Talk about anything
Scriptception.
cybereality It's certainly possible if you make a hit game.
That's a big if tho...
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Megalomaniak That's a big if tho...
Possibly the biggest if ever. But there are still games with smaller success on Steam and also a huge potential. It is not the case that you need to develop on consoles. Look at these stats from 2020.
- Over 50% of indie games never make more than $4,000. These games never generate enough revenue to cover the development time and other costs. Learn more
- An average indie game makes $3,947 (this is actually median, average is not a good measure as it’s significantly distorted by top earners).
- Over 2/3 of the games don’t cross $10,000 in life time earnings.
- However, the top 1/3 of the indie games are doing pretty well. Almost every 1 in 5 indie games makes more than $50,000. Still, this might not mean the game is profitable or a good investment. If the development team was any bigger than one person and took over a year to make, chances are these people would have been better off as full time developers for a big studio.
- Top 9% cross the $200k line. Most of these games are probably profitable and a proof that indie games can survive.
- The top 1% of indie games make over $7,000,000!
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-steam
You can also see here that indie games make up 95% of Steam.
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/indie-games-make-up-40-of-all-units-sold-on-steam
So if you do the math, you have a 50% chance of losing all your money. And about a 67% chance of not making over $10K, which probably means it does not cover development costs. However, if you get in the upper 33%, you will be doing okay. The top 20% are going to make over $50K. If your game takes under a year to make, and it's a solo project, this is enough to live off of, even in America (and may be much more lucrative overseas since you're making USD). Granted, you could get a normal programming job and make more, but it's still a livable wage to work for yourself and make art. If you are in the top 9%, then you're making over $200K, so a game that took one person 2 years (or 2 people 1 year) you'd be making in the 6-figures. And if you get lucky to get to the top 1% you will make over $7 million. Honestly, this seems like a good gamble, provided you have a good quality game you have faith in.
cybereality I don't want to see Unity fail, either. I actually got more assets on their store than I want to admit, and I don't know if I ever would be able to make up for that possible loss. The marketplace here is lacking (no offense) and needs a ton of new stuff on it. It's not that it's bad, it's just very small ATM. The game engine itself? It seems okay, I think it will be better once Godot 4 is out of alpha stage.
Unity is going to be under my radar, as Godot was for a long time.
Now, let me be so bold as to suggest this and am curious on your thoughts. Would a bigger marketplace make Godot more attractive? I suspect it will for Unity devs.
On another note, does anyone know a good place to get animations that run well with Godot and humanoid characters?
Nerdzmasterz On another note, does anyone know a good place to get animations that run well with Godot and humanoid characters?
Tomcat Thanks. I'm not using Makehuman, but I know both softwares somewhat and they are nice... assuming one ever figures out Blender. It was fun to play with, but had a very deep learning curve.
I miss the old Blender versions that I understood.
Nerdzmasterz assuming one ever figures out Blender. It was fun to play with, but had a very deep learning curve.
I tried to make it as clear as possible. If something is not clear, you can ask, clarify and I will try to improve the tutorial.
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C++ is really a pile of steaming bovine waste 
and should never be used to write safety critical systems. And the more I learn about it the more I understand why the Linux kernel guys do not want it in the kernel.
Example, who would remember if they not made that error before that indexing with an operator[] into a map for instance actually changes the map if the key is not found, thus provoking ub in a concurrent environment just with supposed concurrent reader access (that actually is no reader access), if not taken special care of ? And who knows what else is hidden as an error waiting to be made 
?
What did Linus say "... and if it is only to keep out the mediocre C++ programmers" or so. Right he is. I would certainly have made that error, wasn't it mentioned as an example in an exercise.
grumblegrumble
:-)
But in C++ you can use cool but obscure expressions such as:
***i++
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[was piffle from my part]
This is why I ditched C++ a long time ago.
<smoke emitting from ears>
I would probably go back to Unity in its current state before going back to Unreal.
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There's no way around C++. Rust is gaining territory but has the paradigm "You don't know what you're doing so I won't let you". That's a bit the opposite. No, I fear we must sit down on our behinds and learn ...
