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[alexandertnt]

I just checked. It turns out the default directional light is actually yellow...

I have seen some amazing things done with the new lighting system, I just suspect it has been set up, whether technically or artistically, poorly in some games. I suspect artistically, as other games with similar systems (Medieval Engineers is not done in Unity, for example) have a similar look. Well, at least it looks artistically bad to me .

[Neonivek]

If I had to guess why grey is blue a lot of the time.

It is likely because of the color spectrum.

Then again I am also the person who thinks that Brown is part of the Red Family...

[karhell]

O.o Brown isn't part of the Red family ?

[Shadowlord]

The entire site? You took down the entire site? Including the downloads, all the documentation, the forums, and the unity answers? Incredible.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Makes you want to watch now, doesn't it?

[Virtz]

Spoiler: more jRPG related ramblings you're probably better off ignoring (click to show/hide)

It's never clear if enemy soldiers are dead or wounded when their HP hits zero. It's explicit that YOUR soldiers are never dead when their HP hits zero regardless of how it happens, only if an enemy reaches their downed body and performs a coup de grace are they permadead.

Nope. VC2 makes it clear with enemy soldiers throwing screams of despair at seeing their comrades die. You really are controlling a group of monsters.

Give me a break, it's patently obvious that Advance Wars doesn't take itself seriously. No one is ever explicitly killed, the violence is only implied since footsoldiers who are defeated simply retreat and the unit loses strength and eventually poofs, they don't fall to the ground and leave corpses; there are no casualty reports, no mention of medics or field hospitals. The leaders of the armies of entire countries are literally children. Only the spinoff Days of Ruin plays it straight since it's a post-apoc story. One of the secondary plot points is a disease that kills people and causes flowers to sprout from their skin. There's nothing like that in the main series.

Absence of clear graphical representation of death does not imply lack of it. People going poof after they've been shot is as good as death in a 2D game. Usually it's more of a sign the devs didn't feel like making death animations. And considering the minimalism of the animations in Advance Wars, I'd assume as much.

Like I'm sorry, but you cannot be whimsical and a mass murderer unless you're some kind of unrelatable asshole. Killing people takes its toll on a person's mind. With western RPGs at least I'm not looking at cheerful lolis doing the murder, it's almost like I'm looking at someone who understands they're taking peoples' lives. Almost.

The Joker comes to mind.

...which is why he's the hero of Batman?...

He's an antagonist that's clearly out of his mind by all accounts in his universe.

You might if you read a story about one family, though. For instance, 'Mommy was in an accident': A family tries to heal after a fatal tragedy, an article from the Washington Post today. Personally, I had to stop several times while reading it.

So it reflected on you even though you weren't involved. Thus I feel it'd be bad writing to have someone unaffected by things actually directly related to them.

You missed my point. I am more concerned about the latter (feelings, emotions etc etc) because I am emotionally invested in the character. I am not emotionally invested in the faceless "Hundreds of people" mentioned earlier, and as such am pretty happy to mostly ignore that, because its not interesting to me.

I want relatable, not realistic.

You used a pretty inapplicable analogy, though. "Somebody somewhere died" is nowhere near the same as "I killed someone".

And that's fine if that's what you like, although it's not good character writing. A child-minded murderer that doesn't seem to understand the concept of murder is not very relatable as far as I'm concerned, either.

And regardless, most JRPG's I can think of have you murdering generic monsters most (sometimes all) of the time, or the "soldiers" were the aggressors. To take an extreme example, how many soldiers did you kill in To The Moon?

Never played it. Isn't everything in To The Moon just going on in someone's head, though?

Don't be so judgemental, those bandits could be bandits because they are desperate and need to provide for their family. It further demonstrates that games (not just RPG's) are just using "bandits" and inhuman cannon fodder and building unrealistic characters out of them. Your still a horrible person for killing them.

That soldier could be very much down with the kings plan to destroy the world, or just going along for the pillaging. Why is killing soldiers worse when the only difference between a "soldier" and a "bandit" is the label the game gives them, when the soldier can be worse than the bandit?

Did you just equate a soldier to a bandit?

