Game resource system

Developed by former Ubisoft veterans. Build and survive on procedural planets in this space exploration game from indie developer System Era Softworks. Trove is a voxel based game from Trion Worlds, creators of Rift and Defiance. After crash-landing on a distant planet, you must build a colony with your friends, battle others and explore the system prospecting for riches. Discover, fight, and tame indigenous alien creatures or search for lost human expeditions.

In this Sci-Fi roguelike, the player must scavenge derelict spaceships by remotely piloting drones with only some camera feeds and a command line. This edit will also create new pages on Giant Bomb for:. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Resource Managers - Are they any good? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 5 months ago.

Active 7 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 17k times. Cleaned up Rather than having a system of: Resources are held by entities only, or loose.

Responsible for own load into memory. Improve this question. I think this is a valid question. But there are things you'd do with the manager that you wouldn't do with a manifest. Manifests are dumb things that simply gather together disparate resources into a single index. A resource manager can have much more responsibility, and better interfacing with the game engine. However, I think that didn't appear in seach as I used resource rather than asset.

Granted, some people were trying to answer the first question for the second question, which would cause a lot of answer overlap.

Show 2 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. You just request a resource, and it's given to you. No need to worry about resource IDs and stuff like that. There can still be an overall trend towards more powerful actions, however, if players spend their resources on engine pieces that make it easier to accumulate resources or open up more powerful actions.

In some games, time is your only resource. In others, there is a single currency resource to manage. But many games feature many different resources, and part of the fun comes in juggling them all. For example, a player might gather raw materials, then convert them into more specialized goods, which ultimately are spent on special abilities, victory points, or even more resources. Games with many different resources that relate to each other in complex or layered ways are both difficult to design and understand.

For some players, they provide a welcome puzzle. For others, they are a confusing and unpleasant source of stress. Make sure you know your audience when designing the resource system for your game. And make sure you playtest such games many, many times. In Le Havre , resources relate to each other in a layered fashion. When resources are at the center of games, they can enable a lot of classic mechanics. Bidding, bluffing, trading, and many other interactive mechanics are supported by a strong resource system, and often fall flat without one.

And complex resource systems can create intermediate goals for players and puzzles for them to solve, which can form the core fun of a game. However resources fit into your game, remember that ultimately resources are about choice. Make sure your players have options about how they can spend their resources, and for some games, the option to not spend resources should be a serious consideration. When you start working on the resource system for a new game, ask yourself some basic questions.

What role should this resource system have in the game? Should it be a focus and source of fun? Or is it there to support other mechanics, be it by managing the overall pacing of the game or balancing alternative player options?

Other questions to ask involve how constrained the players should be. Answering these questions and tuning an artificial economy can take a long time and a lot of testing. In Manhattan Project: Energy Empire , players must balance many resources: money, plastic, steel, science, oil, workers, energy, and even a clean environment. All games involve some degree of resource management. Darcy Rayner Darcy Rayner 1 1 gold badge 4 4 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges.

If you're working on a PC, setting a memory soft cap is probably superfluous, for example. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Your resources should be split into two: their description usually in XML and actual data.

The engine should load ALL resource descriptions at the start of the game and create all handles for them. When a component requests a resource the handle is returned. That way functions can proceed as normal they can still request the size etc.. Now what if you haven't loaded the resource yet?

Make a 'null resource' that is used to replace any resource that is attempted to be drawn but hasn't been loaded yet. Improve this answer. Setheron Setheron 6 6 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. I'd just been through my school library hunting for a copy of 'Game Engine Design and Implementation', but with no luck.

Does the book go onto detail how it would handle a memory budget? Ultimately even a basic one should be much better than the general malloc since that tends to try and be the best for all things.