Neospector

I decided to at least experiment with Godot and see if I can move over any existing systems, in the event that hatred of Unreal gets to the point that people actively start harassing devs whose only crime is picking an engine they enjoy using. So far? I have some gripes.

I think that, if I can't get Godot to do what I want, I'll just use Unreal, and tank whatever opinionated losers on the internet have to say. I'm not using AI either way, but it sucks that I have to risk people accusing me of it.

So, in sum: I feel like if any hardcore Godot fans read this and want the engine to catch on, they need to do a bit more than wait for Sweeney to shoot himself in the foot until he bleeds out. A list of important plugins to match the functionality of other engines would be nice, for example.

It reminds me a lot like LISP: It's not impossible to learn, but it requires shifting your thinking a little; just enough that people who aren't used to it are just going to give up real quick.

Now, I happen to like LISP actually, so that's not a killer for me. But, I do have to say, from what I've read the core functionality I WANT in my game might not be possible for Godot at all. And THAT'S a problem.

One of the things I wished was mentioned was the unholy cloaca of scenes. The equivalent of an actor is a scene. Levels are scenes. UIs are scenes. Everything is a scene. It makes sense once you figure it out, but the documentation for switching from Unreal specifically is really unclear on this.

I feel like this could have been solved by giving them literally any other name. "Prefabs", "Actors", "Objects", anything but "scene", because to me a scene is a level. Why would anyone refer to a player character as a "scene"? Makes no sense, but I'm well aware this is entirely my problem.

As far as I'm aware, no other engine has this problem. Even the crappy, student-written, code-only engine I used for a college class supported scaled collision. I could be wrong, I genuinely hope I'm wrong, but it is annoying that I DON'T KNOW.

I got a plugin that gives input mapping the same robustness as Unreal's enhanced input. This seems almost mandatory: the alternative is either building a system to handle rebinds and combo buttons FROM SCRATCH, or hard-binding one input per action in the settings, which I don't want.

Basic systems from other engines aren't present in Godot. For example, you can't scale an object without manually changing its collision box separately. Or rather, you "shouldn't". The engine lets you, but gripes about the whole thing in a warning.

I can't actually tell if scaling an object works or not. This has been talked about for over 8 years, with answers ranging from "works fine" to "you need to manually code a setter function" to "you need to muck about in the physics engine to make it work".

The plugins are nice. Many quality plugins that would cost money for other engines are available for free and don't require me to rewrite entire systems just to use them. The actual engine? Not much there, actually. In fact, I'd say there's a distinct LACK of things that should be there.

Getting AI losers mad enough that they block you is always a good thing. I'm not proud of the arguments themselves, to be honest, but the implication of "everyone is stupid except me, which is why they need AI to catch up" gets too far under my skin for me to think as rationally as I should.

To avoid vagueposting, the user in question is bsky.app/profile/thot..., in case anyone wishes to block. They are a vibe-coder who thinks AI "helps poor people with no money and connections make games". The fact that this is incredibly insulting doesn't seem to occur to them.

Man as soon as I finish Control Resonant's story I wake up to a bunch of people complaining about it. It's a complete coincidence, genuinely, but it really is a reminder that there's just a sad number of people out there ready to jump out of their seats and yell "THAT'S ME! I AM THAT MEME!"

Anyway if you haven't you should play Control Resonant, it took me about 42 hours to do the main and side quests (except for one) and I'm currently thinking about doing a NG+. I don't expect it's gonna be as different as AW2's Final Draft, but I have heard there's extra lore and I just love that.

Well, I started trying to make transitions through doors better and a few hours later I wound up with a rudimentary framework to control the player during cutscenes. I'm sure it's terribly implemented, but it does mean I can send sets of commands rather than manually calling individual functions.

Neospector reposted

Ben Taels

@bentaels.taels.net

16 Sept

Some folks online appear to be putting up videos to show how the Wolverine game is too easy and handholding. Some of these videos are, only after they have gone viral, being discovered to have been recorded on the easiest difficulty with (off by default) accessibility settings turned on.

12 Sept

I got myself so worked up ranting to myself about how people don't understand game development, then I opened up the gamedev feed and saw a few AI bros reconstructing in-game hint systems from first principles because they thought an LLM could do it. I'm not mad anymore, I just need to go lie down.

7 Sept

I'm starting to think there's just a cultural blind spot about how bad hotels and fast food places were; everyone whines and complains about the "cOrPoRaTe aEsThEtIc" and I just sit there going "this neither looks nor smells like a gangrenous wound, and that is (shockingly) a marked improvement".

7 Sept

"Oh, they were FILTHY but they had SOUL, you see—" No, fuck off, I am not being gaslit into thinking people enjoyed them, people have been dunking on how cheap and disgusting these places were for fucking DECADES. People HATED them, especially adults who, coincidentally, have all the fucking money.

7 Sept

I don't care if you find whimsy when your hotel room is located in a giant fiberglass Spongebob's left ass cheek, the thing most normal people care about is whether or not the cleaning staff actually replaced the sheets after the guy before you got a bit too excited watching Baywatch.

2 Sept

Swapping out my homemade dialog system with a professionally-made plugin was a pain, but I THINK it's worth it? Less spaghetti, and actually respects conditions and event triggers. I do wish it hadn't been so expensive. Technically it was open source, but it wouldn't compile for the engine version.

