Hot answers tagged console
36
Yes it is, check this list for a proof. Those are some games made with Java using The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL). It is a low-level framework, which provides OpenGL for high quality graphics and OpenAL for sounds. It also provides input API. With these you can quite easily get started to serious game development in Java.
I am currently writing my ...
31
Having a single big file has a few benefits for performance, regardless of platform. Many PC games use big files too.
You can manually cache the offset of each file within the big file, to avoid the need to read file system directory entries (which can involve multiple seeks per file opened if you miss the cache).
You get full control of the order of the ...
31
Not really. Here's the thing- firstly, there's very little in terms of existing libraries for Java compared to the virtually everything that is for C++.
Secondly, Java as a language simply doesn't lend itself well to game development- I mean, for example, if you're dealing with GPU buffers then Java does not provide a language feature which will aid you in ...
30
Is that only a matter of code optimization?
There is indeed an optimization part in this. The more programmers get used to a console hardware, the more they learn how to squeeze graphical quality into it.
But it's far from being the only reason:
Early console titles are developed on evolving hardware and SDKs, so it's hard to get the most out of a ...
25
There are multiple ways to do this, the simplest would be to XOR the two files and compress them (GZIP or so forth). The theory behind this is that hopefully you can get a large sequence of zeroes (long sequences of the same values compress well).
You can take that concept further and try and find areas of the two files where the data is identical and omit ...
19
So, I am really serious about game development, is Java still a viable choice? I have tried multiple times to learn C++, but I don't really like the language. I don't really know why, but usually, whenever I try to learn, I can never grasp the topics.
If your reason for choosing Java is that you couldn't understand C++, your Java programs aren't going ...
17
I went to a GDC session this year presented by the guys at sucker punch, discussing how they handled assisted aim and movement for inFamous. My understanding is that Halo uses a very similar system for assisted aiming, and here's the basics:
When you hit a button to fire, the shot should always go directly where the reticle is pointing. Otherwise, players ...
15
This scheme was started by Nintendo to counter the effects of the video game crash of 1983.
There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence....
In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari ...
14
The executable code of a game doesn't always reside just in the executable,
often it is divided into several dynamic libraries (for example the game, graphics and sound engines), the actual executable, and possibly many scripts for various purposes.
A patch could be fixing issues in any single one of these parts without warranting change in all of them.
A ...
13
but XNA was never a real success
lolwut? XNA is an amazing success. If you just look at this site as a measuring ground, you will notice that:
XNA is the top recent tag (it stays up there quite a lot)
XNA questions get quickly answered, often with multiple answers
Difficult XNA problems are addressed
This shows that there are a lot of people ...
12
Turn to MSDN for all your Windows answers!
"Games for Windows Technical Requirements: Best Practices for Games on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7" has a section on Games Explorer Integration.
Integration with Games Explorer requires that you author a game definition file (GDF), which is an XML text file that is embedded within a binary file (an ...
12
An experienced programmer will generally know many programming languages - learning extra programming languages isn't too hard once you know one well. However I would strongly recommend that C++ shouldn't be your first language, and probably not the second one either.
That's because C++ gets a lot of its efficiency from not doing any significant runtime ...
10
Pro development is almost unilaterally done in C++. If you're planning on targeting multiple platforms, this is a must since it's the only thing that's supported on every console and OS. Note: if you're new to this, I'd start with something much simpler like XNA - still very, very powerful, but it'll let you focus on your game instead of memory leaks and ...
10
While I can't link you to the actual documents used by "proper" published console games (and, really, unless that's what you're doing, you don't need them), but here are the two documents used for XNA games that go up on Xbox Live Indie Games:
The Evil Checklist (things that games fail for)
The Not-So-Evil Checklist (additional quality considerations)
...
9
Are you interested in developing for PSN, or as a retail game that people buy in stores?
To develop for PSN, you'll need to start by contacting Sony and becoming a licensed developer.
To develop a retail game, you'll most likely need to contact a publisher who will distribute the game.
In either case, be prepared to demo the game and your company to either ...
8
Nintendo supports developers with their DSiWare and WiiWare for people wanting to make a game downloadable through the console or handheld.
