"Alternate" Age Creation?

Anything that isn't directly related to Age Creation but that might be interesting to Age developers.

"Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Justintime9 » Thu Aug 29, 2019 12:08 pm

This question is probably sacrilege to bring up on this forum, but I also think it's a good place to find answers.

I haven't done any Age Creation in awhile, due mostly to busyness. However I'm somewhat inspired again. But I get the sense the URU community has dwindled considerably, and as awesome as Korman and other new tools are, URU itself it is getting old, and its audience sparse.

What I'm wondering is, are there any other communities similar to this one that center around a similar love of creating and sharing worlds, but uses the newest technology? I know there's Unreal Engine, but there's probably so many different things to do with that I wouldn't know where to start.
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Deledrius » Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:22 pm

There are a large number of resources out there for the most popular engines.

I'd recommend looking into Godot, Unity, or Unreal Engine if you want to get started making something with those. They all have extensive Getting Started tutorials, and a Google search for tutorials will turn up many more. You can make a wide variety of types of games, both 2D and 3D, and definitely something Uru-like with any of them.

They also have large communities, fora, subreddits, and Q&A on StackOverflow that you can get into for community guidance. Godot has an entire page dedicated to all the ways you can look for help, as does Unity.
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Justintime9 » Thu Aug 29, 2019 2:26 pm

Thanks! That's just what I've been looking for. A big part of this community (GoW) was always the collaboration and common vision of creating something beautiful that people love to explore. I think I will miss the unifying lore (there's always been an attempt to keep fan ages at least nominally connected to URU Canon.)
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Chuckles58 » Thu Aug 29, 2019 8:32 pm

And yet there may be more folk like me that would like to learn Age Building, but have the same Busy Life situation. I would hope this community can hang in there. During Mysterium, Rand mentioned that he really loves Uru.
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Deledrius » Thu Aug 29, 2019 9:46 pm

Justintime9 wrote:Thanks! That's just what I've been looking for. A big part of this community (GoW) was always the collaboration and common vision of creating something beautiful that people love to explore. I think I will miss the unifying lore (there's always been an attempt to keep fan ages at least nominally connected to URU Canon.)

I believe there are a fair few in this community who wrangle with one or more of these engines, so although you should probably look to those communities for direct support there is probably some here who will be glad to chat about them too. :)


Chuckles58 wrote:And yet there may be more folk like me that would like to learn Age Building, but have the same Busy Life situation. I would hope this community can hang in there. During Mysterium, Rand mentioned that he really loves Uru.

I hope so too.
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Sirius » Fri Aug 30, 2019 12:09 am

I'll be happy to chat about anything Unity related :D The other engines I have less experience with, though.

Personally Unity is my preference because the UI is simple and clear. It also doesn't force you in a particular workflow and the engine is a bit barebone in some areas, which I like but some people might not. It does have a few cons, which it inherited from its previous versions which were NOT correctly designed. But otherwise it's still damn solid.

Unreal I'm not really fond of. I dislike it for a few reasons: one (which is stupid), I just hate its snob community. Two: C++ is NOT a scripting language, and Blueprint is NOT a language at all, which is a serious deal breaker for me. Three: the UI is still pretty ugly.
But even I have to accept that it's THE best free game engine ever, period. There is a reason Cyan and a lot of other people work with it.

Godot I've tried. It's very lightweight (finally a game engine without 30+ gigabytes of download ! Looking at you, Unreal !). But at the same time I'm not really fond of its single-component system vs traditional ECS... From a scripting viewpoint, this felt really weird to me. But hey, it's still one of the big guys and with a bit of practice, you will definitely get far with it.

I would also like to mention Xenko. It's been open sourced recently, is written in C#, and looks solid in my opinion. I'm considering moving part of UPlasma to it, and see how it performs.

In my opinion it doesn't matter much which engine you pick, as long as you're having fun with it. In the end, either you pick Plasma and you have built-in networking BUT it's a pain to use, or you pick another engine which is much easier to work with BUT have no multiplayer... In either case, people will enjoy exploring what you create.
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Aloys » Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:08 am

I'm a Unity user professionnaly, but I'm a big Unreal advocate for hobbyist.

The thing with Unreal is that it's simply more accessible. I love Unity, but it's really a developper tool. If you are a hobbyist who don't want to learn programming then Unity is useless. People will say there are plugins for everything, and it's mostly true, but it makes for a terrible experience. First of all most of them don't come for free. Then you need to install them and they may or may not integrate well with other existing plugins, and the UI isn't consistent from one another. etc etc. And it's just complicated. I love Unity because I love to have control over my tools, and Unity is great in that regard. But it's just not user friendly, not noob friendly. At all. If what you want to do is make a game (at least a simple one) there are other options. And you don't need to get actual programming skills to do that.

