Comment by ffn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ffn | Hacker News Reader

I really love that these game engines are doing this. As a hobbyist game dev with a day job and a night-shift (tfwgf), one of the biggest hurtles that keep me building on html5 instead of on desktop was the demand that I had to pay $$ upfront before I have any idea if I can even finish what I'm building (much less how the market will receive it). I mean, I don't mind paying the engine company their demands if I can make money selling my game, but I'm already risking my free time on a project that may very well go nowhere, so I don't want to also risk my money. I'm sure plenty of other folk with great ideas and skills are in this boat, so by finally offering a free version, I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more esoteric indie games that tell great stories, introduce fun new mechanics, educate the player, or make us lose faith in American democracy on Steam instead of the nonstop rehash of mainstream FPS games.

As for me, it's finally time to start building that Sierra-esque ancient civilization city-builder game (i.e. Caesar, Pharaoh, Emperor, etc.).

Unity's been free for years, you've fallen for their advertising to upstage Unreal.

"Finally offering a free version"

Honestly, it's been free for ages.

Not only that but Microsoft had XNA which was also a free game engine that they only discontinued last year so you're wrong thinking that html5 was the only option. I don't think you really researched the market much if you thought that.

Plus if you are serious about an RTS you should read about AI war, who used Unity. It's interesting as if you want to do multiplayer in an RTS you can't use Unity's collision detection as the float calculations are chipset dependant.

What most people don't realize is that the IEEE Floating Point standard (754-2008) actually doesn't standardize when a float should be rounded. Since most CPUs/GPUs are able to do FMAs (Fused Multiply-add)'s that are rounded after the operation, you get a different result than if you were to do a multiplication operation, then round, then add, and then round again.

I'm pretty sure Unity would be able to fix this if they had their compiler always handed rounding the same way.

Also: If you want to see a sane way to handle floating point, check out the Unum format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format))... higher precision than IEEE, doesn't have rounding errors, and uses fewer bits.

Here's an outstanding article that goes into the nuance of actually achieving floating point determinism: http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/flo...

My takeaway: It's hard enough that I'm probably never going to attempt to implement lockstep simulation, and if I was forced to I'd probably do everything in fixed point for my own sanity.

> higher precision than IEEE, doesn't have rounding errors, and uses fewer bits.

It certainly won't provide higher precision using less bits (precision is lg(b^(l - 1)), where b is the base and l is the number of mantissa bits). For any given base, there are numbers that have no exact representation in that base (for base 10, consider 1/3 = 0.33333…, for base 2, consider 1/10), so it certainly will have rounding errors.

According to [0], the basic idea is to store the number of exponent bits, the number of mantissa bits, and the inexact bit (indicating that underflow has occured) alongside the number itself, automatically promoting/demoting mantissa and exponent as needed, and treating inexact numbers as an interval of width 1 ulp. Thus, the number of used bits depends on the number stored (which might well be less than an IEEE format would use for certain (or even the average) workload, but may very well be more due to the overhead of the tag).

[0] http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPreci...

To be fair, XNA's support was atrocious (non-existent?) off of microsoft platforms.

MonoGame is almost entirely compatible with XNA and over the last year or two has really turned into something reliable, at least on MacOS and iOS.

For some platforms, like iOS and Android, you will need a Xamarin license. So MonoGame isn't always a free option.

As someone who played Sierra city builders almost exclusively when I was growing up, please do. Hasn't been a good game in that style in ages.

It's not set in ancient times, but Banished is pretty good: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/

There are also some pretty cool Banished mods on the workshop including http://colonialcharter.com/.

Thanks for this, looks like it will even run on my old Thinkpad X200s, which is the only Windows computer I have at the moment.

Fun game, but the AI eventually killed it for me. You can tell a villager to work on a bridge, and he'll sometimes try to walk around the river to work on the far side, starving to death in the process. Oops.

But that wasn't long after release, maybe it's been fixed by now.

On Android, Townsmen is pretty good. No external enemies, so it's quite relaxing achieving a balanced medieval economy.

What does 'tfwgf' mean?

I tried Googling that and it lead me to some weird places, but still no answer!

my uninformed guess is the face when girlfriend

using my license to conjecture, I'd say that OP has a girlfriend and thus has a lot of expenses that a single man would not have

>tfw is typically "that feel when"

So i can assume it means "that feel when girlfriend". No idea why having a girlfriend would make you work nights? This would make more sense in the context of

"that feel when no girlfriend"

I interpreted it from the perspective of the girlfriend. That is, her feelings on the the significant other being gone essentially the entire day.

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