The Eternal Problem

sometimes only a diagram will do:

sigh…

You know it’s been 20+ years since I tried this coding lark, things have improved but not a lot. http://www.gaslampgames.com/2013/03/20/cpu-and-gpu-run-time-profiling-in-simulation-land/. Too many moving parts that all do their own thing. Parts get all picky about what they’ll work with and barely remember that if  their stuff doesn’t join up with other stuff,  it isn’t worth using. Wonder how many incompatible dodos “cornering the market” has bred during those years. Clearly I didn’t miss anything much. Appalling lack of progress – just like dentistry which remains painful and barbaric and hasn’t moved an inch forwards on that rather huge issue in thirty years either.

Grr.

Here’s someone else’s take on it; his is much more interesting than mine, I may add:

http://ubercode.de/blog/why-asm-js-is-a-big-deal-for-game-developers

I’m not having a day off (Wurm)

just so you don’t know. I never tell people if I have days off. It’s fatal. People immediately find ways to keep me busy. I intend to not spend this day I’m not having off mostly on Wurm recharging batteries and returning to my happy self!

Wurm and not another game because it’s still the best virtual world and the real one outside is below zero as well as bonkers (http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/03/health-and-safety-strikes-again-triangular-flapjacks-banned-from-school-because-they-have-pointy-bits/   -   I rest my case).

If anything interesting happens I’ll write about it. And as a caveat I might get diverted – it happens oo a butterfly. I better use headings.

Wurm
This person is not very popular (and weekends are trrrrrrrolltime) but he has gone straight to the point. It’s a poll. Should crafting be allowed in a crafting game?
http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/78419-dont-allow-anyone-to-create-anymore-items/

Well you tell me. The databases being unable to cope unless everything deteriorates rapidly (except deeded walls, keys and locks) has resulted in me logging in this year only to repair and improve stuff. I log in for the virtual world, the fact that development is live and ongoing, that the playerbase is interesting, that I can get real paperwork done while I chop virtual trees. Due to limited playtime (like what most people have) I’m on Wurm for a ton of reasons none of which is (currently) gameplay. Go figure.

Twitter
Still fooling about with it. Once you get rid of the obvious bots – (PR for musicians, tv chefs, football), you get people doing activism – also partly botted judging by the repeats. Activism via Twitter is ok by me,  but I do think an acceptable format has to evolve so it’s not witch hunts. So far the art of using Twitter appears to be finding anyone with anything interesting to say. The Blender community is nice to follow. And I also like the Dalai Lama’s gentle reminders err …to remember to be gentle.

Butterfly
Bound to happen. Well in Wurm my brain was idling and then it spotted a string of thought that was half hidden under a piece of cheese in headspace from earlier on today. So I fired a few things up in the background and  managed to get a working android emulator on the laptop (quite cool).  After that I started doing xml things to play with the emulator ….. you know Eclipse is the buggiest thing I ever did see. I almost went nuts before I looked at all the complaints in stackoverflow.

I can’t pretend Wurmtime is nonproductive. Emulator will come in very handy – maybe for that spinoff. If I can find a way around Eclipse. Now my brain hurts and I’m tired, (but very pleased with myself for remembering to explore that emulator and getting it to work). Also I forgot to eat lunch!

http://www.scatterbrain.nl/ I should use it.

Why aren’t you all making your own games?!!! (for me to play…)

I come across people all the time with such good ideas…. if only they all made games out of em I’d be in heaven!

Here’s yet another great tool (in development but very far along). No need to fear LOD no more. I don’t know quite what to say. It’s magificent.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?256768-Terrrain-LOD-UPDATE-physics-!!-huge-open-world-for-all-(glsl-custom-shader)

0nly 260 or so lines of script… wow

Spin-off game

Belting through these while I have time. (Might not hear from me next week, it’s going to be a busy one.)

Anyway. Yes. We have the idea for our first spin-off project solid. We’ll be working up one of the game systems we need and extending it to be itself whatever that turns out to be. Jolly exciting!

Using that as a farshore, we know what we’ll need to know to make our first stab at a coherent Thing that we can even (possibly) market if we like it. But that’s not the actual aim in this case, it’s a sort of fake aim.  Really we want more to develope some kind of work ahm, don’t know what you call it – sequence that we can build on and use in future - the steps from idea to finished thing. (Is that a “pipeline” then?)

