  Transition phase | 
Posted - 5/29/2006 11:55:38 AM | Heh, no, false alert, those screenshots are not new. Or, well, they are, as i just took them today, but there's no new feature in the planetary engine.
I called that post "transition phase", because i'm currently in the process of finishing a new version for the space combat prototype, with some new content ( JoeB's Makon frigate, high-resolution sky boxes, etc.. ), and i'll soon resume work on the actual game and the planetary engine. I'm not sure what to do next on the planetary engine; probably vegetation or volumetric clouds. I also need a bit of time to analyze all the design problems that i've encountered in the combat prototype, and how i'm going to solve / improve them for the game. There will be a couple new features / bug fixing in the combat prototype in the next months, but it will no longer be the priority ( heh, i can't spend all my time on a prototype! ). Expect the server to stay up a lot more often after the next patch.
New screenies:
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| Space combat prototype - debriefing Part II | |
Posted - 5/19/2006 5:26:52 AM | Continuation of Part I
Quote:The prototype was supposed to be opened "progressively", starting with 4 players to test the network, and up to 10-16 players after the first bugs ( note that those weren't unexpected, and indeed were present ! ) after a couple hours.
I certainly didn't expect 60 people to show up in IRC, all screaming to play...
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Note: the coming "times" might not be perfectly accurate.
Saturday, 6 May, 3 PM GMT. Exactly 24 hours before release. I'm still missing fundamental features in the prototype. I'm still unable to display any form of text. No HUD. No communication window, no status bars, no crosshair. Most modelers have finished their job though, so the "content" is ready. Or not really.. although i do have all the models, i still have to write the basic shaders with bump/specular mapping, and assign a dummy metallic texture to the ships.
Sunday, 7 May. Didn't sleep a lot, maybe 7 hours ( on a week-end! gah. ). My TODO list has grown quite a lot during the night.. while trying to sleep, i had been thinking to a lot new small features to add, bugs to fix, etc.. My todo list now has 70 items on it, and i'm 6 hours away from release..
At noon, i'm still trying to integrate the sky box into the prototype. A sky box, sounds easy, doesn't it ? Well.. no. My sky boxes are taken directly as "screenshots" from the game: placing the camera at a position in orbit of a planet, then taking 6 views at 90°, forming a cube. For some reason, i cannot use 1024^2 textures. Probably a bug in the render-to-texture code. I loose an hour trying to fix it, then decide it's going to take too long, and just go for 512^2 textures. The atmosphere of the planet is missing too: i'll fix that "detail" in a patch later.
2 PM: in theory, the release is in one hour. I've fixed a lot of small items on the todo list, but it's now clear that i won't be able to finish everything. There are 2 or 3 main points that i need to complete before having a "playable" game. One of them is the ability to detect victory conditions, having a countdown, and then restart the game on-the-fly, so that the game can run in a loop. Things are crashing horribly in all the destructors of my classes.. well.. the contrary would have been surprising.
3 PM: so, i'm supposed to release the game now. I have a glance at the IRC chatroom from time to time, and i'm scared. Tens and tens of people are waiting, chatting, asking questions.. "is it out yet", being the most frequent. I still have some code to finish before it can go online. I delay the release for one hour. People take the news pretty well.
5 PM: okay, the "delay" has been closer to 2 hours than 1 hour, but i think i now have a "playable" version. I'm expecting serious errors, bugs, crashes.. but, it should be possible to play a bit. I've already uploaded the DATA files, and all the players already have it. They're now waiting for the EXE files ( separated from the data, for easier patching later ). I'm uploading the EXE files into a separate directory, and give the address to 3 other developers. Let's start progressively: if other devs cannot join, there's no need to open the "gate" for a flood of 50 players.
6 PM: no dev can join, i'm still alone on the server. Due to a miscommunication problem, i realize after 30 mins that they weren't able to download the EXE zip file at all ( they were speaking of a login/password, those were for the web directory to download the exe files, and i mistakingly thought they were speaking of the login/password to create an account on the server ). But even after that, devs can still not join: they get crashes at load time. After analysis of the log files, i realize that the client crashes at sound initialization time ( thanks to OpenAL ). Then comes the light: they don't have the OpenAL runtime installed, and i didn't include it in the EXE. Another 30 minutes lost.
