Hacker Remix

Building a Game with the Real Engine

145 points by luu 9 months ago | 36 comments

Groxx 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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.

rkachowski 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

That Dungimon system in Fantasian seems like it may be the best new idea for JRPGs I've seen in like...forever.

esperent 9 months ago

Same, it's such an amazing game. And the mobile port is great too.

krypton2k 9 months ago

There was a nice game in this style called The Neverhood.

jermaustin1 9 months ago

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.

22c 9 months ago

The soundtrack for The Neverhood was also very nice.

a3w 9 months ago

Lowdee huh

croo 9 months ago

That game was made out of 3.5 tonns of clay.

jtxt 9 months ago

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.

jamalaramala 9 months ago

> The other bad thing about 3d printing is layer lines. I had some bench parts printed, and I thought I could cover up the layer lines with acrylic paint, but it it turned out that even two layers of gesso followed by two layers of paint didn’t solve the problem.

You can fix that problem by sanding your 3d-printed object before applying acrylic paint. It's also recommended to apply a primer before you paint it.

qw 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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"...

Charon77 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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.

CaptainFever 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

Vsync locked at 60fps on my desktop 1050Ti, which was released 8 years ago, so not too surprising.

Charon77 8 months ago

Samsung S10+, 60FPS although I'm not sure what I'm supposed to look at.

zem 9 months ago

30-40fps on a pixel 3, not bad!

diggan 9 months ago

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.

kleiba 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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 9 months ago

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

kleiba 9 months ago

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.

ksymph 9 months ago

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

KineticLensman 9 months ago

> 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

bitwize 9 months ago

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.

9 months ago

robertlagrant 9 months ago

Needle felting is fun! My daughter got a little needle felting kit for Christmas last year and I ended up doing most of it. I was terrible at it, but we had fun.

atkulp 9 months ago

Truberbrook (http://trueberbrook.com/) is a recent diorama game example.

fiala__ 9 months ago

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.

PinkMilkshake 9 months ago

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...).

ehnto 9 months ago

I still have a few of these games! It doesn't capture me quite like it did back then but the art style is still beautiful, and I remember it kicking off my understanding of "AI" as in game AI, not LLMs.

Understanding how wants and needs drove actions, and marvelling at the language learning game mechanic. The genetics gameplay as well. It was well ahead of its time. I was early teens when I first played it, the same year I started learning to make games in Dark Basic.

esperent 9 months ago

Wow that's a blast from the past! 12 year old me was absolutely addicted to this game.

nickin190 9 months ago

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