I used to use GameMaker back in the Mark Overmars 5.0/6.0 days, but dropped it the moment it went to a paid model. This is great news, and I might honestly check it out again.
Nowadays I would generally prefer to use Godot - not a surprise, given where I’m posting. But GM was great for quick prototyping, if nothing else.
That’s because it actually is the exact same image
Whoever wrote this article messed up and pasted the same image twice for the Au Ra race, which is the first one shown here. The actual before and after shots are pretty obvious
Edit: this is not true, I was recalling a different event. Links are down the thread
I'm not sure if the image has since been updated, but the horn-y boy before/after isn't the same image twice despite looking very similar. The left image has light-colored areas on the horns and some other similarly minor differences which are more noticeable when flicking between them but kinda hard to spot in a side-by-side.
Ah, I do see what you mean upon closer inspection. You have a keen eye
However, this is most likely due to the author grabbing the two images from a different source which subjected them to different compression artifacts. They definitely both are the same model, even if the actual image files are not 1:1
I play the game and have followed these updates as they came out, so I was able to tell very quickly from looking at the hair and eyes. But don’t take my word for it: I quickly tracked down the actual before/after shots. Sorry for reddit link
It is the same model, but the difference is in the horns and scales. Those pics don't do a very good job of showing it, though. From the paragraphs right above the pics:
Following community feedback after the announcement of the graphical update back at the fan festival event in Las Vegas, he shared an update of the Au Ra race, whose updated horns and scales had been initially revealed as looking very reflective but a little too much like enamel.
“This reflectivity looked very high quality so it was good for showing off, but it didn't really match our vision of what we wanted the Au Ra to look like from our original design back in 3.0, so we continued tweaking,” Yoshida admitted before sharing a new headshots of a male and female Au Ra where their horns look less reflective and more natural. “This goes for all of the updates for the other races as well. What we showed in Las Vegas wasn't the final product but a work in progress.”
It’s all a bit tangled up now, but the second set of pictures in the article shows the current in-game models and then the remade models, where you can clearly see the difference in the hair. The first set (the one in question here) shows the remade one, and then the remade-remade one with the muted horn texture.
I remembered this particular Au Ra from the slideshow about 4 months ago, so when I noticed the distinct hair being the same in both and found the original slides I tunnel visioned on that. But in truth, what we are seeing is a second pass after player feedback from the event I incorrectly believed the shots were from.
I apologize for not being as in-tune with the game’s news as I had assumed. I do not play an Au Ra myself so I had been kind of tuning out the drama around the scales and their luster. But it (and the changing of the glowing eye rings) has been an ongoing pain point for many. People get really attached to their look
As someone who has put countless hours into various MMOs (including FFXIV), I totally get people getting anxious about their characters looks potentially changing. I remember when WoW had their character model update as the feedback from players then. Blizzard resolved the issue by adding a client-side option to toggle between old and new character models.
Loved the visuals and the puzzles, but was kinda disappointed by the story and how they presented their message. Still a really nice game, I’d recommend it
The visual style and language puzzles definitely were the thing to get me to buy it. Currently on the scientist level with my son. He’s been in charge of exploring and I think he likes the different cultures associated with each level. And he’s been super excited every time we crack a puzzle or complete a language. Been lots of fun and glad they put in some deep thought into it.
I’ve been playing since d1 launched. I stopped a while back and dip in and out with each expansion but hate that I find myself not knowing what’s what. I’ve held off on lightfall, given the reviews. Should I bother at £15 in the sale, or say my goodbye’s?
It’ll probably be free to play for the last month before The Final Shape. Grab it, get the atrocious campaign over with, and burn through the seasonal content before the month is over.
Well, the studio that brought us TS had been closed down in 2009 already. Deep Silver had opened a new studio under that name in 2021 (admittedly employing parts of the “old gang”), which is the one we’re now seeing getting shut down.
After Crytek had thoroughly fucked them, yes. Much of the key people were the same and thats really what I referred to. The Old Guarde did not survive a second fall.
More importantly, people who directly influenced my childhood via Goldeneye and the original TS were in there when it went down again. To them, I give the mightiest of salutes.
Hate to see that. Recently played through time splitters future perfect with my friend and had a great time on the Xbox backwards compatibility. Hopefully the time splitters rewind project makes good progress and releases at some point.
they would have done these layoffs regardless for what it’s worth. Apples privacy stance for advertising companies (what unity wanted to be) and the lack of easy access to additional investment this past year meant that it’s not been a sustainable business for a while
While Epic has been pouring money from Fortnite into Unreal Engine and making significant progress in updating the engine.
Unity has been sitting on its ass for years doing absolutely nothing in the way of R&D.
As a result, Unity is now left behind.
Valve has given up on being an Engine developer.
Epic with the Unreal Engine will have a monopoly soon if it doesn't already.
Anyone attempting to make their own modern game engine these days are way behind the ball. All the big players are switching to Unreal.
And it's not only Game Engine, but movie making engine as well.
The only company I could see that would have the $$$ and talent to compete against Epic for a Graphics Engine would be nVidia.
AMD doesn't have the R&D and Scientists specializing in Graphics/Physics/Rendering/Simulation/InformationLoading like nVidia does.
Valve has the $$$ and talent, but they are focused on hardware now, and are even farther behind than Unity.
Having a single Game Engine monopoly will be bad for all of us in the end.
The only Video Game engine that I could see someone develop that could compete against Unreal, is if the engine was built from the ground up 100% focused on anti-cheat. Libraries that are designed from the start to be multiplayer focused with un-necessary data scrubbed properly from the clients so they can't sniff out data. Something designed to be hack proof.
That game engine, even if not graphically intense would be highly sought after in a wide genre range of games.
…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.
And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials on places like YouTube.
Popular tutorial channels on YouTube know their viewer audience is less likely to be large enough to be profitable via ad revenue, premium subscriptions, etc. if they are limited niche of people only willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for.
Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of an application gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.
This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.
All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.
All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.
Never really thought about the popularity of FOSS starting with youtube-tutorials. But completely reasonable that when everybody starts with Godot (or other FOSS like Blender), even bigger Studios might just use that one since there are just more guys already proficient with it.
Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini’s price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files… OR…
They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there’s no licensing fee or if there is - it’s only when they are really profitable or whatever.
The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.
Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you’d be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions…
Same goes for Adobe’s stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud’s garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services… All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.
This is also why languages like R and Python are supplanting SPSS and Matlab. Open source is just better in some ways, particularly once it gets over the initial usability barrier, which Jellyfin seems to now be achieving.
Hello I work for Unity (for now lol, we’ll see)! I’d like to just say from my end of things we do actually do a solid amount of R&D. Just that a depressing amount of it either never sees the light of day, takes so long to release it has already been done better by someone else, or is unannounced with little to no documentation on release so it never gets visibility. The other thing to note is that Unity does a lot of non-game things that might not be that noticeable if you’re just looking at it from a game making perspective, like our publicly known contracts we have to help train the military to “totally not kill people you guys”!
gamedeveloper.com
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