Game Devs Crying About Asset Flips?

Given the numbers provided before, it looks like it was a runaway ideas for him. Meaning, the term gained popularity.

 

Definitely agree there.

 

While it is true that Jim Sterling has less subscribers, I would argue that his overall influence vastly exceeds what is indicated by subscriber count. For example, Markiplier has 28 times as many YouTube subscribers as Jim Sterling. I highly doubt Markiplier has 28 times as much influence as Jim Sterling, though.

 

This. We feel the same about it then I think there was just a communication breakdown.

I do agree that he would carry more sway per subscriber, you are correct in my opinion. I can't think Jim would be 28 times more likely to sway a single subscriber though. I wouldn't go as far as to name him the most influential game journalist by a long shot. I dont think the coined term asset flip is as popular among game players as it is unity devs.

 

I literally watched the entire thing unfold. He did coin the term, and his videos were posted here, which is the only reason anyone here knows about the concept.

 

Almost as ridiculous as spending six pages discussing how ridiculous it is.

 

I was not disputing the fact that he coined the term just saying it was far more likely to be heard on unity forums than in the general players population.

 

Yeah, I don't think it's necessary to do a communal refutation of this point of view on the forums. What interests me though is what I consider it to be a symptom of.

 

Depending on your view there is nothing wrong with asset flips.

You could just buy the "UnitZ" asset pack and sell it (as is) on Steam. The gameplay is not much worse than Unturned and since graphics don't matter you are in the clear.

You could show artistic integrity and craft everything yourself OR you can do it like PUBG, buy everything from the asset store and become the most successful developer of the year.
It is an ideological question, I guess...

 

It's fun playing PUBG, see so many assets they share with our game.

 

And the funny thing is that many people don't notice that pubg is full of unreal market place and other purchased assets and art.

Reskin here and there. Spend your time on the gameplay and map and people will not care that the vehicles and weapons are from a store.

Assets are sold to be used not sold to take up virtual dust in your hard drive

 

It just shows you how two faced everyone is. I guess "did you enjoy pubg with it's assets?" will become a common counter troll technique handed down from troll to fledgling troll.

 

I never got the chance to weigh in on this one, it seems.

Doesn't it seem a bit crazy, that anybody would care if the model for a space marine cropped up in a different game? Simply put, I believe it speaks to entitlement on behalf of a very entitled group of people who have become so accustomed to being served by the industry, they no longer have any boundaries on what they (we?) deserve.

New everything, original everything, and not later--now.

Too bad, so sad for this generation/demographic that the industry has moved on. I look at Overwatch with it's gorgeous, youthful characters, completely divorced from any well known IP or franchise and say "good for you." Well played. Good show. A game that isn't about anything.

It's a brave new world. League of Legends just makes characters from thin air and nobody cares about their originality. Why? Because they're not targeting the impossible to please Sheldon Coopers and Comic Book Guy's of the world, anymore... Neither are these people solely represented in the development world. You are not required to have a pony tail to work on video games, those days have passed.

Regular guys and girls (with degrees in related fields) are making games, free to play with game enhancing p2p features is the new model and will be around for probably as long as streaming video will...

I say, sure. Do it.

Reusing assets between games should be respected for it's efficiency, and we should all embrace it. Not only this, people should unionize and form game development collectives and help indies make better games and more money.

I see all these lone wolfs getting nothing done, when just 3 of these rock star, solo people working together could release a killer game in months.

In fact, if enough folks we're smart they'd band together and create an aesthetic that all indie devs could share to make asset reuse easier. Think about what manga and anime have done in terms of hours of playtime vs western counterparts.

Just sayin

 

@Master-Frog I don't think the issue is as much about seeing the occasional reused model. It is the totality of the project. PUBG uses a lot of readily available assets in their game, which is often joked about, but is not seen as a significant negative on the whole. That's because the gameplay has been generally well received I believe.

Its the games that don't offer nearly as much to praise, and on top of that reused a lot of easily recognized models seen in other games, that get the majority of the bashing.

Take an example from movies instead of gaming. Star Trek Generations (7th Star Trek movie) at its climax has a Klingon ship explode. They didn't even create that for the movie, as Star Trek fans immediately noticed that they just reused the exact same Klingon ship explosion from the climax of Star Trek VI. Obviously they did it for cost cutting or speed of production reasons, the same as game devs who use 3rd party assets, but the movie was not significantly criticized for it. That's because the movie was generally well received on the whole. You would have seen this criticized a lot more if the movie was overall of much lower quality than it ended up as.

 

I already said my piece on the first page but on a side note, I think we put a little bit too much pressure on ourselves to deliver in the shadows of giants. I ain't the best artist out there, but these little lighting tests I put together in less than 20 minutes and they could easily be at home in a decent game (that includes modeling time)..

