duane Thankyou m8 I removed them and merged and everything seems fine!

    Unfortunately, we don't all have the luxury of owning rights to use LEGOS... I wonder what other marketing tricks would be useful?

      Well yes. But if you are willing to take some heat, controversy or lawsuits can be free marketing.

      Okay, this is odd. I was working on a VR project called OpenXR. When I try to download and install the assets for it, the game crashes every time. Unsure what is going on, but this issue is not unfamiliar to me. I still don't know how to fix it, however.

      Nerdzmasterz
      Roblox got away with it way back in the 2000's. Simply don't call it a lego. You could even invent your own discount lego brand and plead it as a parody when they eventually sue you. That actually works in the US. You could call it:

      • ClickyBricks
      • Build A Block
      • Caltrops I mean Calblocks

        Efectivamente. There are actually quite a few brands who sell bricks that work in a similar way to Lego under a different name.

        This is because the purely functional aspects can not be protected. That would be like protecting physics, which of course is ridiculous. The design aspects or course can. Now, don't ask me to explain the differences. I have no idea, and I believe many companies, not only Lego, ran into that.

        In some context, you can't protect the concept of a car with 4 wheels and an engine of sorts. But the design and the branding, that you can protect.

        If you just make the bricks look like... bricks... there won't be any legal issues. It's a computer, they don't have to actually interlock.

        Lego's original patent covered the design of how the bricks connect (the bumps on top, hollow cylinders below, etc), as well as several alternatives they didn't intend to use but were worried competitors might use.
        But that patent expired in 1978.
        https://patents.google.com/patent/US3005282A

        Oh man. I have a few really good ideas/stories for a game, and I'm kind of stumped with the visual design. I know how to do art, but I want to work on the thing solo, so I have to manage my time. One of my main ideas is an urban FPS parkour type of thing. Like a mix of Mirror's Edge and F.E.A.R. The problem is, I have to keep the game small to do the assets.

        Question for you all, would you rather play a small game with AAA graphics, or a larger city with lo-end indie graphics? I was thinking either doing flat shaded polygons (like Out of this World / Another World) or having pixel art in 3D. I think I could do a small city like that. But I'm not sure it would be compelling visually. Or do AAA graphics (from a few years ago) but make it a smaller game. Something like Dredd or The Raid, where the whole game is inside one building. What do you think?

          I prefer larger games to high-end graphics, but maybe I'm weird. 😉

          No, honestly I say game play > graphics, and I gather I'm not alone. I mean, Sims 4 graphics is better than 3 graphics, but everyone on those forums is begging for more game play from 4 and is often saying 3 was better despite looking worse. Just an example.

            cybereality I believe that you probably could make a large game with realistic graphics in relatively short period of time, though my standards of what constitutes large is quite low. I think you could come up with a prototype in an incredibly short period of time but, I assume that the artstyle will be the hardest thing to execute. The only advice I can give you, where the art is consider, is to just find the easiest way to get things done. If there is a shortcut, take it; nobody will know or even care. Some ideas that I have for my own game would include making some sort of character creation system for enemies/NPC so I can make a whole bunch of them look diference with just a few models while reducing draw call (though I'm far from reaching there yet). I don't think I have to give you any advice on level design; just remember that you're just one person and find the easiest way to get things down as fast as possible.

              cybereality

              I hope you're not depending on feedback from here -- it's kind of a specialized crowd. 🙂

              Who's your target audience?

                  Oh wait. I didn't mean reduce draw call; I might file size. XD

                  Yeah, that makes sense @Audiobellum . I have no problem with coding, I could probably code the basics of an open world game in a few months. The issue is just the scope. Like I can do art, say one character or one car. But not 30 realistic characters or 100 cars. I know I could procedurally generate a city, I did some research years ago, and it's actually not that difficult. Especially if it similar to Manhattan, where the streets are on a grid. But there are a lot of little pieces, just like the garbage in a can, fake movie posters, every bottle of liqueur in a bar. It's not that any one thing is difficult, it's just the scope of it all. I'm also considering some AI-generated art, but I haven't seen anyone pull it off in real-time yet, so it would be a big gamble. And I still have a lot to learn in terms of machine learning. But that would be something else to explore.

                  cybereality Just me.

                  Then ask yourself these following questions:

                  Which would you rather play?
                  If you were browsing through steam right now which of them would you click on to see it more closely?
                  What would be most likely to entice you to actually buy it/pay for it?

                    Well, I did a quite test today of 3D pixel art graphics and I'm not sure I like it. It would make the art much quicker to make, but it looks ghetto. Granted it was a quick 2 hour test, but not very promising. I want to try the vector look tomorrow. Personally, I love realistic graphics, but I'm trying to be practical.

                    I was thinking something like this game. Would anyone here want to play (or buy) something with these graphics?

                      Nerdzmasterz I mean, Sims 4 graphics is better than 3 graphics, but everyone on those forums is begging for more game play from 4 and is often saying 3 was better despite looking worse.

                      There was a living city in Sims 3, there isn't one in Sims 4. Totally different feeling.

                      cybereality Personally, I'm not a fan of pixel graphics. I think low-polygon models are better.

                            cybereality
                            Gameplay or story wise, no idea (since I don't know what it is).
                            Graphics wise, definitely. Looks cool.

                              Pixels are okay if done right. Sheltered used pixels, but given the animations it had, it's a good thing they were. These range from getting sick to answering nature's call. Ewww, I am so glad that was so unrealistic.