(Related – I keep losing all the links/names for all the little games I come across and like and it’s a pain to trawl through here looking for them so I’ve taken advantage of WordPress and set up an extra blog for Indie, Unusual and Older games. Mainly Indie, and mainly small. I won’t be selling our stuff there either by the way – it’s more just keeping fave games together and saying why I like them. Still setting up, will post the name here when it’s got something on it. It’s a quickfix because I know this blog needs a Graet Tidy Up and part of that is that there’s too much going on in one place…)

I diverge! Back to our spinoff. It will be single-player and we can spit it out in Unity 3 Free if necessary (Flex? HTML5?), will not require dedicated home-grown source, or very complex graphics. But an easy-to-implement ui would be nice. Might use Blender but this is a little project and probably not worth all the workarounds. Might even use it to try out various languages, hmmm not sure about that …maybe.

Time is an issue. 2013 is not the kind of year for us where there is a lot of extra time and learning the “real” stuff (coding and graphics) takes total priority. I think best to regard our spinoff as a sort of practice run and learn what we can from it. It’s a side-issue but a nice one and it’s exciting!

Right now, we’re into diagrams about the gameplay hehehe – fun…and no, not saying what it is here and today. If it goes anywhere there’s time enough for a reveal. We’ll think up some unreasonable codename probably.

How necessary are backups?

hahahaha!

Yes well the frankenstein wiring in this place did for my external hard drive, as I wrote earlier this week. There was a little spark and it died, aw! I do have a plug-effort to even out spikes in the power supply but it’s already packed. Them’s the breaks. I’m sure worse things will happen.

I still need to extract old work from the usb I put it on (actually several of them). Hoping to pick at that today, maybe, if there’s time.

I’d even forgotten I’d done that but I’m glad I’m me. I put my housekeys in the fridge now and again. I should be more… err… less relaxed about all this. Thing is mostly we’re running through tutorials just now and then taking what we’ve learned and fooling around. Nothing we did before cannot be reproduced quite fast, that’s why I’m relaxed. But yes… backups. I think having things in more than one form is a good idea, and intend, though not often (6 monthly or so), to do hard copy of any code. Paper might not be durable over centuries but it beats digital storage hands down for being the way to store “that copy you can use if you really have to”, specially given we currently have frankenstein wiring. In general I don’t like putting things only in one form  and in one place when they are this ephemeral (hence the usbs). Some irrelevant stuff needs to go on dropbox too.

It’s nice to realise how far we’ve progressed even in a month, and (yay) there is scope for a redo here and there. I shall call it “revision” and be content.

How necessary is a sub? (Costing:GD&C)

I have quite a few scraps and morsels whirling around in my head so yer’ll need to excuse the short bouts of typing them out as I go about my Sunday, which is always busy.

This is all a bit previous of course, but to scout ahead is the way I think (and achieve), so here I am poking around server hosting looking at prices. I only vaguely know what I’ll be needing in the dim and distant future, which is right and proper since it’s dim and distant. The following is some notes for  much later,  for if anyone of us fancies puffing TWoFB up into a business. Much later. And huge if.

Studios have running costs, which on the surface doesn’t hang too well with only sporadic income from cash shops. Fixed outgoing + sporadic income = not compatible? Well sort of  …once you scale things up it’s very doable. If the sporadic income easily covers the fixed outgoing you’re home and dry, to put it simply. “Easily” being the important word.

My long and rather acute nose for flannel tells me that running costs are nowhere near being the rocks upon which games founder – excluding debt servicing and wages. But don’t start me on wages. The pressure (here in Britain at least) to employ people you can’t afford is huge and causing all kinds of trouble what with wages being deliberately depressed and handouts being given both to employer and employee to keep them that way. It’s all very unrealistic… I must stop…..

Hehe. Ok I’m back in the room. I’ve kind of jumped a step or three. I’m writing off any startup costs because frankly a) up to now and for the forseeable any equipment we need doubles for personal use and b) the cost of accounting and administering it (time particularly, but money too) outweighs the benefit of reclaiming any tax benefit on it. In other words it ain’t worth the bother until the day the door opens (just about). I know this from starting up before. A quick record of what we started with is about all I’ll keep, and mainly just for interest’s sake (it’s on the TWoFB … aka Thingie page   if you’re curious).  Another step I left out: TWoFB and the Garden Shed is my hobby, so I don’t record or formally account for time spent. Roughly a year’s research, very part time (done). And I estimate if I had done that full time would have taken only 3 months. That’s a working account and good enough for me.  Right now, roughly 2 years very part time learning (doing) – well it’s a guess. I might get there quicker because I like learning. Or I might get diverted – oooo a butterfly! In keeping with what I put before (debts and wages are or rather should be expensive) once I add myself as waged, that’s when the cost of running the thing goes up.

