Game Engine

[Rabcor]

What game engine was this game made on? Is it available to the public?

[Mno]

In-house. Made by Noogy.

[Rabcor]

Would be nice to know what languages it was based on :P

[mark]

i think i read somewhere (on the game's site, methinks) that it was done in xna.

[Madd the Sane]

Yes, it was written in XNA4, thus it was likely made in C#. Although the Mac an Linux ports use a port called FNA, based off of MonoGame.

[cyanic]

Note XNA and FNA are easily interchangeable, considering they both implement the same interfaces. The PS4 port is probably also XNA (via the PS4 MonoGame port), and probably with the same bugs in the PC version.

You do not want a copy of Noogy's engine code. It's ridiculously messy and buggy. And it appears he refuses to fix it, even when prompted several times with the exact problem and solution.

[Rabcor]

Well there goes that, I'm not particularly fond of XNA, but I thought this Engine was among the more impressive 2D game engines I've ever seen, and also met my requirement for being Cross Platform. Seems I'll have to look into other approaches, I'm currently flirting with HaxeFlixel a little.

[cyanic]

By impressive do you mean shaders? Shaders make everything look more impressive than it really is. You don't want to touch Dust: AET's engine. So many broken naming conventions and public static variables everywhere. It's a nightmare. But at least it does make patching slightly easier because you can deal with reflection less, what with all those public static bare fields.

I have messed with a different developer's engine. It's also .NET, and with the right engine plugins you can get it to render with OpenGL. In fact, games are implemented as plugins, and you can easily reference the engine DLLs in your own project. Nice serialization system too, and scenes are Flash-style (widgets and timelines). It's so much more competent than Noogy's code. I might try to port Dust: AET to it one of these days, once I figure out how to work the scene and timeline system.

[Rabcor]

That would be overdoing it I think, sure the game might be a bit buggy (especially on Linux; surround sound fails miserably in it for one) but it is working and it is cross platform.

It would be better to just develop a new game. Usually is isn't it?

[cyanic]

What's pulling the weight for the game on the cross-platform front is really FNA. The original game code barely needs to be modified, just retargeted to reference MonoGame/FNA libraries instead of XNA libraries. Surround sound can be fixed (ask for flibit, or you can patch it yourself if you wish), but elementary errors in the game itself can't be easily fixed without modifying the original game code. I've patched a few things via the Patching Platform and even sent Noogy an email about it, but you don't see anything being done about it officially (though the FNA beta has my patch incorporated). You can see how frustrating it is when the developer runs away from maintaining his code even when directly told what needs to be fixed with a patch that has been tested and proven.

Having some sort of pre-made game engine is usually beneficial when starting a new project. It helps you focus on the game mechanics than low level stuff like setting up a rendering pipeline and outputting sound. There's a good reason many nowadays use Unity. It's so easy to make a game in it because you don't have to worry about rendering, just mechanics and maybe flashy graphics if you're into it. The downside to ready-to-use engines is the easier they are to use, the more saturated the market is with low-grade junk made by 12-year-olds. But of course, that's not really a concern for you as a game developer. Just focus on making your own stuff be nice.

[Rabcor]

Really surprising to see him just run off and ignoring requests to fix his game. What kind of dev does that? Especially when he's offered solutions on a silver platter!

Also if you have a patch that can fix the surround sound on Linux, I'd love to get my hands on that.

I think the market would be slightly less saturated by low grade junk if there were more tools like Adobe Flash Pro lying around so that they could basically upload all that junk to sites like newgrounds. Kids and n00bs could create junk to their heart's content and just upload them for free somewhere outside the market rather than flooding greenlight and such.

But sadly, the one and only tool capable of doing this as one stop program where you can create everything from the graphics and animations to the UI and basic scripts is flash pro.

We've got tools like Spine and Spriter (neither free, one of them is 60$ or 250$ depending on the package you get, and the other is on 25$ while it's in beta) but these still aren't as feature complete as flash (for example they don't support creating the game's art in the program itself) there are of course also a few game engines, like Stencyl (HaxeFlixel based I think), Construct2 and similar, but again none of them support image creation and editing within the actual development interface.

So kiddies start to resort to things like RPGMaker, Ren'Py and occasionally Unity. But with the prices of the tried and tested UE(4) and CryEngine being driven down to 20$ and 10$, if I wanted to develop a 3D game right now, I wouldn't hesitate to jump on UE4 like a hungry wolf :D

But for now I want to create a 2D game, Dust AET had impressive graphics compared to most 2D games I've played (although admittedly many others did indeed have "clever" graphics, by applying extremely simple effects like vignette, or using monochromatic color schemes) but Dust was at an entirely different level with that Bloom effect (which I normally hate in 3D games, it turned out pretty well in 2D) and unmistakably just "shinier" graphics than most 2D games I've seen, that was why I was interested :P Also like you said shaders probably played a large part in it, but I'm unfamiliar with them, although inevitably I won't be for long since I plan to pick up graphical programming some time next year. Anyhow, for a n00b dev like myself, this poses a bit of a problem, since I want to make a 2D game, but 3D is all the rage these days, I just can't find a single game engine that suits my purposes.

The view towards 2D games tends to be "Those simple beginner games" forgetting all the glory of oldschool dungeon crawlers and a bit later, the final fantasy series (and comparable titles)

Hell, we even had the Oddworld series, but look at us now. (Although in my case I'm picking 2D game development because I already have the necessary skillset for creating decent 2D graphics, although animating will be an obstacle course for me. And I simply have too limited resources to be making 3D games, textures are a particularly fat problem, and animating 3D models is certainly not easier than skeleton animation of 2D sprites, etc, but it's also just better suited for the types of games I am developing)

[Mint Vanilla]

Knowing what he's been through[www.gamasutra.com] to make Dust: An Elysian Tail, I can kind of understand why he might not want to work on it (although we did get those patches).

[cyanic]

Well, one way of going forward could be open-sourcing the game so that those who want to work on the code could. Remember the first Humble Indie Bundle? Aquaria is a prime example, with lots of bug fixes coming in and even a PSP port, whose developer was eventually contracted to bring the game to iOS and Android. It could be a bit sticky with consideration to Steamworks, but it's definitely doable (supposing separating out Steamworks components into a non-open-source assembly and loading it dynamically is sufficient). Open sourcing the code does not necessarily mean open sourcing the assets, so it's not like Noogy would be losing sales. With proper source tracking and regular builds, the open source code would benefit all players on the existing supported platforms (except maybe Xbox 360; not sure how Microsoft would handle it), and could lead to support on more platforms in the future.

As for patching, I don't know why you wouldn't accept a fix, especially for a common problem that has occurred ever since the PC version was released. I told him exactly what to fix, and it would have taken at most 5 minutes to write the code to fix it.