how do you compare to almost 10 year ago you?

[Vladimer]

lol

[Zeuter]

See you in 2 years.

As it turns out, unicode from this block can't be used here.

[Cassiel]

I tried but I found out to my detriment that it was an incredibly abusive industry.

Speaking of, just saw this on the front page of Gamasutra:

http://jobs.gamasutra.com/jobseekerx/vi ... tno=132618

65k for an engineering gig is a joke. I also happen to know a lot about Ryan Dancey going back years to his time at WotC and WW/CCP, and man, I feel bad for whoever takes a job at Goblinworks.

[Turkey_Slayer]

So where's my F2P game, Zeuter?

[Zeuter]

Working on it. Not sure whether I'd like to tie the name Zeuter to it though, so I'm reluctant to post about our progress.

[Zeuter]

However, I can tell you about some fun technical stuff. As we have a rather large amount of assets, making spritesheets for all animations would be prohibitively expensive on the disk space side. It is a mobile game after all. As such, we've decided to use tweening.

Our artist creates the animation in Flash, which he then exports with the following tool: https://github.com/grapefrukt/grapefrukt-export
It exports one or more animations to two .xml-files, one file with the z-index and offset for each separate moving part, and one file with the actual animation frames (containing rotation, scaling, translation etc) for each part in each animation, and an image collection of parts. The xml is highly compressible and thus far more efficient than a spritesheet that simply has all the animation frames.

There is one drawback, however. Drawing all the different part textures in the XNA spritebatch is hugely inefficient - as far as I know it has to stop and start the spritebatch again when you switch textures. Huge overhead. I've overcome this, however, by using the following tool: http://spritesheetpacker.codeplex.com/
With this, all the parts are packed into one big efficient image, while it generates a rectangle dictionary for me to access all the parts. The only additional requirement this generates is that all part names need to be unique, but that's not hard to enforce.

[Cassiel]

Why XNA?

[Zeuter]

Well, Monogame to be precise. Ease of porting to other platforms and C#, a language I really like.

[Cassiel]

Just seems a bit heavy when there are all these snappy Lua engines out there. Still love C#, though. Parser combinators 4 lyfe.

[Zeuter]

What language would have your preference?

[Cassiel]

Talking about the engine, not the language. Other engines might have an equally rough time with your setup, though. Who knows.

If there's anything I don't miss about the WC3/SC2 days, it's having to do coding gymnastics to get around silly engine limitations.

[RageAgainstVoid]

A labour not missed, but still admired.

Zeut, cool stuff. I wanna see you give us kind of a post mortem when all's done.
Yeah, kinds of context switches are to be minimized especially in graphics.

[Shortling]

I have confusingly and uncomfortably transitioned from one confusing and uncomfortable transition period to another one. I have missed all of you terribly.

[NRJyzr]

I took a specialization in game design with my software engineering degree. Of the 15 people in my graduating year with this...minor I guess you could call it, I'm fairly certain only one actually went into the game industry.

As for 10 years ago me. I was 17, graduating from high school and fat. I lost a ton of weight and I'm basically a completely different person, not including that I am married and own a house now. Bunch of shit happened to me though, my sister-in-law (well, future sister-in-law at the time) and her boyfriend, who was my close friend, died in a car crash. Then two years later, my Mom died suddenly in her sleep without warning at 52 years old, six months before my wedding. It has caused me to not waste my time or take shit from people I could care less about.

Not to bring in my sob story, everyone's got shit they deal with, but that is why I am so different compared to ten years ago. I know people who haven't changed one bit in ten years.

Randomly pop in here, and what do I find.

Jesus...

Gand, hope you're doing ok
-the old guy

[gandalf37]

Hah thanks for the concerns everyone. It is appreciated. Like I mentioned, I didn't post that to gain sympathy - to say my life is shit would be a blatant lie. I guess I just wanted to answer the original question very honestly as I never have been able to. Normally when I see someone "in real life" I haven't seen in a while and they ask how I've been I usually just reply with "oh, fine", which is also a blatant lie. So it was refreshing to answer honestly.

It's now funny that you refer to yourself as "the old guy" NRJ, amongst my friends we're all hitting 30 soonish (some already have) and we talk about how we're getting old now haha.

[Cassiel]

My standard response to "How are you?" is "How I am," with a dash of "Fuck your small talk" face. AwkwardDude4Lyfe.

[Turkey_Slayer]

EdgyDude4Lyfe.

FTFY

[Jellbelly-]

Holy shit! What a strange time-warp rabbit hole to fall back into... it's amazing the shared history us bunch of weirdo misfits have here. I was like literally 12 when I started playing the ToBs with you noobs. Bizarre.

Interesting how many of us went into creative fields or have aspirations to. I graduated this May and moved to LA to make movies one day. In the meantime I am a prostitute trying to survive in this crazy town. Look for my credits on 2 Chainz music videos and shitty reality TV shows. Srsly. It's brutal out here starting out but I'm hopeful there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I wish all of you the best of luck. Make awesome stuff. Oldschool 5v5 tourny is happening 10 years from now and the underdog pLex will dominate as per usual. Pix be nice.

[Cassiel]

Acting or something else?

[Nooneyouknow]

Holy shit seeing 2013 join dates here is freaky.

I think I'm just going to stop resisting and go fully into accounting/bookkepping. I still think CPA requirements for California (and most other states for that matter) are absolutely ridiculous though.

Also, car payments fucking suck.

[Cassiel]

Listen to the Mustache.

[Turkey_Slayer]

Listen to the Mustache.

There's some good tips in that article, but there is some stupid shit said there as well. A lot of it doesn't really even apply to people who don't live in certain geographic areas. It also says that Lexus and Acura vehicles are reliable, which except for a couple models, is a bold-faced lie.

[Cassiel]

Specific models are exactly what he's talking about, and there's no restriction by geographic area. He uses 15k miles per year in the example because not everyone is in a position to bike around town, but biking also isn't necessary to cut down your mileage. I drive fewer than 3k miles per year because I moved to within 3 miles from where I work. That's something you should do anyway -- you'd be amazed at how positive an impact a 5-minute commute has on your life.

[Turkey_Slayer]

He uses 15k miles per year in the example because not everyone is in a position to bike around town, but biking also isn't necessary to cut down your mileage. I drive fewer than 3k miles per year because I moved to within 3 miles from where I work. That's something you should do anyway -- you'd be amazed at how positive an impact a 5-minute commute has on your life.

That's something I can't really do at this point. I go to school and I work at that school which is 5 miles away, but I also have to be at a hospital in Miami a couple days a week which is 30 miles away. To move closer to either the school or to Miami would be mean a significant increase in rent, which wouldn't justify the transportation costs. Of course, these are just individual circumstances, but without a doubt there's many people in similar circumstances across the country. If you were to just look at transportation costs in a vacuum, then yes most of the things in that article make sense, but in real-world applications it's obviously not as black and white.

Even before all of this, I put 100,000 miles on my vehicle in less than 5 years, which is over 20,000 miles annually, and I would hardly consider myself an extreme driver as the article stated. I've never had a commute longer than 50 minutes, not even to Miami. I guess I'm just a guy who's on the move a lot.

I also value my life, so I won't be biking anywhere down here.

[Zeuter]

Gosh, I think I pay max 30 euros for transportation a year down here in socialist hell Netherlands.

Never needed a car myself though, so there's that. If it gets to the point where a company car is required, I'd like to get a Tesla.