29 Aug

Today marks the second time I have seen an absolutely dogshit media illiterate take coupled to a comparison between RWBY and Honkai Star Rail. The first was complaining about RWBY and the second about HSR, so it's not people being critical of one over the other, it's just weird it happened twice.

25 Aug

"Other than the stuff that interested me, it didn't interest me" "Other than the stuff that didn't interest me, it interested me" There, you have now seen literally every social media post about Gamescon, congrats, you've done it, you may now go back to enjoying things like a normal person.

21 Aug

I feel like I've blocked and reported more AI bros and spam bots just browsing the #gamedev feed than I've blocked on any other social media site. Which isn't true, if my actual blocklist is to be trusted, but it really does feel that way.

21 Aug

I can tolerate the fishy self-promo accounts (most of the time), but the amount of spambots with a name consisting of a random amalgam of characters condensed into an obviously-malware URL telling me how you can pay them $200 and they'll crap out a terrible AI poster is just wild.

I got a big rant incoming that I'm sure is completely irrelevant to anything, but I'm getting it off my chest:

You'll note I'm not necessarily criticizing any of these aspects in of themselves. Some of them I'd even agree with (e.g. I'll absolutely defend games criticized for being "too formulaic"). But sitting there and watching every single person make exceptions for one game? That pisses me off.

Stop being hypocritical about it, that's all I ask.

I got a big rant incoming that I'm sure is completely irrelevant to anything, but I'm getting it off my chest:

Dave the Diver got bashed recently because people realized Mint Rocket is a subsidiary of Nexon. The developers themselves stated explicitly that they don't even consider themselves indie. The same happened with Clair Obscur, and I won't even get into the weird conspiracies people had with Mixtape.

Basically: every other game (especially if they're indie) is analyzed, put under an electron microscope, every word drilled into, every pixel examined for something to complain about. But not Palworld. We've got to give as many free passes as we can to Palworld.

I got a big rant incoming that I'm sure is completely irrelevant to anything, but I'm getting it off my chest:

*gestures wildly at Zelda, Crash Bandicoot, Pokemon, FNAF, Halo, Mega Man, Overwatch, The Sims, and pretty much every other game in existence that has ever gotten a sequel* *stares at camera in disbelief*

Are they indie? I dunno, honestly. They get massive amounts of funding and support from Sony (mostly because of the Nintendo beef), though, which I know a LOT of people wouldn't consider "indie" if it were literally any other game.

I got a big rant incoming that I'm sure is completely irrelevant to anything, but I'm getting it off my chest:

Literally the entire discourse about Clair Obscur, and the reason it lost awards, was because people said SPECIFICALLY that using AI then giving up on it was still using AI, that turning your back on it wasn't enough and you had to be against it from the start.

Do they make unique games? Fuck no they don't, they have one type of game: "parody of current popular video game mechanics". Every single game they've ever made is like this. Even the "animal slavery for automation" bit isn't new, they did that in Craft World too (as a parody of Satisfactory).

I got a big rant incoming that I'm sure is completely irrelevant to anything, but I'm getting it off my chest:

I think the reason I have such a visceral reaction to Palworld is that it represents every single hypocrisy you could ever have in modern gaming discourse. Every aspect of it is something that literally any other game or company would be absolutely BLASTED over if they were being talked about.

Do they support AI? You bet they do, entire game made out of an AI generator which they are currently trying to scrub any reference to off the internet to polish their image. People's response to this? "Well, they learned their lesson, that's good, right?"

2 July

A lot of the people complaining about the content of modern video games have never scrolled past the first page on Steam and it shows. Boy howdy, does it show.

30 June

I'm drafting a shop background. In terms of quality...I think it's pretty good for literally my first draft. I'm glad the idea I had is feasible; I'm not good at pixel art or digital art, so an edited 3D render is what I have to work with. Definitely not satisfied with it, though. #gamedev

24 June

This has been happening a lot lately so I'm just gonna express my thoughts: this is how I currently feel whenever literally anyone tries to start up the "AAA vs indie" culture war (alternatively, the "what counts as indie" culture war).

24 June

Annoying hipster culture never died out, they just commissioned 8-bit avatars and started pointing and screaming at every extraction shooter like that one scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

11 June

It turns out the reason I had so much difficulty with seamless portals was because the original tutorial I followed was an over-complicated mess that flubbed the velocity on portal exit. I found a new tutorial that not only fixed this, but drastically simplified the entire blueprint. #gamedev

11 June

As you can see, the biggest issues now are just lighting/textures needing to match. The portals are also one-way, but that's a problem for future me. Bonus points, I don't need to enable the global clip plane, no 15% increase in basepass drawtime, huzzah!

youtube.comSeamless Teleportation in Unreal Engine 5YouTube video by Polar Panda Games

11 June

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBEj... Here's the tutorial that actually worked, for anyone interested in their own implementations.

2 June

Beans the Babyhemoth! I love them! Thanks @stellaris.paradoxinteractive.com

1 June

I sometimes wonder if you could shut down an argument by asking someone about the last time they were wrong about anything. Literally, anything: the price of a hamburger at a nearby restaurant, a lore fact you mentioned in chat, the typing of a Pokemon. Anything.

1 June

Most people, I feel, wouldn't be able to answer, because they genuinely don't think they're ever wrong, even when they claim otherwise. ESPECIALLY when they claim otherwise.

31 May

Not sure how concerned I should be about a recent wave of complaints I've seen across various games that all seem to boil down to "I can't believe the game wants us to PLAY it, what were the devs even thinking?!"