using Godot!

steve_coral | 3 years ago | on: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

I've made several games in Godot and continue to use it, but it has serious issues that hamper it from prime time. Here are some I've encountered in my latest project, a point-and-click adventure in the vein of Myst

- When playing non-OGV video files there will always be a black screen in the first frame of the video, no way around it

- OGV video streams suffer from sound stuttering problems on playback

- There are some performance bottlenecks around 3D and occlusion culling, which will hopefully be fixed in 4.0

- No browser web view so you cannot use HTML for markup or design, meaning making interactive pages (like an in-game wiki) is a massive slog

- Font-rendering issues with blurriness and lack of pixel-perfect sizing (if you are doing retro pixel art fonts they will suffer from anti-aliasing)

- Importing 3D assets is wonky and you still need to write custom import tooling scripts in order to make it even slightly usable. Even then you will most likely have to redo all the lighting on your models

I think Godot 4.0 will be a great leap forward and I'm very much rooting for them. But if you are trying to make a big 3D A-level game, you will spend a lot of time with your head in your hands. At least with Unity and Unreal they have large asset marketplaces and very active communities so you can get around a lot of frustrations. Godot is still quite small in that regard. However for 2D or smaller scoped 3D indie games, it's really powerful and versatile. I personally enjoy the Godot workflow with nodes and signals connecting them much more than my experience with Unity and prefabs, which I found to be a bit convoluted.

steve_coral | 4 years ago | on: The harsh truth of video games programming

Could you possibly post a pseudo-code example of how the above would work with ECS? How do you attach the components to the rock object if not inheritance? Would you just have them be functions that you call to include within the rock via a header file or something? Or a separate code module you import, if using Python?

steve_coral | 4 years ago | on: Boeing suspends vaccine mandate for U.S. employees

Yeah I mean the flu we experience yearly is “descended” from the Spanish Flu but we don’t require flu passports to get a coffee. Eventually (I hope) the madness will subside. Forcing people to get vaccines will only result in contrarian noncompliance due to the peculiarities of the American psyche. We are much better off in the long run investing in universal health care and increasing access but that’s a non-starter in our political climate
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