I think you forgot to actually link to the game

Ok boomer

Unlikely, but you are now aware that the youths call all old people boomers and further that "ok boomer" was originally targeted at fellow young people saying old people shit, not actual boomers.

i can download it though.

it’s not amazing yet but still cool to see and to know that this can be achieved rather quickly

Odd, I can’t either any more. I’ll reupload it to Catbox in a few hours when I get home.

It’s nothing particularly amazing mind you.

Same, I want to see it!

i can’t get the video to work, neither on my instance nor on the instance of OP :/

Retro shooter. Its a retro shooter. "Boomer Shooter" is a stupid term that ignores etymology and linguistics to conflate two totally unrelated things.

The name is still very silly. No boomers coded any of those games, it was gen x folks.

"Boomer Shooter" is a specific gaming genre classified as trying to remake/recapture the feeling of older games like Doom or Quake.

Boomer shooter and no boomers were shot 🥲

"boomer shooter"? In the style of shooter games from Gen-X was writing them (John Carmack), or a shooter of Baby Boomers?

In any case, good progress.

Indirect/proxy should make politics more-significant, right?

There's a game, I think it's called Democracy, which has one hell of alot of dimensions of stuff which affect outcomes.

if you've never seen its .. can't remember if it was the skill-tree or the setup-thing, or just the intro-tutorial, something ( I'm not a gamer, but study human-meaning, including psychology, including story & game ) .. you may find many inspirations for interactions to include in the affecting-outcomes math..

Duh! I just realized, that you could actually do both, but each run the players have to choose direct-allowed or indirect-only, in order to give your game both kinds of exploration..

hopefully that'd mean only some more work, but for much more value for your game?

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It can go either way... What kind of game do you want to make?

Focus on your core vision

I like alternate history games as long as they are pretty clear and obvious that they are not trying to portray real history as it happened. So anything that increases the different outcomes is welcome, but likely to be much more difficult to program.

Allow direct conflict, but give it severe consequences. A little research should pull up some ideas of worst-case scenarios - anything from economic collapse to destruction of the UN to nuclear apocalypse.

Civil war mechanics could be interesting, for example if a power took direct action and it caused severe unrest among its populace.

For a standard UE 4 or 5 game, 4 to 6 hours is normal time for iterative cook builds. If you lose your cook your are fucked and have to wait 20 hours. And that would involve incredibuild to get more than 100 cores during the compile.

Just use Vim.

  d :

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depends on what kind of game and what future you plan for the engine. if you are looking to use similar tools (item placement etc) you might be able to re use components for gameplay later if you keep parity with things like the "high resolution overlay capabilities"

Ahh yeah that makes sense. That'd be a pain in the ass if it was for every build.

Worth noting: That 4 to 6 hour number is probably for a build from scratch. A good build system will be able to only recompile things that have changed and so the develop -> compile -> test cycle is usually much faster.

I love lemmy. Thank you so much for your detailed response and fantastic article, its exactly what I was looking for. Seems like the bottleneck isnt really the infra. Definitely a difficult problem to solve.

but I mostly work with infrastructure and optimizing build systems.

Besides source code, games also need to compile source assets. An example of this is textures; a dev might store them as PNGs in their source control, but the texture will need to be converted to a different format depending on the target hardware. On mobile, that might be something simple like PVRTC, or maybe supercompressed KTX. Geometry and animations also need to be compiled, usually from something like FBX to whatever runtime formats the engine uses, not to mention all the other copious amounts of custom data needed for the game.

Shaders are a challenge because you can't fully compile them ahead of time. They're usually authored in some DSL (maybe HLSL/GLSL, but sometimes also an engine-specific custom language), and depending on the target graphics API they can be compiled to intermediate bytecode (eg SPIRV). However, that bytecode needs to be compiled by the user into the internal format needed by the graphics implementation (which can even change between driver versions on the same machine), which is why modern PC games need to compile shaders on first launch. Consoles with fixed hardware can avoid this problem.

Beyond that, the shader permutation issue leads to games requiring a shitload of shaders for performance reasons, exacerbating the issues described above, both for the developer performing a release build, and for the user launching the game. This article describes the issue well.

So add all that on top of the usual time it takes to (cross-) compile the engine and game code, which is often a massive C++ codebase of dubious quality, and sometimes also an outdated proprietary toolchain of dubious quality.

No, is it relevant? Help me out

EDIT: There's a play called Waiting for Godot, but the meaning of Godot is ambiguous

...do you know where the name "Godot" comes from?