Getting into game development

I'm a longtime developer, but my career so far has been focused on business application development using the SAP ERP platform. If you don't know what that is, do yourself a favor and forget that it exists.

My current project is a turn-based beach soccer tactical game, with visual novel and dating sim elements, built using the Godot game engine. The working title is The Saturday Amateur Beach Soccer League. This is currently in the prototyping phase, and there is a good chance it won't go any further. I will add more detail in a future post.

Categories: gamedev

Cemu and Xemu on Moonlight

I have been experimenting with both Cemu (Wii U emulator) and Xemu (original Xbox emulator) recently, streaming them to my TV using Moonlight. (At this point, the SteamLink app is but a distant memory, and will only use it for games for which Moonlight doesn't work, like Valkyria Chronicles).

For Cemu, my test games (so far) have been Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker. In both cases, I have had zero issue with Moonlight. Launching the games through Steam directly has been problematic. So, instead of doing that, I created a batch file to launch each game, and added those batch files to the NVidia GeForce Experience "Shield" settings. Here is the content of the batch file:

echo off
set Emu="C:\path\to\exe\file
set Game="C:\path\to\iso\file"
start /realtime /b "" "%Emu%" -g %Game% -f
exit

For Xemu, the only game I've tested is Jet Set Radio Future. I was planning to play Panzer Dragoon Orta as well but, after giving the game a shot on original hardware, I quickly realized that the game was not for me and decided not to play it. Here, I have encountered the same issue I had when I first launched the emulator: my controller was not recognized. I had to use a mouse to navigate to the settings and select it, both on the computer and on the Raspberry Pi. After that, things have been running great. I think launching through Steam would have worked here, but instead I created a batch file to launch the game directly and also added in the "Shield" settings as well.

Categories: in-home-streaming

Tomb Raider (2013) on Moonlight

On a whim, I reinstalled Tomb Raider (2013) on my gaming PC this week, and started playing it. I have very mixed feelings about this game (despite the fact that this is the third time I'm playing through it), which I will probably detail in another post later once I finish it.

Playing this game through Moonlight on my Raspberry Pi is a charm: the visual quality is excellent, and so is the framerate. Despite its age, this game still looks great. At the time I first played it, I remember thinking "I don't care if games ever look better than this, this is good enough". This opinion has not changed.

Categories: in-home-streaming

Enter Moonlight

Over the past few weeks, I've decided to test Moonlight instead of SteamLink. Results have been... mixed.

The program is actually very easy to install via the RetroPie-Setup script. It is available in the 'experimental' packages. There is a specific command available to automatically create shortcuts, so games can be started directly from the RetroPie menu (under the 'Steam' category).

One problem I encountered right away: For whatever reason, my DualShock 4 was recognized as 'Wireless Controller', not as a DS4, and the button configuration was all messed up. I tried to figure out how to change it, but gave up after about an hour, and went back to using a Dual Shock 3 (also wirelessly), which was properly recognized and works as expected.

The first game I tried, of course, was the original Tomb Raider. SteamLink had some noticeable input lag issues. It is not the case with Moonlight. Everything worked perfectly. Same with Tomb Raider II. I was able to beat both games without any kind of issue. The visual quality looked even better than using Steam streaming.

Other games I've tried with Moonlight:

• The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure (thanks to the recently released translation mod for the PC version). I've played about 10 hours so far and I have yet to encounter any issue. Again, the video quality is top notch, and the inputs work great (using a Dual Shock 3).
• The Lego Ninjago Movie Videogame: This game is surprisingly fun and funny (especially since I got it for free last year during a promotion). I have found two issues: Anytime I need to rotate the left analog stick, the motion is not detected properly, making those puzzles virtually impossible to complete, and the game will crash randomly when streaming. I tried the rotation puzzles on my PC directly with an Xbox One controller, and it worked as expected, and without crashes.
• Valkyria Chronicles: I can hear the sound, and that's it. The screen stays black when streaming this game through Moonlight. I tried it with SteamLink, and have not encountered any issue there. I did some Googling, and the same issue occurs on an Nvidia Shield device as well.
• Tomb Raider: Legend: Again, seems to work great with Moonlight. I had two issues playing this through SteamLink: the game was too dark, and the analog sticks were too sensitive. I haven't encountered either of them with Moonlight.

Categories: in-home-streaming

More testing with Tomb Raider (1996)

I've spent some time testing this game today over wi-fi. It was not a good experience, due to input lag. It's not much, but enough to be noticeable and make a relatively simple platforming section in the second level of the game somewhat tricky (especially for the jumps).

I tried a few other things as well:

• Ethernet over power lines -- Better, but still noticeable. I did not run into any video issues though, the frame rate was constant and did not notice any compression artifacts.
• Wired both PC and the Raspberry Pi into the same router -- About the same as ethernet over power lines. Maybe a tiny bit better, but still noticeable.

So, at this point, I'm not convinced this can work, at least not for action game that require precise timing. This should be fine for anything turn-based though.

Categories: in-home-streaming