Being a bandit, without exception, implies doing harm onto others for your own gain, even if there is a family behind you. There is no realistic path in being a bandit where you do not kill or injure innocents for selfish reasons. Generally nobody forces you into banditry either. Like at least try plain theft before you go out and murder people. And no, supporting a family is no justification. Everyone has a family, and doing banditry you deprive those other families for the sake of your own.

A soldier acts on behalf of a ruler or country for a higher purpose than their own personal ones, whether willingly or not. They fight to provide a better life not only for themselves and their family, but their entire nation, sometimes more than that. There's bad things a soldier can do, but they're in no way inherent to being a soldier. Being a bandit means you assault innocent people for their valuables and that's it.

JRPG characters are less defined by their actions than western RPG characters. So the fact that you "killed 100 soldiers" (an action) is more significant to a character in a western RPG, as they don't have much else to define their character. JRPG characters are defined primarily by other aspects, and these actions are generally less important.

That's... pretty terrible writing. That's all I'll say.

Please, no more grimdark! It basically implies an absence of colours and characters with the emotion of a cardboard box. Absurdity is sometimes fun, but not always.

Then stop with the murdering. You can't have murder and innocent cheeriness among mentally stable protagonists without it being bad writing or pure comedy.

[Parsely]

It's never clear if enemy soldiers are dead or wounded when their HP hits zero. It's explicit that YOUR soldiers are never dead when their HP hits zero regardless of how it happens, only if an enemy reaches their downed body and performs a coup de grace are they permadead.

Nope. VC2 makes it clear with enemy soldiers throwing screams of despair at seeing their comrades die. You really are controlling a group of monsters.

* GUNINANRUNIN has never played VC2.

I can say for sure nothing like that happens in VC1.

[Shadowlord]

P.S. Unity put their site back up 5 or 10 minutes after my post, but then it was overloaded because they put it back up to release Unity 5. :V

[itisnotlogical]

I hope they fixed some Mecanim weirdness. I've never quite been able to get animation triggers to work properly; usually they either trigger twice, or slightly off-cue, or they play half of the animation before immediately snapping back to the previous state. Also it'd be nice to have animation events be in the Animator panel rather than import settings, but there's probably a good technical reason for that.

[Sergarr]

Everybody can forget about Unity, Unreal Engine 4 is now free!

[Shadowlord]

I take it you overlooked the 5% royalty, which, at $100,000 in revenue (the point at which purchasing unity pro becomes mandatory) adds up to $5000, and continues to cost you as you make further revenue because it's a royalty.

Edit: For comparison unity pro is $1500, and if you're making Android or iOS games you'd need to buy the Android and/or iOS plugins too, which are another $1500 each, a total of $4500, once, not per game, and that would be all you would have to pay unless/until you wanted to upgrade to unity 6 in a couple years (assuming they maintain the same release rate).

They've also made all the engine features available in the free version of unity now, which is especially nice.

[alexandertnt]

Spoiler: JRPG stuff (click to show/hide)

You missed my point. I am more concerned about the latter (feelings, emotions etc etc) because I am emotionally invested in the character. I am not emotionally invested in the faceless "Hundreds of people" mentioned earlier, and as such am pretty happy to mostly ignore that, because its not interesting to me.

I want relatable, not realistic.

You used a pretty inapplicable analogy, though. "Somebody somewhere died" is nowhere near the same as "I killed someone".

My point is "Focus on what I care about. It's not those 100 soldiers (or at least, not entirely), this is why".

And that's fine if that's what you like, although it's not good character writing. A child-minded murderer that doesn't seem to understand the concept of murder is not very relatable as far as I'm concerned, either.

Why is it that being void of emotion is not considered bad character writing?

Regardless, I think this "Kill 100 soldiers" thing is a lot less common in JRPG's then you are making it out to be, to the point where it can hardly define the genre.

Never played it. Isn't everything in To The Moon just going on in someone's head, though?

Most of the game goes through someone's head, yes. It still functions as a counterpoint to this idea that JRPG's consist of smiling children murdering soldiers.

Did you just equate a soldier to a bandit?

No. I gave a description to demonstrate that its not right to reduce bandits to generic-RPG-monsters while raising soldiers to innocent honest people, without any more information about these people.

At this point, I think your just projecting your own ethics onto these games. Which I suppose is fine when it comes to how you relate to characters. My own sense of ethics differs, and I will try to explain why.