Sprinkle with a bit of Speedtree and hey presto, if one was to carry on at that rate you could have an arena FPS up in a day or two.. Sure it ain't going to win AAA most detailed and well sculpted artwork of the year award 2018, but we're not talking early 00's retro chic or OMG look at that hideous graphics either..

 

I'm pretty sure either of those would take me 20 hours. Hats off to you.

 

I was gonna say stop bragging with your efficient workflows and beautiful renderings - but EA put it more eloquently.

I recognize those birch trees from previous content Shadowk. Flipper!



Seriously though - you have a uncanny ability to put together some beautiful environment shots quickly!
When is your Arena FPS coming out?

 

Things start to get tricky when you want wide open spaces and min 90 FPS. It's pretty easy to get it to look beautiful (well not for me but for a talented artist such yourself),but to get it to look good AND run well,that's harder .look at escape from tarkov, incredible looking but with huge performance problems even on cutting edge hardware.

 

From what I understand -- not from experience but from reading -- is that the key to getting a large world to run smoothly is in breaking it into chunks, and judiciously using LOD's.

About graphics and lighting -- here's an in game capture from Splinter Cell, circa 2002.

It looks a bit dated, but honestly it still looks as good as plenty of very fun games that come out today. You can see that the textures and models don't have today's level of detail, but they got the lighting done right and I feel like lighting has a lot more persuasion on making a scene look good than modeling and texturing.
Heck, you can have some matte gray cubes and cones laying around, but if you get some nice lighting set up just right, you can make those primitive shapes look pretty appealing.

 

Everything I make can run at least 60 FPS on PS4 like the last Unity openworld "experiment" I made a year ago (example below) it has ridiculous foliage draw sizes so it could be further optimized for VR, sure I have worked or should I say "assisted" on games where they've struggled to get even 30FPS but it was usually down to design decisions and / or basic mistakes.

A) Not playing to the engines strengths: For e.g. UE4 used to have an issue with fill rates, their tiled deferred renderer had a massive G-buffer size and shared all the usual issues a deferred renderer brings to the table with opacity and translucent materials.. It was capable of creating massive games, but at that point it was best to avoid excessive foliage.

Whereas Unity was the opposite way round, their deferred renderer was relatively light weight but the engine suffered from a lack of decent integrated streaming capabilities.. Sure I know you can stream pre-fabs etc. etc. but it's not the efficient / adapative compression algo texture / mesh / auto-instance setup you find in AAA engines like CE.

You could of course do something about this, then again there's many things you can improve and it's a rabbit hole you don't want to go down unless you have a team of hundreds behind your back.

If you are looking to make anything large "NEVER" select an engine on base ease of use, you select it on what fits your project and I have suffered for not taking my own advice.

B) Understanding fundamentals of how graphics / sub-systems and engines work at a rough level.. Unless you're a rendering expert who natively understands how to legitimately bring an engine to it's knee's 95% of the time it's user issue. Especially in indie games (that tend to be smaller)..

I've come across it too many times, crap level design, too many materials, excessive shader complexity and vertex manipulation, LOD'ing where they shouldn't or should, using heavy shadow casting techniques long distance, excessive lit particles, lack of object pooling, not understanding how you should transform multi-object worlds for things like POO (point of origin reset), assuming automated functions like batching (and in some cases streaming / instancing) is actually doing what they think it should be doing, excessive use of physics objects and of course in Unity GC etc.

They'll spend their time shaving 200 polys off a model when a nearly 20 year old GPU could render 2 Million polys.. Missing the point by a wide mile..

Crap level design is generally the number one issue, you can't just have a flat plane with a mile's worth of heavy foliage and expect it to work right.. You should be occluding as much as you possibly can, put bends in terrains, walls in front of villages, have breaks in foliage (it looks more natural anyway).

I could write a book on this subject, a 101 ways not to tank your game. Generic non-specialized engines are not made to take the beating of a game like Witcher 3, although it doesn't mean you can't make a large and very complex game. It just means you got to be VERY clever in how you approach it and willing to compromise. There's nothing wrong with loading different areas, IF the game is made in such a way you're not constantly have to go back and forth where you suffer excessive loading times..

I've played AAA games where it asks me to jump to three locations excessively and it'll have a 2 minute wait period every time.. Again crap design, they should of kept the mission local to itself and if the mission required the scene to be large then you'd stream in the local area objects.

Every game doesn't have to have a TOD system because it'll effect things like the ability to bake which WILL save a LOT of bandwidth. TLOU is a relatively large game and that's all baked, if you have the ability to bake lighting and understand the fundamental steps of creating games you're laughing.. It will run at lightning speeds on modern HW.!