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C++ is great, I just don't think most people need that much power or performance. If you do, then you have no choice. But even some of the more advanced ML stuff is moving to GPUs. I think at some point CPUs and GPUs will merge, but the architecture will probably be more like GPUs. Basically a huge set of parallel streams that are fully programmable. Because x86 is a dead end at this point. Or at least it has the potential, but the software can't take advantage. While with GPUs you can essentially reach 100% potential today.
My beef is that any time I tried to learn C++, they cover the basics only, or only very advanced stuff. It
And if you look into Amdahl's Law, you'll see that adding more cores/processors won't solve the problem. For example, if your program is 95% parallel (a very generous number) and only 5% serial, the absolute maximum speedup would be 20x, even if you had a CPU with infinite cores.
http://rits.github-pages.ucl.ac.uk/intro-hpchtc/morea/lesson2/reading3.html
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The end of the touring machine ? Why not.
Somehow the programming languages have not kept up the pace with the hardware development, I take it. C++ just has too many elements that change semantics depending on context. Who knows them foot guns all ? Edit: I'd say C++ is very well for programming let's say OSI level 5+. Btw., it has some power to it, but C and lately Rust are quite a bit off, for the sacrifice of flexibility.
But not all problems lend themselves well to parala pallalel parlay ? Aren't games a good example ? Edit, aside from rasterization and/or ray-tracing ofc.
Nerdzmasterz My beef is that any time I tried to learn C++, they cover the basics only, or only very advanced stuff
It took me a lot of books, looking at other code, trying out my own things, until I got a grasp. I may be not the brightest candle in the candelabra, I confess +/-2 years, on and off, and still I sometimes sit there awe struck.
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Better than me. I grabbed Unreal and followed a guy's YouTube to the letter, grabbed courses, left C++, came back a few times, joined the academy and tried to figure it out without much luck...
Unity was way more my style.
Maybe I will try to tackle C++ again someday, just for the sake of Unreal's graphics. Sorry, Godot and Unity, my horror games and VR worlds should look very realistic.
An example of what I mean- this was actually done for my first game in Unreal- it was nothing fancy, just a game I was making with a tutorial, but I went crazy with the look and feel of it. Note the accelerant beneath the explosion- a fallen pipe with who-knows-what in it. I also made note to add a liquid underneath which has smaller flames, but you can't see all that here. I was going for the base tutorial game, then add a little timer to see if the player escapes before everything is decimated by flames.
There's no such thing as a safe programming language, only safe engineering. We defined how to make provable software decades ago, because I was studying it in college. No one uses those methods unless they absolutely have to, because they're slow and expensive. So the software that was not proven drifts slowly into uses that should require proof.*
This is not peculiar to computers. Every branch of engineering deals with it, but most of them started longer ago.
* No one agrees on what should require proof, because everyone values life and safety differently, usually depending on whether it's theirs or someone else's.
Pixophir But not all problems lend themselves well to parala pallalel
Yes, that's the point. If you read the OS book I linked to, it might make more sense. Most of the slowdown on computers is not the computation. It's the IO a good amount of the time. And many tasks need to be executed in a particular sequence. So even if we got 4096-core processors tomorrow, our computers would probably not get much faster at all. Some things would be much faster though. Ray tracing, baked shadows (which is sort of ray tracing anyhow), password cracking, search algorithms or other pure data processing. There would be benefits. But in day to day computing, using your web browser, managing files, etc. it's unlikely things will get much faster.
cybereality It's the IO a good amount of the time.
SSD drives can be 30x as fast as mechanical hard drives. That makes a huge difference.
If anyone makes tutorials that show how to create a specific thing, try to make it short. There are some tutorials that take like 3 hours and by the time you carefully follow each little step and copy what the teacher's got you have only a rough idea of what just happened, but there's 0 chance you could recreate it after that long process- most of all you're going to want to feel like it's done.
It's rough tho, it's hard to know what to google for, as to what feature of an engine to learn and practice. We all get ensnared by the "Recreate a running and shooting talking pilgrim" tutorials.
