Steam: Greenlight

[Airship Ballet]

You can trademark "The Dark Mod", but you can't trademark "Dark" or "Mod" or "The"

You'd be surprised what you can trademark. Cadbury almost got away with trademarking their particular tone of purple. Anyways, Melan posted links to the technical terms. They really do have to pursue their copyright if they want to actually own their own branding. They don't have a choice, because while they don't want to stop Persson from using 'Scrolls' they do want to stop someone making an Eldar Scrolls game in a decade. IIRC he won in the end anyway, didn't he? I'm sure some dirtbag will come along and copy the name near-as-dammit (with some change to Elder since they let 'Scrolls' slide) and prove the necessity of that kind of legal action. I imagine your argument is why they lost, but it's also why we'll have a few X Scrolls games on the app store in short order.

Edited February 18, 2015 by Airship Ballet

[Melan]

 

What happened in 2010 ?

TDM was released in late 2009. If Eidos/Square-Enix didn't do anything within a year, why expect something several years later?

 

Also, what Springheel wrote. It is not an issue.

[motorsep]

Aye, cool. So do you want to be on Steam or not really ?

[New Horizon]

I think it depends on whether or not there is a lot of invasive Steam code to add, or any type of restrictions placed on us by Steam, if there is none of that then I suspect we would be happy to use Steam.

[motorsep]

I don't believe you have to put anything Steam related into the code. I would recommend injecting DRM into .exe just so Steam version is attached to Steam and at least you could track how many people playing/played the game in a certain timeframe, but I don't think it's a requirement.

 

It would be nice to add closed source launcher with Steamworks functionality, because being on Steam essentially entails participating in the Steam's ecosystem, with trading cards, etc. (trading cards don't require any code btw).

[Springheel]

Aye, cool. So do you want to be on Steam or not really ?

Are you asking because you think that hasn't been answered enough times already, or because you think you might get a different answer than the ones posted yesterday, or because you didn't read anything posted in the last few days?

[Anderson]

Are you asking because you think that hasn't been answered enough times already, or because you think you might get a different answer than the ones posted yesterday, or because you didn't read anything posted in the last few days?

Lego, ergo sum.

 

(and if totally free games are allowed to be put up there anyway)

Yes. A lot of them.

Check "No More Room in Hell", "Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok".

It's the golden type to highlight indie games that wouldn't have succeeded otherwise. Steam offers a highlight upon them. Regardless of the countless downsides it includes as a DRM (in it's nature at least).

[SteveL]

[auto detection of screen size]

That is convenient, but it takes only 5 seconds to change that in the settings. I didn't know this was a feature of the TDM by the way.

 

I think that the biggest concern should be for people who never read forums or news. They just see a new game. Install it and play it with whatever it has.

I think it's more important than that. It's about first impressions, especially for the casual players you mention. If a game launches and looks blurry and crap, it'll get uninstalled. And if we go for Steam, we want those first impressions to reflect the hard work that's gone in from mappers modellers and devs -- the professional touch.

 

I can't argue with that: if that's the only real concern it'd be wise to let someone as familiar with the code as those currently working on it ask the questions.

Hooking this on your reply, but it's addressed to everyone. Someone unfamiliar with the code, whether a coder or not, could do quite a bit. Even if it does turn out that there's a task list that needs an existing coder, being given a task list is much more palatable than the prospect of downing tools on a current project to go and do research for an open-ended task. Coders are every bit as obsessive about their current projects as mappers I did read the dev FAQ on Steam but didn't see any specific instructions or discussions. It might be as motorsep said, it just launches anything. But it can't work for everyone all the time, and there can't not be discussions around. How does the Steam HUD interface work with full screen apps? Ours is notoriously sticky -- note the "how to tab out of TDM?" threads that've popped up twice this week. Does it work by using a borderless window? That might work better for us, otherwise we need to find out how we can do some testing. Is it possible to try out your game in a test setup without committing lots of work? That kind of thing.

[Airship Ballet]

- Does it work by using a borderless window?

- Is it possible to try out your game in a test setup without committing lots of work? That kind of thing.

- It's a DirectDraw overlay, far as I know. Since others like it (FPS counters and hooks for recording software) work just fine, I don't think you'll need to worry about that. You can add non-steam games to Steam and have the overlay just plain work so long as it uses openGL/DirectX and has no overlays of its own. I know for a fact that it works with the current build of TDM because I've added it as a non-steam game long ago and use the overlay from it all the time, no problem.

- That comes later once you're in cahoots with people and they're notifying you of any changes to make. The real focus here should be letting people know. It's less important, obviously, since sales aren't paying off your mortgage. All the same, you wanna be promoting on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, whatever you can to get yourself out there, and that Greenlight page better be convincing! I'd love to contribute to the Greenlight spread, at the very least. Since it seems to be generally accepted that Steam is a good thing, though, said Greenlight page should be put together and uploaded at the earliest convenience of everyone involved.

[motorsep]

So I take it as going Greenlight beats getting on Steam right away

[demagogue]

Yes, SqEnix, the IP owners, ran a joint contest with us and cleared our IP in writing. Can't get more sanctioned than that.

 

Melan is talking about TDM being released in late 2009 and we've been cruising along just fine since then.

 

Edit. Lol, this kind of post happens when it's hard to see a new page on a phone. Well this thread got a lot of action in the last 24 hours.

[Diego]

Just to get the technical part out of the way I remembered it's possible to add non-steam games to steam. So I did that and it worked perfectly, the Steam overlay works, takes screenshots just fine, I can launch TDM from steam, the whole thing works.