                              Beat Cop uses pixels, though, and the graphics are so lame. PS: it was a game for mature audiences only. Still, it felt like the main thing that made it mature was a swear word thrown in very often. Not the best experience if you just want to play detective.

                                Tomcat Exactly. It seemed more like good graphics replaced good game play, and made it seem like they were simply being lazy.

                                    Nerdzmasterz seriously, don't play this game. The characters fearlessly say whatever they want, call people whatever they want, and ruin the game.

                                        Nerdzmasterz It seemed more like good graphics replaced good game play, and made it seem like they were simply being lazy.

                                        I'm not sure if "lazy" is the right term. I've been following the development of The Sims series and I think the developers just lack the skills. Or rather EA in their greedy style saves money and doesn't hire really competent workers, who of course cost more. It's very much like Sims 4 wanted to improve the graphics without raising the system requirements too much and they almost succeeded. But new ideas after the departure of William R. Wright — they did not have: growing up is done in phases, smooth growing up was not mastered, the same rough squares for the placement of walls and objects — only small cosmetic changes to the old solutions. Until there is an alternative to The Sims — no dramatic improvements are worth waiting for.

                                          Nerdzmasterz I think I get it. Growing up I got programmed to connect the no-no words with tension. When it gets used in a punk song, it doesn't phase me. But when it's dropped every other line in an otherwise calm prog rock song, I'm on edge. Though knowing prog, that might be the point. Prog dudes are weird.

                                            The meshes, nodes and bounding boxes are dancing before my eyes. My eyes suggest me off-by-one errors, but unstable left and right and to and fro. Compiler says all is well, no warnings of buffer excursions, doesn't crash when rendering, so it's probably my mind playing tricks on me.

                                            Time to crack zosh ... lunk lunk lunk ... aaah fire up a game.

                                            Cheers :-)

                                            Um, is there any reason files that are PNG, OBJ, or FBX would cause Godot to crash? Still happening.

                                            I'd show the assets, if I wouldn't have purchased them. I could possibly offer a zip of the project, but I can't get it to even open- let alone show what's happening. Anyway, this is the link to the assets, if anyone knows anything about them. I usually have no trouble with assets from this site.
                                            https://syntystore.com/collections/simple-series/products/simple-apocalypse-interiors-cartoon-assets I have godotOVRmobile, godot-oculus, and godot openXR addons in the project. Not sure if one of them is conflicting with another?

                                            Please help? I really just want to develop VR games, I would love to specialize in that.

                                              PNG is a standard format, so should be no problem. I've had crashes on large images (above 4K) but smaller files and usually no problem. For any 3D models, like FBX, you should import into Blender and then export to glTF. OBJ is usually okay, but glTF is a much better format. For FBX, there are like 200 different versions (Autodesk updates it every year, sometimes more than once) and they break compatibility all the time (I think on purpose, to keep you subscribing). So you have to import to Blender first, and then export to a real open format like glTF, which works fine in Godot.

                                              I don't know about the fbx in Godot, but at least Blender's FBX is purely clean room reverse engineered, meaning none of the developers have read the official FBX docs, due to Autodesk's licensing being pretty horrible.
                                              So there's chances things can be wrong or not be supported properly. You might have an edge case FBX file that Godot doesn't understand.
                                              (I'd guess Blender's FBX is more up to date than Godot's FBX, so as Cyber says, try using Blender to convert them)

                                              cybereality Hmmm...I played Tokyo Xanadu and didn't have any problem with it's graphics; this looks pretty decent as well. It's not the type of artstyle I'd expect from an FPS but, perhaps you could do something different by making a FPS game based on games like Tokyo Xandu or Dusk Diver( which is a game I haven't played but seems incredibly similiar to Tokyo Xandu). What I like about Tokyo Xanadu is that it's "open world"( which is just a bunch of hub locations connected to each other through various levels) take place in a contemporary modern setting( that isn't post-apocalypic) yet it doesn't seem strange that the player can't drive anything. Getting away with an "open world" game that's limited in scope is something I probably should study. Anyway, what you want to do with your own game is up to you at the end of the day anyway. When your game is a major success, free to share some of the billions with some of us.

                                                Godot used to use ASSIMP, but I believe they updated to a custom FBX loader. In any case, it's open source, so I assume reverse engineered. I've bought thousands of dollars worth of assets, and honestly the FBX files almost never work. Even in Blender. The format is horrible, and I think intentionally designed to be broken. There is no reason for an array of points and references to textures to not work in 2022. So FBX is bunk. OBJ almost always works, since the format is simple and public. But I'd still recommend importing to Blender so you can export the material properly.

                                                  Woah! Look what I found on the internet. Someone is making this in Godot!

                                                  Woah! Never heard of that. Animation is a little stiff, but otherwise it looks pretty full featured.

                                                  I mean, that is pretty legitimate packaging. But if you get some random USB drive in the mail, you're kind of an idiot if you plug it into your computer. Like if some random white powder arrives in the mail, you gonna eat it? Maybe it's a good lesson in security.

                                                  Nerdzmasterz Um, is there any reason files that are PNG

                                                  I load PNGs up to 16k without problems. But I made these myself with libpng and load them with stb_image (that's C/C++). If there are crashes on loading, I would suspect the own part of the software to cause them. That'll be Godot. Bugs happen.