The first step is to contact Nintendo to become a licensed developer (http://warioworld.com/). After you've made this important first step then Nintendo will be able to answer all of your questions.
Be prepared that ...
8
Since Consoles pretty much have one specification. And not like PC where you have tons of different variations. Developers can optimize their games better. But this doesn't mean it will do space magic in the long run. It will reach a cap. ( currently the 360/Ps3 have 512 mb in total, which to many developers seems to be an annoyance)
Consoles are fairly ...
8
New hardware generally just offers the ability to do more than before. Most graphical improvements come from new techniques, new optimisations, and better art.
It's worth knowing that the 'new' techniques that get used are rarely new - they are typically 20 year old techniques that previously were too slow for real-time rendering. These typically get ...
8
Do game developers plan to start small on a new hardware, to have space to evolve while creating a series of that game?
They most certainly do not!
When I first joined the games industry, I asked a producer from [giant publisher you've definitely heard of] this very question. He told me that every console game his company developed used 100% of the ...
7
Some color data will be lost or changed regardless of your texture format. However, a bigger problem will be gamma correction. Gamma correction can be a tricky subject since your game will not appear visually the same across all display technologies and finding a single solution is not going to be easy.
These might help you out:
...
7
There are good answers here. I had to figure it out for myself on the project I'm on, but came to the same conclusions as the Sucker Punch guys (and I had thought I came up with something novel. Baww :( ).
I find it useful to consider your entire first person 360x180 degree "panorama" as an "acceleration field". All valid targets create gravity wells which ...
7
Disclaimer: This doesn't exactly answer your question. However, I have attempted to (briefly) mention some points that may be of interest to you.
The reason that you see so much about C++ is because C++ is still the industry standard -- the most common language for consoles, etc.
Java is not frequently used. Minecraft is a pretty popular game that made it ...
6
EDIT: After a comment by @ChristianIvicevic I felt compelled to reword my answer to emphasise that the Article link I provided is a far better alternative to using a system call as it is more secure and does not risk producing false positives with anti-virus software.
Try and use this Microsoft solution:
Performing Clear Screen (CLS) in a Console ...
5
Apart from very good answer given by Adam I would also like to point out some other important factors:
The fewer files you have the easier is the deployment of your application.
This is especially true if you want to deploy your application on mobile platforms, like iOS, Android or Windows Phone. Even if in case of Windows Phone you still can have as many ...
5
You can write your own games from scratch for many of the Nintendo platforms. devkitPro provides devkitARM, which can compile for the Gameboy Advance and the Nintendo DS, as well as devkitPPC, which can compile for the GameCube and the Wii. There are also utility libraries to help you access the hardware.
Running your games is very simple on the GBA and ...
5
As @AttackingHobo said, the memory is very fast and expensive. Also, you must take into account that these consoles launched years ago, when memory and hardware prices were higher.
Another factor that goes into making consoles very performant on what appears to be very limited resources, is that since every console is identical, we as developers can take ...
5
Linear mapping is probably not the best solution (which I believe involves converting your RGB to a CIE colorspace, scaling there, and converting back), but it is very easy to implement, and the range difference is small enough it probably won't matter.
If you use SOIL, it can automatically do this when loading the image, by passing SOIL_FLAG_NTSC_SAFE_RGB ...
4
Obviously they want them to be cheap to make. As for the PS3 specifically, memory prices were very high at it's release, but they dropped soon after.
There ain't a big clunky operating system running alongside games, so unlike Windows developers can actually utilize all the memory, you easily have more "room" on a PS3 than on an XP machine with 512 MB of ...
4
Google for "javascript obfuscation". This will muddy your code up for when you deploy it. It will change your identifiers to more cryptic things so people will not be able to deduce what the score variable is called unless they monitor all the variables while running the game. Javascript's at a disadvantage since the code is directly readable by the user. ...
4
Your question seems a little vague to me (mainly the how part, do you mean the concept or the coding?) but I'll try my best to answer it for you:
Why
I know I use console logging in all my projects. For me, I mainly see it as a way for the end-user to report problems. An example could be, the game crashes for an unknown reason. So they come to help and ...
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