Huge images:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So that's nice

[Anderson]

[auto detection of screen size]

 

I think it's more important than that. It's about first impressions, especially for the casual players you mention. If a game launches and looks blurry and crap, it'll get uninstalled. And if we go for Steam, we want those first impressions to reflect the hard work that's gone in from mappers modellers and devs -- the professional touch.

 

 

Oh, ok if you say so. I suppose you're right.

 

It's just that most, even professionally done AAA games mostly require manual fiddling with settings.

[Cookie]

I still think that a steam release should be done, but with the campaign included. This might be the best way to receive a positive feedback and people will always remember TDM for a hopefully great campaign that creates a feeling for the player to get "involved" (playing FMs, creating FMs maybe even directly contributing to the games development).

One thing that should be fixed is the games necessity to quit itself after installing a new FM. I don´t know if this is easy to solve, but it kind of leaves a "this game is not a real game but still some kind of mod" feel and should be fixed for a "professional" release.

Other than that, there are almost no other greenlight games that come even close to TDMs quality and releasing it on steam would give the game the attention it really deserves.

As far as I understood, even after your game got accepted through greenlight, you have the time to sort out things that need to be fixed for a release and any concerns regarding copyright or other things that might appear can be discussed with the support staff that will help you releasing your project.

[SeriousToni]

Why does everyone complain about the game restart when you change an FM or the options? At least for the options change it is normal for many other games too to do a restart and it only takes about 5 seconds and you got your new FM up and running.

 

About the campaign I agree with you. That would be the next big mark on the map after the final standalone release. But it's far in the future I think.

[chakkman]

It's normal for changing stuff like the resoultion, and even then some games won't have to restart. TDM is pretty quickly restarted though. What always bothered me more are the ultra long loading times before missions. Don't know any other game which has such long loading times. I know, a lot has already been said about it, and if it's necessary, then it's like that. Still one of the main issues i see.

[Anderson]

Why does everyone complain about the game restart when you change an FM or the options? At least for the options change it is normal for many other games too to do a restart and it only takes about 5 seconds and you got your new FM up and running.

 

About the campaign I agree with you. That would be the next big mark on the map after the final standalone release. But it's far in the future I think.

 

It's normal for changing stuff like the resoultion, and even then some games won't have to restart. TDM is pretty quickly restarted though. What always bothered me more are the ultra long loading times before missions. Don't know any other game which has such long loading times. I know, a lot has already been said about it, and if it's necessary, then it's like that. Still one of the main issues i see.

None of these are seriously a problem if the FM I'm playing is good.

 

After getting a good one, I realize how wrong I am.

 

The long load times, as far as I can remember were also an issue with Doom 3 (if I'm not wrong, at the time even Far Cry had the same issue). It's probably written in the engine and can't be changed.

[demagogue]

There are ways to speed it up, but at this point they come with a cost that's too high. (Some optimizations have already been done, ones you can do for free. It's better than it used to be, and the progress bar is more accurate now. The coders should be given credit for that much at least, doing the best they can with it. Everyone knows it's a pain.)

[grayman]

The obvious design change is to use threads to load map bits in parallel, but when I attempted to do just that, it became painstakingly evident that the current design assumes linearity from beginning to end, and I found it very very difficult and frustrating to do things in parallel. Too many undocumented assumptions, too many gotchas, not worth the effort in the end.

[jaxa]

Let's just email Gaben.

Edited February 22, 2015 by jaxa

[nbohr1more]

Loading times may be somewhat addressed in an upcoming build if we can get RGTC normal map compression to work.

 

A great percentage of the load times is generating mipmaps for uncompressed normals.

 

If there was a way to feed the engine premade mipmaps for uncompressed formats that would be cool too

but currently the best option is to improve normal map compression and "use it" (try to convert as much content as possible to RGTC or DXT).

[SteveL]

If there was a way to feed the engine premade mipmaps for uncompressed formats that would be cool too

DDS image format does that doesn't it? Does it work for normal maps too?

[nbohr1more]

Hmm, that's an interesting point. Uncompressed normals in a DDS container eh? I don't think the engine knows how

to parse that though? Would need to take a second peek at the loaders and spec.

 

Currently it only reads RXGB or DXT variants from DDS as I recall.

[nbohr1more]

Ahh, Ok we support GL_RGB8 and GL_RGBA8 which are uncompressed DDS types.

The problem is that these are noted to be larger than TGA itself. I wonder if the reason is the inclusion

of mipmaps (meaning the size difference is predicted and nullified in running code.)

 

Having pre-compiled mipmaps might still save memory allocation on map load compared to generating them

at that point so this might also alleviate Malloc errors for bigger missions... or might cause more due to

even larger storage requirements...

[OrbWeaver]

The obvious design change is to use threads to load map bits in parallel, but when I attempted to do just that, it became painstakingly evident that the current design assumes linearity from beginning to end, and I found it very very difficult and frustrating to do things in parallel. Too many undocumented assumptions, too many gotchas, not worth the effort in the end.

Trying to do things with manual threads is typically very difficult, as I understand it. What you really want is a nice parallelisation framework like QtConcurrent which lets you hand the API a vector of stuff to be done and tell it "Process all of this in parallel using a suitable number of threads, and get back to me when you've finished".

 

Unfortunately we can't use QtConcurrent since we're not using Qt, but I wonder if there are any similar frameworks that might be easier to integrate.