Whew, okay, this one is pretty huge: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.740_Code_Panopticon The idea of a “panopticon” is that it’s a structure where there’s absolutely no privacy, and there’s perfect observation of everything that happens inside. Dystopian thought, right? Well, in this case, I’ve been working on constructing a panopticon… for memory leaks. The idea is for myself or…
Second beta build of the day: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.711_More_Fixes I still have to chase the memory leak that we’ve got going on, and a new rash of reports of various things arrived this evening thanks to Daniexpert (that really is helpful, so thank you!), but this build cleans up some of the issues, and also adds a…
New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.710_Hotfixes_Serialization_and_Performance Possibly the first of two for today, we’ll see. This one fixes some latent bugs in the prior build, mostly about loading transports and saving the game. You know, not anything important. This also makes the UI sidebars more responsive, and fixes a possible glitch in xml importing and two definite…
New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.709_Upgrades_And_Serialization_Fix This one upgrades to a newer version of unity, fixing a number of bugs of relevance, including likely fixing the freeze on startup that was sometimes happening. Additionally, this release should fix the bug where sometimes units would just turn feral on you when loading a savegame, and all bumrush you…
Another new beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.708_Bugfixes_And_Death_Spawn This one is smaller, but hits a number of bugs that were bothering people. It also adds some more new features that SirLimbo is working on for some of his new guardians and such. There is still a serialization bug at the moment (probably), and at any rate I still…
New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.706_Expanded_Wormhole_Invasions_And_Raid_Engines (Please note: this one again breaks savegames, and there’s a known save corruption glitch from the prior version.) Well! It’s been a busy six days since the last release. This new build mainly has cool new things from Badger and SirLimbo, however, so let’s talk about those things first. I tried…
This is a doctoral thesis sort of topic. The short answer is that everything is changing, all the time. There is no stasis, period. The simplest way to look at this is hardware and tooling. In the past, you could code your own engine and that wasn’t an insane thing to do. Now it is.…
If you want, you can code your own game engine. I don’t recommend it. I had coded my own from 2002 through 2009, but later ported my custom engine to Unity 3D in 2010. It’s a different time period now, and you want to be able to hit PCs, macs, consoles, and who knows what…
My first advice is to go watch the series on Film Courage where they interview Jack Grapes. He explains his philosophy on Method Writing, on which he teaches courses and has written many books. There is not a 1:1 analogue with game development, but as he himself notes, his concepts apply to any field of…