Being a bandit, without exception, implies doing harm onto others for your own gain, even if there is a family behind you. There is no realistic path in being a bandit where you do not kill or injure innocents for selfish reasons. Generally nobody forces you into banditry either. Like at least try plain theft before you go out and murder people. And no, supporting a family is no justification. Everyone has a family, and doing banditry you deprive those other families for the sake of your own.

a robber or outlaw belonging to a gang and typically operating in an isolated or lawless area

It does not imply "without exception" doing harm, nor does it define any inherent motivation for any crimes committed. Your defining a specific definition of banditry that you are using to justify your actions, without any knowledge about these people. Feeding your family is not selfishness. That's like, the polar opposite of selfishness. Starving to death will force people to do all sorts of desperate things for obvious reasons that can hardly be considered voluntary. Maybe if you offered some sort of charitable feeding program or something?. This does not excuse their actions, but the reasons must be considered when judging the morality of their character, and when looking for a solution to the bandit problem. You don't know that they have not tried "plain theft" first (They can't be both a bandit and a thief?). Banditry does not necessarily involve the murder of people. Hell, maybe they feel its wrong to murder and the threats are only bluffs. Why can't they have some character depth too? They are still human.

I could consider your character the good guy if they went around and made an effort to help those desperate bandits that wanted help, and help dish out punishment that has been decided by a legal body after a fair legal trial. Or if you attempted to capture one alive that was wanted for trial.

I do not understand how I am supposed to see a character who goes around being the own self-declared judge, jury, and executioner as the good guy. Last time I checked, if someone who was robbed at gun point, and then gave money to someone to kill the person at gun point, they would both be off to jail, because they both did bad things.

A soldier acts on behalf of a ruler or country for a higher purpose than their own personal ones, whether willingly or not. They fight to provide a better life not only for themselves and their family, but their entire nation, sometimes more than that

Not sure how assaulting, murdering, or looting is now OK because its for some hand-wavey "higher purpose". At best it can be deemed an unfortunate necessity, but I'm going to demand a very good reason as to why its a necessity (which most games rarely provide, since bad guys are bad guys and are little more than fleshy bits of XP).

They fight to provide a better life not only for themselves and their family, but their entire nation

Everyone has a family [in the other nation], and doing [soldier things] you deprive those other families [in the other nation] for the sake of your own [and "your nation"].

There's bad things a soldier can do, but they're in no way inherent to being a soldier.

Soldiers are trained to kill. Killing is bad. Of course its inherent to being a soldier! Not only that, but soldiers are trained to kill other soldiers. You should try being part of the other nation one day. Again, as above, this killing can be an unfortunate necessity at best.

But I can't make the judgement call if it is actually an unfortunate necessity, because most games just want me to accept that enemies are nothing more than evildoers doing evil to be evil and bad (and drop treasure on death).

That's... pretty terrible writing. That's all I'll say.

Why? Focus more on the parts I actually care about seems like good writing to me. Again though, this doesn't really seem to be inherent to JRPG's.

Then stop with the murdering. You can't have murder and innocent cheeriness among mentally stable protagonists without it being bad writing or pure comedy.

See above. Your greatly simplifying the situation, where murdering bandits by the hundreds (they are human!) doesn't mentally affect you for some reason, only killing certain humans (like soldiers) do.

I hope they fixed some Mecanim weirdness. I've never quite been able to get animation triggers to work properly; usually they either trigger twice, or slightly off-cue, or they play half of the animation before immediately snapping back to the previous state. Also it'd be nice to have animation events be in the Animator panel rather than import settings, but there's probably a good technical reason for that.

Yeah, I gave up with their trigger system and made my own. Actually, I just made my own state machine animation system after realising that Mecanim has too many limitations, and was fiddly to keep in sync with my character's behavioural state machine. It's also easier to mix in custom procedural animations, since Mecanim has IK only for arms and legs, (and even then it only works for human rigs ).

Mecanim's not that good IMO

Keep in mind price wise, you have to buy a licence for each person working on a project.

It's nice that all the features are available to free users now though.

