amafi

@thephantomnaut: @giromindtricks: Awesome, thanks. I'll grab one as soon as I find it in stock.

@giromindtricks said:

I bought a Hori Real Arcade Pro 4 Kai recently and would highly recommend it. I wasn't a fan of the "Kuro" buttons, so I replaced them with Sanwa OBSF 30's and a 24 for the start button. The Kuro buttons just felt strange and they had this horrible squeak if you hit them off centre, this would probably go away once you break them in. The stick I thought felt perfect. Overall I spent £145 (£120 for the stick, £25 for the buttons) which is still over £50 cheaper than a Madcatz PS4 stick even if I was lucky enough to find one in stock.

Now I use this as my main stick on PS3, over my Qanba Q4 RAF. The stick also works on the PC in PS3 or PS4 mode, the only real difference is the touch pad counts as an extra button in PS4 mode.

Is the RAP4 Kai mod friendly? Got some buttons sitting here already from the last time I upgraded a stick (ordered, delivery took so long I forgot about it, ordered again).

My old Hori stick was a bit of a nightmare to mod compared to the TEs and the Q4s and the like.

I'm no netcodist or anything, but from what I've heard people like Mike Z of skullgirls fame say about it, I really don't get why not everyone goes for GGPO (or some other rollback based netcode if they must reinvent the wheel).

There's so much middleware all over, from the trees to UI elements to textures, but everyone always seems to really want to make their own mediocre to shit netcode for some reason.

As for the game, I haven't played a lot. Did the tutorial and a bit of training mode. Tutorial is decent, if only for scorpion. Wish they'd had something similar for combos and specials for every character. Training mode seems ok. Easy to record stuff on P2 side and try out setups and punishes and such. Also the PC version is real pretty once it got out of menu simulator 2015 mode. Nice glistening brains and innards.

Gonna save story mode for this weekend, I think. Hopefully it's good.

Yeah, I like prototyping tiny bits by themselves, personally. And then completely scrapping them. Even if the only thing you learn is one way to not do something, that's incredibly valuable knowledge.

Best way is to make a bunch of games.

Do it in game maker, construct 2, UE4, Unity, the Blender Game Engine, whatever. Just do it a lot. Once you figure out some of the stuff you don't know how to do, find resources either online or in books that help you figure out how to do those things, and do those things a whole bunch too.

I'd also recommend checking out some of the MVA courses available from

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-topics/game-development

All free, you just need to log in with a microsoft account, like hotmail or outlook or live or whatever.

I'm currently going through some of the SCOM and Azure stuff, which is nowhere near as much fun as game dev.

And yeah, don't be afraid to learn how to code. It's not as hard as you think. HTML5 and javascript might be a good place to start, since the syntax and basic skills are something you will be able to take with you to whatever language you go with next (as long as you don't get way crazy and go with something like lisp later), it's very light on requirements when it comes to software, you don't need to mess around with fancy IDEs and learning to compile and link and all of that stuff, you just need a decent text editor like atom.io or sublimetext or something.

Still really want to get a Cintiq to replace my wacom tablet and a 3dConnexion SpacePilot 3d mouse for doing 3d DCC/CAD stuff.

And a Makerbot. And VR goggles.

I mean. Just LOOK at how cool that thing is!

As someone with a PC capable of running any game that comes out for it at least as well as it runs on console, there is not a single game I care about on either the PS4 or xbox one yet.

90% of my purchases on the PS4 are cross-buy games I primarily play on the Vita. The only console I turn on at least once a week is my Wii U.

For me it's game controllers etc stuff.

HOTAS and pedals, 7 gamepads,3 different mechanical keyboards, 1600p 30" monitors, things like that.

Almost bought a wheel for driving games the other day and I hate driving games.

Probably not unless it involved free to play and hats.

Looking forward to hearing feedback on the headset though. And a price. And software compatibility with the oculus libraries and things. Would suck if engines had to add support all over again for the RE vive or whatever the hell the terrible name for the HTC headset is.

Pretty sure unity just compiles to the .net common runtime language.

There are projects out there that let you write games in F# and vb.net etc as well as managed c++, boo, js and c#.

Awesome news about UE4, I've been meaning to check out the new stuff for a while now.