[HN Gopher] Building a Game with the Real Engine
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       Building a Game with the Real Engine
        
       Author : luu
       Score  : 133 points
       Date   : 2024-10-18 23:04 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (novalis.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (novalis.org)
        
       | Groxx wrote:
       | Point and clicks have quite a few similar examples, the genre
       | lends itself well to dioramas because even when it's 3D it's
       | often a fixed camera path that you can optimize for.
       | 
       | As an example, a nice looking one from a decade ago:
       | https://store.steampowered.com/app/205020/Lumino_City/
       | 
       | Papetura also got a fair bit of attention for a while (for good
       | reason, just look at it): https://youtu.be/ZVhtuKleLuI
       | 
       | Personally I love the hand-crafted "real" look these bring. It
       | tends to consume a _ton_ of disk space, but it looks good pretty
       | much forever.
        
         | aeontech wrote:
         | Lumino City was the first one that came to mind for me as well!
         | 
         | The next one was the Fantasian, by the creators of Final
         | Fantasy (https://youtu.be/ePFgyBtvqQU) - apparently this is
         | finally coming to non-Apple platforms this year, at that.
        
           | esperent wrote:
           | Same, it's such an amazing game. And the mobile port is great
           | too.
        
           | rkachowski wrote:
           | Same, I was blown away watching the making of video
           | (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLv2uHxygc0) and discovering
           | that these environments were created physically. The whole
           | world had that soft handcrafted feel, and it turned out to
           | stem from actual crafts!
        
           | butlike wrote:
           | That Dungimon system in Fantasian seems like it may be the
           | best new idea for JRPGs I've seen in like...forever.
        
       | krypton2k wrote:
       | There was a nice game in this style called The Neverhood.
        
         | 22c wrote:
         | The soundtrack for The Neverhood was also very nice.
        
           | a3w wrote:
           | Lowdee huh
        
         | croo wrote:
         | That game was made out of 3.5 tonns of clay.
        
         | jermaustin1 wrote:
         | This is the game that comes to my mind. I had the demo from a
         | Windows 95 game disk. The demo was great. Never played the full
         | version though.
        
       | Charon77 wrote:
       | You could do gaussian splat on the diorama picture and you can
       | have pretty good dynamic camera movements where the player could
       | walk around
        
         | esperent wrote:
         | Your game would go from playable on a smartphone to requiring
         | an rtx 4090 and 64gb of RAM (ok, slight exaggeration). But it
         | would certainly look amazing.
        
           | diggan wrote:
           | In true game dev fashion, I think parent meant to do the
           | splatting once at build time, and runtime would just use the
           | resulting data, rather than each scene load involving a
           | dynamic "Splatting the gausses" in order to finish loading.
        
           | CaptainFever wrote:
           | Just for reference, here is a real-time 4D Gaussian web
           | viewer: https://antimatter15.com/splaTV/
           | 
           | Does anyone on a smartphone want to try it?
        
             | ffsm8 wrote:
             | 80-90fps on pixel 8 pro. Occasionally spikes to 3 digits
             | for a few moments.
             | 
             | The calculating power of current gen devices is honestly
             | mind-blowing
        
               | aidenn0 wrote:
               | Vsync locked at 60fps on my desktop 1050Ti, which was
               | released 8 years ago, so not _too_ surprising.
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | Oddly enough, some of Cliff Bleszinksi's first titles published
       | by Epic (then Epic MegaGames) were point and click adventures
       | like Palace of Deceit: The Dragon's Plight. They had MSPaint
       | graphics and VB code.
       | 
       | This is a lovely continuation of that same tradition that takes
       | full advantage of your analogue craftsmanship skills.
        
       | PinkMilkshake wrote:
       | Something similar was done for the 1996 game _Creatures_. A part
       | of the diorama still survives and is on display at the _Centre
       | for Computing History_ in _Cambridge_
       | (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/42694/Creatures-
       | Deve...).
        
         | esperent wrote:
         | Wow that's a blast from the past! 12 year old me was absolutely
         | addicted to this game.
        