7 PM: frustration in the air. Many people already left the irc chatroom, slightly annoyed. I'm really sorry for that, but they were warned that problems had to be expected. Devs can now play "okay" on the server. It's time to start a more serious test, and i give the EXE to the public.
8 PM: things are going.. more or less well. A serious amount of people are crashing. Some have configuration problems ( lacking vertex/pixel shader 2.0, no fallback implemented yet ). Some have sound problems, even with OpenAL installed. Most are disconnected from the server. I have to confess something: due to lack of time, i didn't implement error handling either on the client nor on the server. Which means that if the connection is dropped, the clients will not realize it immediately.
In order to prevent tens of players to join and play at the same time, i had implemented a few admins commands as well as a waiting line/queue on the server. When the client is launched, the player fills connection/config informations ( account name/password, IP address, graphical resolution, etc..) and pressed "OK" to connect. Because there's no error handling/confirmation, people didn't know ( even though they were warned in irc, and on the forums, that there'd be a waiting line ) that the connection was queued and still "alive". As a result, many pressed the "OK" button many times, thinking nothing was happening.
On the other side, on the server, i was being flooded by "player X has joined" and "player X has disconnected" messages. Lesson learned: never release something without proper error handling/messages.
In part III: how the test ended, what has been the outcome of that, and the next days, busy patching.
Make sure you look at the Video of the latest (0.3) release, Divx 4 + MP3, 67 Mb if you haven't done so already !
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| Space combat prototype - debriefing Part I | |
Posted - 5/15/2006 6:01:05 PM | As you've probably noticed, i haven't posted a lot of development updates recently - and there's a good reason for it: the release of the Infinity Combat prototype. For the first time since two weeks, i finally have an hour to spare, which i decided to spend writing this report: a "debriefing" of everything that happened during the past weeks.
The development of the combat prototype has been, to say the least, chaotic. It all started with a few criticisms that i saw on the web here and there, saying that i was purely concentrating on the technical aspects of the game, but not the gameplay. Of course, that is partially true, but i had already done a bit of work on gameplay-related areas, such as the physics, the generation of the universe, etc.. But in early March, i had an idea: to make a new prototype, not a technical one this time, but that would concentrate on a gameplay-specific area ( combat )... and this prototype would end up in a fully playable game ( although not as deep as a full game ), that anybody could download and test.
The goal in this prototype was triple:
- to test the early gameplay mechanics, especially the combat side.
- to test the controls, physics, collisions, and network protocol, and to fix bugs in those.
- to monitor performance and stress test the server in actual "real world" conditions and internet latencies. Of course, i'm not speaking of running a true MMO here; but how could i run an MMO if i already had performance problems hosting a small arena-based game hosting 20-30 players ?
Another thing that i thought would be useful would be, as a motivation boost to everybody ( me, but also the other developers and contributors ), to have deadlines. Now, i didn't want to be too strict about deadlines, but having a goal certainly helped.
Initially, i had planned to develop this prototype over a period of around a month. Development started in March, and was supposed to end in early April. Of course it didn't work out that well.. i didn't take into account various "external" delays, such as:
- the release of a new version of ASEToBin for modelers to be able to work ( a bit less than a week lost )
- me being sick for a week
- the release of Oblivion ( one week and a half lost ! ).. arg
- the PCGamer interview ( a bit less than a week lost )
- a technical demo for various interested companies ( one week delay again )
- the Minas Tirith project deadlines ( one week and a half )
In the end, i released the first "public" version, which i called 0.2, on Sunday 7 May.
The prototype was supposed to be opened "progressively", starting with 4 players to test the network, and up to 10-16 players after the first bugs ( note that those weren't unexpected, and indeed were present ! ) after a couple hours.
I certainly didn't expect 60 people to show up in IRC, all screaming to play...
To be continued in Part II: madness a few hours before launch.
Media:
Video of the latest release (0.3) from yesterday, Divx4 + MP3, 67 MB
  
  
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| Space combat prototype: release | |
Posted - 5/7/2006 5:11:30 AM | The space combat prototype should be released today at 3 PM GMT. Yay! Instructions to download the client will be posted in the Testing and Feedback forum at release time.