I don't want to turn that into a "is true coding is needed to make a game?" debate (cause that's a complicated one), but I understand some people may not be interested in learning that, they just want to make a game, and there are ways to do that.

Unreal I'm not really fond of. I dislike it for a few reasons: one (which is stupid), I just hate its snob community.

That is so true. And so sad. Thankfuylly it's not the majority of the community that's like that, but as a Unity user whenever I peek at the Unreal world I can't help but notice it. :/ And the C++ thing, I am afraid it's part of that. Ugh.. I don't know why they use C++. This is just so overkill in every way.. And the compilation times.. god... :x

Xenko

First time I hear of that one. It looks interesting. From a quick look at it I don't see it bringing anything new to the table, but being open source is cool.
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Sirius » Sun Sep 01, 2019 9:36 am

I agree with pretty much all you wrote (as far as I can tell, having less experience with Unreal overall). People will have different skills and expectations when it comes to game engines, and Unity certainly feels rather barebones in a lot of areas. Plugins help, but result in additional cost and inconsistent experience.


Aloys wrote:And the C++ thing, I am afraid it's part of that. Ugh.. I don't know why they use C++. This is just so overkill in every way..

I hate C++. I like that it runs fast, yes, but writing and troubleshooting it is slooooow, and interoperability with other languages is a nightmare.
However, there is something to be said in favor of using a single language throughout the whole engine. It's hard to say "Unity sucks because of X", but Unity's C# integration might be one of the reasons the engine can be so annoying to users.

You could write a book about all the things Unity does wrong, but let's take the following example...
See Unity's UI button ? You can use the onClick event to setup calls to Unity's API from the inspector and change fields or call methods of other objects. This is a VERY powerful feature. It's not quite visual scripting yet, but it does allow you to code without writing code. And the inspector itself also doubles as a debugger, AND a dependency injection / inversion of control framework (or whatever those are called).
Now, it would make sense to use UnityEvents pretty much everywhere in their API. BUT. Instead, in some areas Unity use regular C# delegate, which do the exact same thing except they are not displayed in the inspector. In some other cases, there simply isn't any event and you have to rely on polling to guess whether a component's state was changed during the last frame. Duh...

That's why I'm hopeful that Xenko, being full C# without any need to restrict access to core engine features, will be better designed. I doubt the inspector will be as powerful as I would like it to be, but at least I hope the C# API will make a bit more sense...
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Rabbit » Sun Sep 01, 2019 3:09 pm

Justintime9 wrote:This question is probably sacrilege to bring up on this forum, but I also think it's a good place to find answers.

I haven't done any Age Creation in awhile, due mostly to busyness. However I'm somewhat inspired again. But I get the sense the URU community has dwindled considerably, and as awesome as Korman and other new tools are, URU itself it is getting old, and its audience sparse.

What I'm wondering is, are there any other communities similar to this one that center around a similar love of creating and sharing worlds, but uses the newest technology? I know there's Unreal Engine, but there's probably so many different things to do with that I wouldn't know where to start.


I want to get back into Age building as soon as I can, and finish what I started some time ago. Like a lot of people, "life" gets in the way and I have had to stop everything for quite some time. Personally, I'm going to stick with what little I know and see how far I can get, possibly have a test age in a few months once I can sort out both software and a good methodology of testing in a live shard somewhere. I'm sure Unreal is amazing, but it may be way over my head to learn and would take me to long. My biggest concern is that the Myst community stays together long enough for people to see my stuff before someone at Cyan decides to pull the plug on MOULa due to low attendance numbers/funds.

:)
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Re: "Alternate" Age Creation?

Postby Deledrius » Sun Sep 01, 2019 9:51 pm

Rabbit wrote:My biggest concern is that the Myst community stays together long enough for people to see my stuff before someone at Cyan decides to pull the plug on MOULa due to low attendance numbers/funds.
:)


Luckily, fan servers won't be going anywhere even if Cyan does that. In fact, when people aren't able to sit around on the static, non-updated Cyan server we may finally start to see an increase in interest for the fan servers such as Gehn, and the Fan Ages already available. So you don't need to worry about the game dying even if Cyan has to give up on it.

If you need help and guidance building, there are still people here who are ready and willing to provide it!
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