Inviting the government to solve gaming industry issues is a really bad idea.

So this has bothered me all week to the point that I felt commentary was necessary. What am I talking about? The whole controversy surrounding EA and loot boxes in Star Wars (EA) Battlefront 2.

The issue started when big game companies like EA integrated mechanics that were initially devised for the free to play model, into full retail games. These mechanics include micro transactions and gachapon style vending.

I won't get into detail describing what EA did as that was covered by various other reporting outlets and indie YouTube personalities. But the part that disturbs me, is about mid week it was reported that some governments were considering the idea of getting involved to regulate/define the gachapon mechanics as outright gambling, “for the childrens” sake. This was met with a large amount of posters cheering and praising the idea.

As you probably already guessed I'm part of the minority that feels it's a bad idea to let the government handle this. While I don't feel that the government is evil, I have lived long enough to know that if the government is brought in, the whole situation will become political. And I have often observed this to generally be a bad thing. Political situations have always brought out the most useless and ugliest of debates on issues that don't even effect the majority of people voting on it. Not to mention that these kind of things always end up being about “the children”.

So the problem is, that people feel if they do abstain from buying bad products it will not change the AAA gaming industry as people that either don't mind paying or are desperate enough will buy it regardless and continue to feed into this anti-consumer model. This of course is false, as it was reported during the week that request for refunds and bad press was having an effect. Voting with your wallet dose work.

The government may manage to tailor legislation to our liking, but I'm very doubtful that would happen as there are too many people in the government with their own agendas.

I feel that angry Star Wars fans are not thinking straight, and fail to realize what inviting the government into the gaming industry means. I think they have forgotten in their hate filled rage that not so long ago the government wanted to censor violent games. In some ways they still do.

The thing you have to realize to see were I'm coming from is that EA games are optional, the government is not.

I can ignore EA but not the government.

I can decide that EA games are a bad deal and not purchase them with no real repercussions. No matter how unfair I feel my taxes are, I have to pay them, or armed personal will come to take my property, freedom and even my life if it escalates to that extent.

And I don't need 50%+1 of all players permission in order to not play EA games.

Anyway that is all I have to say about that.

LOOK!  A loot box!  Just kidding....  Or am I?!  Dun-Dun-Dunnnnnn

So in game development news.

Godot has finally been feature froze. With the anticipated release of Godot 3, enthusiast have been adding a ton of new stuff to it, causing major feature creep. While I love new features as much as the next developer wanna be, it was getting to the point were no progress was being made due to constant bug fixes and revisions.

Now that Godot is feature froze, GDQuest (guy doing the course that I signed up for) can start working on it again.

So for the next few months I'll probably be doing that as well as practice my Blender skills.

Alright,... Let's take it again, right from the top.

As usual, real life has been busy (a lot more than usual). No real progress has been made in terms of putting out a game, no surprise since I changed game engines on top of everything else.

Since my last post I figured out some of the issues that I was having with Godot, mainly the animation system. Now I'm good with it. It seems that animate sprite and the animator are two independent entities and can work together or separate, but the tutorials I did made it feel that it was necessary to use both. I also found a way to show variables in the editor.

So I'm a lot more familiar with how the interface of Godot works. That doesn't really help me with scripting though, and the tutorials available on YouTube are what you would expect. Thankfully I found out about a course that was in the works. It's being created by a user that goes by the name Gdquest. I helped crowd fund it, so I'm in line to get a copy when it's released. He is currently working on the finite state machine, and it's a concept that I never really learned when using Unity. But it looks like it's going to save me a lot of headaches and problems if I learn how to make and implement it.

And for some sad news warped in some good news, Blender doesn't seem too interested in supporting NPR (none photo realistic) rendering in their new engine (Eevee). I won't be switching Blender versions anytime soon. Thankfully the NPR community seems to be working/trying on a solution for this problem.

That's it for now, so I'll end this with a familiar picture that now has a not-so-familar re-rendering to it!

Waiting for Godot.... Or was Godot waiting for me?

Hey all (anyone that comes here + empty space).

It's pretty obvious that I haven't been doing a heck of a lot in the last few months. Well I'm finally bored with playing games, so now I'm back in a (try) make one, frame of mind.

As I'm sure those of you that use Unity already know that they have finished its final 5th life cycle and now plan to move to a subscription based model. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not a fan of the new model. The new model makes it twice as expensive for people like me that have no interest in developing for mobile platforms. Anyway, what's done is done. Now that it's March, Unity will find out if their master plan was as good as it sounded on paper. If you ask me, I think their “new” CEO finally EA'ed the company.....

So I finally decided after some consideration that I should probably be looking into a new game engine (for a backup if anything). Unity is great, but I don't like the path the company has taken and I suspect that this is a prelude to, more “fun” to come.

Looking around the web I got the typical big name engines and a few unknown(ish) ones. I finally found a post somewhere were someone mentioned an engine called Godot. What I found was a free open source engine that pretty much fit nicely next to Blender in terms of available. So with nothing to lose I gave it a go.

The interface resembles Unity somewhat, but took me a while to get use to making a full scene that functions similar to how prefabs worked in Unity. Although this engine could use quite a bit more polish, I think it's the diamond in the rough I was looking for. While it's definitively usable, I kind of feel a few things could be improved on. I'm still fairly new to Godot, so some of this could be my own lack of knowledge on the engine.

-Exposed variables and adjusting things during run time: maybe there is a way to do this in Godot, but in Unity it made debugging and tweaking a lot easier as you could outright see what was going on under the hood while your game was running, and make tweaks without having to relaunch over and over again.

-The animation player: while it is usable, it feels a bit buggy and funky, the FPS setting when inserting your clips feels/is broken as I didn't notice any speed difference when adjusting the value. You can still adjust the time in second value during key frame insertion to change the frame rate. But it would be nice to adjust the FPS value instead of stretching/squishing the timeline.

Those are pretty much the two major things that I had some issues with. Some other minor stuff that I won't bother to get into right now. Overall though, this is a surprisingly good engine, and who can argue about the price/contract?

So~~~~

As of right now I'm in the process of learning how to script in GdScript and generally how to do all the stuff I learned to do in Unity. Thankfully my time in Unity wasn't wasted as I'm having a much easier time learning to use this one. On top of that, this engine has a somewhat simpler layout compared to Unity. It's tilling system is far superior to Unity IMO (Note: haven't tried the latest Unity build yet, but I suspect it won't be as good as Godot judging from screenshots)

My current goal is to remake that god awful platformer I made in Unity, Cat Attack!!! FFFF&M. Hopefully I can improve it more this time around :)