       | qw wrote:
       | I accidentally hovered my mouse cursor over the images, and saw a
       | detailed description. It may have been generated by AI, but it's
       | a nice touch that was not expected
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | I especially liked the descriptions to the eagle images, where
         | the prompt was "Painting based on Goya's Saturn Devouring His
         | Son, but with a giant eagle eating a tiny headless monk in a
         | brown robe. The eagle holds the monk's in its giant claws.
         | Crimson fluid leaks from the monk's neck.", and the
         | descriptions are:
         | 
         | - an eagle feeding blood to a child in a brown robe.
         | 
         | - an eagle dripping blood onto the hand of a youth in a brown
         | robe; the child's hand and face are bloody and the hand only
         | has three fingers but not because one was eaten.
         | 
         | - a child with no legs holding back the claw of an eagle
         | 
         | - an eagle with its beak at the face of a man; maybe it's
         | eating him or maybe it's feeding him. The eagle has distorted,
         | weirdly large human hands wrapped around the man's neck.
         | 
         | BTW, the alt text, the image filename and the element id are
         | all variations of "Fuck Midjourney"...
        
       | kleiba wrote:
       | It seems quite obvious that Gen AI will be a major change in the
       | creation of game assets. If not stand-alone then certainly in the
       | form of AIded (get it?) tooling. In particular there's huge
       | potential for the indie market. If you're thinking about starting
       | up a company, that's definitely a space where things are going to
       | be hot IMO.
        
         | Vampiero wrote:
         | Every single game dev on Earth has been thinking that since the
         | very first GANs, but the state of the art when it comes to
         | generative AIs that are actually useful for asset generation is
         | still pretty bad.
         | 
         | Much like LLMs are still pretty bad at logic. It seems like
         | we're plateauing in that regard...
         | 
         | The thing about assets is that they have to be coherent with
         | each other. You can't just generate them one at a time in a
         | bunch of different styles and sizes or they'll look terrible.
         | In the simplest case you want to generate at least an entire
         | spritesheet for a single character or object. And that's still
         | fundamentally impossible with modern generative AIs
        
           | lpat wrote:
           | Consistency was for sure the biggest issue when I tried this
           | approach last time. Also most of the images were a bit off,
           | like having misaligned limb or some visual glitch. Sometimes
           | fixing those details can be harder than drawing some crappy
           | image from scratch.
           | 
           | I really wish there was a tool where I can select the theme,
           | which objects I need and it would spit out some half decently
           | looking art. I even don't care if it was some simplified,
           | cookie-cutter art as long as it was low-effort and
           | consistent. It could be a real time saver for prototyping.
        
           | jncfhnb wrote:
           | I've been exploring this for a while. Icons are pretty solid
           | with flux these days. Previous models struggled with this.
           | 
           | Sprite sheets are achievable or near achievable imo. SDXL was
           | maybe good enough as a foundational model if you could
           | leverage IPAdapter or a Lora to maintain character
           | consistency. Although the former was never effectively tuned
           | for styles I wanted and the latter requires some actual
           | artist output still. Flux as a base model is far more
           | consistent and has good enough controlnets to do sprite
           | generation but probably still needs some a proper IPAdapter
           | running to be stable enough for production.
           | 
           | Ideally it's just a productivity tool for an actual artist
        
           | ksymph wrote:
           | I can't speak for how well it works but PixelLab [0] claims
           | to support animations, rotation and other things that seem
           | impossible.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.pixellab.ai
        
           | kleiba wrote:
           | I did, however, specifically use future tense in my post. I
           | agree that we're not there yet but I don't think that we have
           | plateaud. The rapid spurts in GenAI from nothing to what
           | we've got today in such a short amount of time is not
           | sustainable, but we're still seeing improvements all the
           | time.
           | 
           | I don't understand the LLM/logic analogy, other than that
           | there's still things about GenAI that are lacking today.
           | 
           | Current GenAI is not streamlined for asset generation. But I
           | think there is a huge opportunity to go into that niche and
           | address the problems that currently exist.
        
         | KineticLensman wrote:
         | > It seems quite obvious that Gen AI will be a major change in
         | the creation of game assets.
         | 
         | Check out the authors discussion on the subject of 'turds' [0],
         | image artefacts created by AI that totally break immersion as
         | soon as you properly notice them.
         | 
         | [0] https://novalis.org/blog/2023-05-30-turds.html
        
       | jtxt wrote:
       | Reminds of an early tank simulator where the driver in the
       | cockpit saw a video feed from a camera on a gantry they were
       | slowly driving around a diarama.
       | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE
       | 
       | "Real engine" for just one player at a time though.
        
       | fiala__ wrote:
       | this is neat! Diorama-based games are really underrated IMO. I'm
       | currently attempting to do something related, building a game on
       | top of Google Street View, with 3D audio and objects embedded in
       | the panorama.
        
       | atkulp wrote:
       | Truberbrook (http://trueberbrook.com/) is a recent diorama game
       | example.
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-22 23:01 UTC)