recent gamedev news

[WildWeazel]

Just some interesting developments, material, and trivia that I've come across lately. None of this really warranted its own thread, but it's all of interest to us.

Civ3 is still quite a bit more popular than I'd realized, even since joining Suede's discord. For the past few months Steam stats have shown Civ3 consistently in the top 10 4X games with a running average of around 1200 players online at any time. And that's just the Steam version.

Godot is working through version 3.5 Release Candidates, which I believe will be the last minor version before the jump to 4.0. This will be a recommended upgrade for us once it's stable. There have been 5 RCs and counting, so we're still Waiting on Godot...

Also in Godot news, they held the third GoGodotJam last month, a virtual gamedev festival and contest. You can find the entries, and video archive of previous years, on the website. They also took submissions for a 2022 showreel. I don't think we're quite there yet (especially without our own assets) but maybe next year!

Meanwhile FreeCiv 3.0 was released, with the "civ2civ3" ruleset now being the default. It will now play more like Civ3, but it is not a clone of the C3C rules nor compatible with Civ3 files.

From the frontpage: Amplitude's creative director talks about how modding drove his career and, interestingly, his desire for Humankind to be "an engine for making games in the genre."

Also, streamer FilthyRobot and game designer Keith Burgun both interviewed Soren Johnson about Old World, and Firaxian Anton Strenger gave a talk at GDC titled "Ahistorical Accuracy: Bringing New Myths and Representation to 'Civilization'"

 

[Quintillus]

That is a great summary. The Soren Johnson interviews in particular are on my radar, but I want to finish one or two more games of Old World first!

Where do you go to see the top 4X games on Steam? I've seen the page that shows the top 100 games overall by concurrent players, and it's been a few years since Civ3 was on there, but I didn't know you could view it by tag/genre/category. IIRC, that's about as many as Civ3 had when it was last on the top 100 list, which would indicate that Steam has grown, but Civ3 has remained at a similar level of engagement. I guess that means Civ3 is officially in "Good old game" status where there's a long-term audience. The cost of the game being about the same as a fancy latte, less when it's on sale, probably doesn't hurt in bringing in the occasional new player either.

Edit: Found https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/4X/#p=0&tab=ConcurrentUsers, which shows Civ3 is the 7th-ranked 4X game based on current concurrent users, just behind Civ4 BTS and just ahead of Total War: Rome II Remastered. With 73 total 4X games on Steam, that puts it in the top 10%. But I haven't found the count yet.

 

[WildWeazel]

I don't know where to find the raw data. Someone has been posting monthly stats to Reddit.

 

[Ozymandias]

That is a great summary. The Soren Johnson interviews in particular are on my radar, but I want to finish one or two more games of Old World first!

;

Edit: Found https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/4X/#p=0&tab=ConcurrentUsers, which shows Civ3 is the 7th-ranked 4X game based on current concurrent users, just behind Civ4 BTS and just ahead of Total War: Rome II Remastered. With 73 total 4X games on Steam, that puts it in the top 10%. But I haven't found the count yet.

7th most popular, after 23 years! ... Well, I, for one, am not surprised.

 

[WildWeazel]

more minutiae:

Unity's community (commUnity?) is imploding after news of a merger with a malware-associated app monetization company and some hostile comments from their CEO (formerly of EA), driving a lot of indie devs to Godot. One reason I opted for an open-source platform...

Speaking of Godot, we're still ...waiting... for 3.5 (RC 8?!) but they've released a 3.4.5 in the meantime and are planning to enter 4.0 beta very soon.

There's lots of rumbling about Civ7 - or more accurately, the lack thereof - since we're coming up on 6 years since the last iteration. I suppose that will put our title under additional scrutiny if we haven't made up our minds by then.

 

[WildWeazel]

I didn't mean for this to be an ongoing series, but interesting developments keep happening.

Godot 3.5 is finally released, which allowed me to finish the virtual machine image that new contributors can now use to quickly get started. I had thought this was going to be the end of the line for Godot 3, but now they're talking about 3.6 with additional backports of features from 4.0.

Speaking of 4.0, it looks like full .NET 6 support will make it in, which would be great for us. It remains to be seen how much of an effort it would be to port C7 to Godot 4, but considering we have pure C# libraries and a thin UI, I'm optimistic that it wouldn't be too bad...

Per the front page, Unciv is gaining popularity. I've been aware of this game for a while but didn't realize how much progress they'd made. It's been on the Play Store for at least a couple of years in alpha/beta. Unciv is an open-source cross-platform (including Android) remake of Civ5 in a simple 2D engine. This seems like great news for us, for two reasons:
First, it shows that community remakes (granted, theirs is visually much simpler) are still achievable and well received, even if they take a while. Unciv has over 350 contributors, 421 releases, and 5 years of code history, with a million downloads on Android alone.
Second, they're explicitly cloning Civ5 and using Civ in the name, so if they don't have any trouble we should be fine.

 

[Quintillus]

Dang, a million downloads! I didn't know they were that popular! It's also been on my radar, though I haven't tried it yet... Civ5 being my least-favorite game in the series being part of the reason for that.

I walked by a theater last week, I think it was in Buffalo, advertising a now-in-the-past performance of "Waiting for Godot". It reminded me of C7.

I'd agree that hopefully it won't be too bad moving to 4.x, but I'd glad we didn't wait for it before setting things in motion.

 

[Kyriakos]

My computer can't run Godot, which means that Godot is waiting for me :/

 

[Plotinus]

My computer can't run Godot, which means that Godot is waiting for me :/

Under-appreciated comment!

 

[Kyriakos]

Under-appreciated comment!

But not of the level of that "Maissetrap"

How time flies, Plotinus, and yet we have a full account of things taking place 16 years ago, along with direct expressions of emotion which one can assume have faded in the meantime.

 

[WildWeazel]

You can't run the Godot Editor, or can't run games made with Godot? What kind of system is it?

 

[Kyriakos]

You can't run the Godot Editor, or can't run games made with Godot? What kind of system is it?

The editor.
The bottleneck is that this computer pretty much has no gfx card, so can run only stuff that don't use heavy rt 3d rendering. Eg it only runs up to Blender 2.8.
It used to belong to my sister, who isn't into games. My own got thrown away years ago - but it could run Godot

Obviously I aim to buy a new computer, but for that I need a better income - part of the reason why I am currently creating a third online literary seminar.

 

[Plotinus]

But not of the level of that "Maissetrap"

How time flies, Plotinus, and yet we have a full account of things taking place 16 years ago, along with direct expressions of emotion which one can assume have faded in the meantime.

Yes, and there are Spacer One and Stormrage, as if they'd never left. Which in a way they haven't.

 

[WildWeazel]

Godot 4.0 is now in beta with full support for .NET 6. That will be an eventual target for us.

Steam is hosting TactiCon, an online strategy gaming event, this week.