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Japanese schoolgirls is a big NO-NO in Australia 😅 Jokes aside, this is the first time I hear about this game, watching trailer I immediately thought about “When They Cry”, and then I read this from article: “Silent Hill f is being developed by Neobards Entertainment (which has previously served as a support studio for Capcom’s Resident Evil games), with creature and character design by Kera, and a script by When They Cry writer Ryukishi07.” So now I’m hyped!
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are “six or more years old”, and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I’m playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
There are still people so powerful they manage to use Windows XP in this day and age. My intuition says most people will be able to use Windows 10 for at least one more decade with minimal issues, after that it will gradually become trickier, but it will still be usable even in 20-30 years with advanced hacks if humanity doesn’t go extinct by then.
Oh man I love how much I have to manage my inventory in this game.
I’m currently playing Skyrim and I kinda dislike fast travel after Morrowind. It felt more interesting to figure out the best way to quickly travel from point A to point B because that involved mark/recall, mage guild teleports, propylons, silt striders, boats, etc. It was interesting logistics mini puzzle, and some of it you had to plan before traveling somewhere, (like the best place to cast “mark” spell). I guess inventory management can be like that too, it can come in different forms like having to play tetris with inventory slots in systems like Diablo, or balancing carry burden between companions in your party in games like Skyrim, or deciding between extended herbalism bags vs smaller general purpose bags in games like World of Warcraft.
Sure, I sometimes prefer simpler systems too. It depends on what I want to play currently. I’m more trying to say we need all kinds of games. Imo, complexity and flexibility of all those systems, like character stats, perks, inventory, etc - is what makes “RPG” an “RPG”. If you take a bit of it away it becomes an “ARPG” like “soulslikes” and other similar games. If you take even more of it away you get “slasher”, “3d platformer”, etc. I’m a big fan of ARPG and 3d platformers like Spyro or Soul Reaver, but it’s totally different kind of games.
Interface looks very similar to SkyUI 🧐
Those features though, I hope other RPGs consider them carefully:
- You can send items from inventory to your home base with a single click
- Consumables don’t weight anything so you can carry infinite potions
This is just way too casual/reductionist imo. At least make some mechanic that justifies sending items. Like an item teleportation spell or something. Imo it’s okay if some RPGs will be as convenient as this, but asking for every RPG to be like this is just too much.
Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.
Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅
If a slow startup of the editor the first time
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.
It is a philosophical difference.
It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.
one time cost
Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.
an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.
I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.
Unreal is easy to pick up for 3D.
Unreal Engine 1.5 - yeah, maybe. Definitely not UE5. It’s one of the most complicated, convoluted and heavyweight systems in existence. Just engine itself is 100gb+ download, opening it the first time takes 30m to compile shaders. Just reading briefly through gtlf import dialog took me like 10minutes.
Doom … mod-friendly
If it’s non-standard engine (“sourceport” in Doom terminology) with its own scripting infrastructure (like GZDoom) then sure. Vanilla and Boom compatible engines are kinda tricky, DeHackEd isn’t exactly the easiest modding approach. Mapping-friendly - for sure, but modding - less so.
And this 24$ thing runs games from 21 consoles (including PSX). Here is 13$ thing that plays 7 consoles.
I’m also using the same system as you. Currently I’m playing Skyrim as a story/ambiance game and Doom 2 (community maps/mapsets, which are releasing every day) as forever playable game. I have time to play more, but I somehow settled on this as I find it very comfortable and enjoyable. Before current Skyrim playthrough I played Steins;Gate and before that original Silent Hill 1 and so on. As infinite games I also sometimes play Quake (community maps/mapsets) and modded Minecraft.
Good job writing this up! When I picked UPBGE I expected the only big performance concern to be highpoly deformations in rig animations, so I thought it’s a no issue for me as I’m doing a very lowpoly thing. Eventually depsgraph turned out a massive problem and at this point every new dozen of objects added to scene hits FPS in mysterious ways, even when there are no constraints or anything like that on those particular objects. Overall I’m using maybe a two dozens of constraints and one simple geonodes setup in the scene, and being able to use those was one the biggest motivations to use UPBGE at all. Turned out they’re really problematic due to depsgraph. I’m sticking with UPBGE for my current project, but I’m really considering moving on afterwards, the way I choose to organise everything in separate composable components hopefully going to make porting it simple. I actually ported enemy ai state machine from my other Godot project to UPGBE, and now it seems I’m going to port evolved version of it either back to Godot or maybe even Unity 😅 Anyway, it’s very fun and productive working with UPBGE, but performance is surprisingly too bad even for very simple lowpoly games, when they require a lot of dynamic objects in the scene.
Reposting from my other reply: There is strafe actually, even two ways of doing it, using original DOS bindings: < and > or alt + left/right arrow. For me the easiest way to do it without strafe is just to move forward a bit, then go back and wait for dudes to come in from the right. Dealing with imps is really hard since their fireballs are sped up significantly. I tried a bit more and it seems it’s possible to actually beat this level properly. You can get other weapons and powerups. It’s just really hard with speed mode and nightmare difficulty.
Played some Doom 2 (halfway through Deck the Underhalls) today, gonna play Skyrim now (started new playthrough few weeks ago). After finishing Underhalls I’m gonna proceed to play even more Doom, and after finishing Skyrim I definitely wanna play more Morrowind, some big things released recently [1] [2].
I personally mostly watch gaming streams as a background for work, never as focus activity. As a main activity I definitely prefer to play myself rather than watch others playing, with a rare exception when I’m just interested to see a few minutes of gameplay of some new game to see if I’m interested in it.
Silent Hill (Duckstation) - classic survival horror game
- great atmosphere, strong sense of mystery and dread
- oldschool approach to mystery/horror where everything doesn’t have to be explained or logical
- some outstanding puzzles
- combat is kinda annoying, but when you play with emulator you at least have saves everywhere
By the way, imagine how Piper Perry would look if she was drawn as anime character. Would you consider that extreme lolicon? She’s almost 30 y/o and that is absolutely legal even in real porn.
Had a relevant conversation nearby recently: https://ani.social/post/5729640/6253450
I really like the artstyle in WoW and often use it as reference.
Have you tried actually comparing game assets from different versions side-by-side?
Big movie industry seems to be one of the most rigid forms of media. Every time I notice the same cinematic/presentational tricks used again and again to invoke the same feelings/emotions in viewer. This is visible in movies themselves but in teasers/trailers it’s done in some kind of heavyweight refined form. Minecraft deserves better than those overused formulas.
Skyblivion is almost there btw, should release this year. Idk why Bethesda would waste their time competing with it.