DaveTheCoder SSD drives can be 30x as fast as mechanical hard drives. That makes a huge difference.
Yes, but that's not the whole story. For example, the fastest SSD today can read about 7GB per second. However, reading that, you would think an OS would load instantly, or a huge AAA game could open in a couple seconds, but there is still load time. Because there is a lot more going on.
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duane There's no such thing as a safe programming language, only safe engineering.
Certainly true. But my uneducated and slightly humorous 
point was C++ (and its STL) is a particularly bad language for safety critical applications. Unlike for instance C or the new kid on the block for systems programming Rust. It is much easier to get an overview of what a C-program does by looking at it, providing some rules for coding style are observed and to prove that it is correct, than it is for a C++ program because C++ hides too much in documentation small print and compiler high-handedness. Not maliciously, it just has become so because of historical reasons.
And C++, because of all its power, enables newcomers like me to do a for instance a render framework without actually knowing or being aware what's going on in the detail, which bears the danger of making code with undefined behaviour just out of good intentions.
I may, of course, be totally wrong.
cybereality As someone who resides in the rural area of a developing country, $4000 would be a lot of money to me(I'm assuming it's in US or UK currency). This is why I think it's important to be prolific( even though I haven't reached that ideal yet); I also think that developers could make more games that they can afford to sell for cheap. I think developers who are more talented than I am, would have an easier time making a full game in a shorter period of time and probably should. I'm currently sitting on a finished game but, the game is also a template for other games I plan to make in the future. I'm never going to make a game from scratch ever again. Instead, I'll just iterate and improve over what I already have established. If I get the chance today, I'll be playing over my game and recording the footage that I'll turn into promo material. However, I'm also going to get the ball rolling on making a new and improved version of the same game asap. Consistency is the ultimate goal for me; it might minimize the amount of luck I need.
I agree, making a template for games is a great way to let you make a game faster, although it takes a while to get to that stage. My zombie game would be a great template for my 2D games, for instance. Another thing I did when starting out was to rewrite all the code. While this is the other side of the same coin and would take forever, it helped etch in my head what the codes did. Much like how I learned how to use the if statement by writing out a number of them. Any more, the if statement is about as easy as the alphabet- so I could move on to using the switch, else if and else statements, and other more complex things.
Back when I used it, I could've taught someone the basics of Unity as I surrounded myself with examples of it.
I have a lot of prototypes, but I don't reuse projects. Instead, I write my scripts as generic as possible, and then I just copy in what I need. I probably have hundreds of small tests, so it's rare I have to write anything from scratch.
I attended a wedding yesterday and got the privilege of sitting next to a senior programming who over the last 8 years has blown through millions of investor dollars on the promise to deliver a educational MMO sold directly to schools currently apparently already testing in Ohio. I had so much fun at his expense, especially after learning about his original timetable and the use of Unity. Game development read like a nightmare across his face hahaha, starting with education seems like a much safer bet. I will still put fruit in space tho, mark my words.
If anyone wants to read a highly inflammatory and possibly libelous diatribe against github...
http://techrights.org/2022/07/17/coplagiarist-covertly-relicensing-as-proprietary/
Yeah, I know. Reading this stuff is a guilty pleasure of mine. 
I feel like that dude is a free-software Alex Jones, but he's kind of right...
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Yeuch MS.
@cybereality Who's Alex Jones ? I know Davy Jones (Fishface), are they related ? :-)
Seriously, where to put stuff in the future ? I mean, it could happen that anything a dev posts under a free license will be relicensed and they themselves be sued for their prior violation of the later rebranding.
But I understand now better what AI means ...
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Been a while since I've uploaded anything, albeit short:
Is this something i did wrong or a new forum thing?
Pretty sure it's dependent on some setting in youtube.
Megalomaniak
I double checked allow embedding. Maybe it's cos I blagged 20s of Hans Zimmer music :S
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Lol, talking about copyright and -left infringements :-)
Well it prompted saying I could use it but they would monetise my video (not something I could do if I wanted to anyway) so was fine with it. Seemed to embed fine in reddit though.