I wanted to post a full dev update (the "so called space combat prototype - phase 9") but i've just been lacking time. I'm counting minutes. My TODO list is becoming longer and longer. At the moment it got 70 items to implement in around 5 hours. Fortunately, most of those items are small fixes or features. The main thing left to add are particle effects, an ini/setup dialog box for the client, and the radar. Wish me luck! Back to coding..
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| PCGamer Sweden article up | |
Posted - 5/4/2006 10:20:26 AM | Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Scans of poor quality, sorry. There's even a link to Gamedev.net in the last page :)
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| Space combat prototype - phase 8 | |
Posted - 5/1/2006 3:36:38 PM | This week end has been overwhelming. Around 30 hours of work over a period of 3 days. But it was well worth it :)
The bad news is, i've missed this week end's deadline. There are a various amount of reasons for that, the main one being that i found 2 major bugs ( one in OpenAL, one in the networking ) and each required half a day to fix.
The good news is, the prototype is starting to look rather nice, or at least that's my opinion. My goal ( at least from a gameplay's point of view ) with it is to recreate the ambiance and fights of the old Lucasart game series based on Star Wars, X-Wing and Tie-Fighter. Of course, there is Newtonian physics, so it's not the same, but it's quite similar.
I've added 3D sounds and musics. For this, i used a generic interface ( ISound ) and its implementation in OpenAL ( IOpenALSound ). At the beginning i thought it'd be a 2 hours work, especially since i used OpenAL in the past ( but for smaller projects ). Unfortunately, i discovered the hard way that it was not as easy as i thought, and lost half a day on it.
The problem with OpenAL ( and my mistake for assuming it was ) is that it's not such a high-level library. I was expecting it to feed hundreds of 3D sound sources, and the library would automatically, based on the relative volume of each source, select the N closest to match what the hardware ( sound card ) is able to mix. Unfortunately, OpenAL doesn't do that for you, so after creating more than 60 sources, i started to get weird OpenAL errors, and it was impossible to create more sources. In the end, i had to implement an algorithm that scans all the virtual sound sources and map / remap them automatically to N pre-allocated "real" sources. Doesn't it sound like a lot of fun ?
I've added CutterJohn's frigate into the prototype, and played with many physical parameters, like its mass / inertia. This is a really nice ship. Very hard to control, but also very powerful ( it has MKII turrets ) and strong. But an easy target. I'm not sure if it's going to be a popular choice in game, as without assistance ( other players to defend it or to distract the turrets ), it's quickly dead.
JoeB sent in some updates for the battleship ( with better hardpoint placements, and updates in the hangar ). He also made a mine with a MKI hardpoint. In the prototype, this mine will explode when a ship comes close to it, or fire at a distance. I've yet to implement the explosions and shockwave effects..
I've finally implemented the teams concepts, so now each ship is given a team ( and mines are in the "neutral" team ). Each team knows its battleship, and a battleship won't attach you if you're in its team.
As far as networking goes, i've implement smooth interpolation for the turrets orientation, and interpolation for the orientation of ships. I think there's still a bug in that code since sometimes objects ( on the client side ) start to spin like mad, but hopefully i can easily fix it.
I've implemented the concept of "spawn zones" for each battleship, so that when a player enters in game, his ship is spawned on a docking pad inside the hangar of the battleship. Handling bounding boxes from world space back and forth to battleship's space.. lots of fun ( or lack there of.. ).
Betelgeuze did some minor work on the H.U.D that Starbrow had started. It's not perfect, but for the moment it'll do the job. The H.U.D. is the main thing to finish right now. I'm displaying a small "info" window on the bottom-right of the screen, that will contain a 3D view of the entity you've selected. You can scroll all the entities by pressed the "T" key. If you are targetted yourself, you get a back / mirror view of what's behind your ship, if the camera is in first person mode. It was easy to implement and it's quite nice..
Finally, i've fixed a bug in the network protocol. I won't enter into details, but i lost a couple hours today, and it was due to a packet that arrived out-of-order, but was not "remembered", so when another copy of that packet arrived, it was delivered again. Two messages for the price of one.. that was not expected, making the client crash.
The release date for the prototype is now Sunday 7th May, at 3 PM GMT. Unless a major accident happens, this should be the last delay, as a week should be plenty enough to implement the last features and "polish" everything. Get ready!
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