[UXLZ]

The whole 'characters not caring too much about death' is pretty pervasive to the entire gaming, movie, and to a lesser extent book industry anyway. I fail to see why you're using it as a point against JRPGs in particular, and honestly I'm glad that all these things are written 'badly' because the alternative is incredibly homogenized and incredibly boring.

[nenjin]

My rule has always been thus: motherfucker draws on me, motherfucker is sleeping in the dirt.

Which in Skyrim etc... usually means I quicksave before I boldly walk right into the middle of something. I give most people a chance not to murder me. So, ethically, I have a pretty safe system. And when you look at it like that, half of the world IS made up of BAD people.

I find the logic that they'll kill you if you don't kill them pretty inescapable. (In video games. In life things are a lot grayer.) Maybe if game AIs would fight to wound you or scare you off or some shit, or if you had ways to interact with people in combat and be like "hey, put your fucking weapon down!", things wouldn't be so black and white. But pretty much all moments like that are scripted, and obviously so. So most of the time the player doesn't have to think that hard about whether or not to kill something. The developers make that distinction for them through gameplay.

Which is why I like games where you can kill anyone. People can do all sorts of stuff to you in RPGs, without actually trying to kill you. It's just they'll usually try. When a guy steals from you and you catch up to him, does he just try to give your stuff back? No, he pulls a weapon and you fight. When you stumble into a bandit camp, do they stop and see if you just want to give up your money? Not usually, unless it's scripted. About the only time I feel bad in situations like that is in Skyrim, where you sometimes come up on bandits at camps and they won't attack you, but they're clearly ready to and say as much. In those instances, yeah, I'll take it, I murder the shit out of them. More because of my expectations of the game and understanding of the mechanics doesn't give me any reason not to.

I actually just did a quest in Skyrim that kind of challenged my morality.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You're investigating these murders in Markarth by the Forsworn, the displaced early settlers of Skyrim who have gone all Braveheart/Apocalypse Now. Turns out they're being directed by the King in Rags, who was captured a long time ago and sent to the Silver Blood family's mines. And they arranged a deal where the King in Rags can keep giving them orders as long as they kill who the Silver Blood family needs dead. You as the player investigate. You basically figure out what's going on, and offer to take care of the King in Rags for the Silver Bloods. They refuse. The corrupt Markarth guards and Silver Blood hirelings both tell you to keep your nose of it as your investigation continues. Your accomplices are murdered, you're framed for it and you get sent to the prisons. In talking to the Forsworn prisoners and the King in Rags, they all tell you how they were essentially forced into a life of savagery, screwed over by Nords, lands stolen, imprisoned and essentially forced to become Forsworn to survive. So now they hate the Nords more than anything else. The King in Rags makes you kill a dude to prove you're willing to play ball with him, or you'll never get out of the mines. (You can still get out but I did what I was asked, which I didn't like.) They decide to break out and end their deal with the Silver Bloods. You exit the mines with them, they essentially welcome you as Forsworn, and then you're left alone with the King in Rags. Your choice is to join him or kill him, and on reflection I decided, he was the cause of much pain and suffering, who really didn't care who died in the end, and to let him loose would just be to allow their campaign of terror to continue. On the other hand, the Nords, along with the Silver Bloods, are all kinda scum too. Just over privileged, racist scum, who also happened to have just royally screwed me.

So I kill the King in Rags, step out and all the other Forsworn prisoners get slaughtered by the guards (*cough my followers *cough.) And then the head of the Silver Blood family comes up and is like "Hey, thanks for dispatching the King in Rags, he was becoming too much trouble. Sorry about all the imprisonment and stuff, here's a trinket to make up for it."

That whole quest line actually kind made me stop and consider my options, albeit by giving me several bad options to choose from, and challenged my usual strike last philosophy of dealing with NPCs and quests.

That said, my next goal in Skyrim is to go find the head of the Silver Blood family, and get pay back for framing me and having me imprisoned. And for generally being a dirt bag.

[Mech#4]

There's also a bit of an issue with some games, thinking of Skyrim here, where the game does actually have an option to yield to your opponents but either it's difficult to pull off or the A.I doesn't consistently respect the gesture of blocking and activating. It's like how the A.I in Skyrim will flee when it is low on health, go and cower behind a rock for about 10 seconds, then come running back to continue attacking.