I forgot the third thing I forgot or maybe that was it. Anyway back to server hosting. Poking about I think we could comfortably spend £300 per month and get some people playing together. There are even cheaper options which will be explored and tried in the experimental stage, but I’m costing for when we have all the friends and family and a few (!) others that are established long-term-ish users. There is no lack of hosting services and products out there, and much of what they offer is still gobbledegook to me, which doesn’t stop me shopping. My best guess, wading through the jargon, is £300 per month for nothing to be squished, cramped or dysfunctional.

That is not a lot. If your *established* but small business can’t make that you’re on a loser already (startups and experiments are different and get plenty of leeway and failtime when it’s me in charge).

Like any leadperson I’m not ruling the option out, but I don’t think that a £300/pm server cost would need a sub because it’s just not that dire. Microtransactions (and lateral transactions eg spinoffs) should cover it. Further along I’ll be able to guess how many players my £300/month would support. For now I don’t have the knowledge. And yay there would be the whole experimental stage to get through first. I intend not to have any debts to service by the way. There are more costs, of course there are, but servers are the one that means the wheels turn which is why I’m so interested. Without this particular cost covered there is no point in even looking at the rest.

I can see how companies that have debts to service and have substantial labour costs would be utterly desperate for a steady income – those are the most obvious and likely reasons for the veneration and lust for a subscription model. Or maybe they just cream the extra money off the top. (haha could be… could be..) I don’t know. But from a nuts and bolts perspective, paying for server hosting does not appear to be what dents the bank. It’s doable.

Edit: that bit I forgot? Is the government’s bite of the pie. It is substantial. Here’s good advice –  don’t open for trade until you firmly believe you can make enough to pay the state.

Off The Rails as soon as possible! (Vanguard Saga of Heroes)

The 4 funnelled starting zones in Vanguard are fine really, I don’t mind them. I am still trying out the various classes though and have now seen quite a lot of them. Also I see the dreaded “revamp” word being used regarding the original racial starting areas. Why? I don’t care if it’s boring and there is no room for personal glory in just fixing the bugs, evening out the quest flow and letting things be – not liking just fixing things, well that’s some dev’s personal problem. I’m just a player here, dev aspirations are not my concern, and I don’t like streamlined pablum, new for the sake of new.

Exploration is of time as well as area, you know. The deathknell of WoW-and-my long-standing relationship rang out exactly when they stripped out old content and replaced it with a thin, on-rails boring overfast trivial experience, which you only wanted to play once and never again and which outlevelled the zone. No more pleasant times with Thottbott tracking down obscure items or strange npcs or places I came across. I didn’t much care if things were broken here and there either. It was discovery, pure and simple, and exploration, and it was good. If things don’t work so well in old places and you don’t feel inclined to fix them, just put “Here Be Bugs” on the map and let people still be able to see what past devs made. Layers of time provide richness.

We can make far snazzier pyramids nowadays, but people still go to Egypt.

So starting on a rainy moonlit Qalian evening… (get comfy, snuggle down, I will tell a tale….)

So far my ventures into this world had been pleasant but bland, only the classes and their sheer dazzling depth had gripped me – but one must not judge a whole game world by the very startiest starty places and thankfully this dark elf was ready to go to the secondpartystarty starty place in Khal, as soon as the sun rose. Scorpions on leashes eh, she mused, well…. ok. Being trained by rats, no… rat people. Giggle! Anyway, soon time to find the path down the cliff and see what lay ahead. This did:

Wow.

I was not to know it right then, but that was to be the start of a marathon gaming session, the like of which I have not been tempted into since my very early days of instance soloing on World of Warcraft, before I got involved in guilds and raids and all the other things they push down your throat – and hence had no time for such delights.

Usually I do ignore the lore in games, I confess it. I find it badly constructed which soon annoys me. Whole chunks don’t fit together and the layers don’t relate. Things get undue importance then trail to nothing. But the lore here is slowly seeping in. Down the hill I had more doings with the ratpeople, the Ksaravi, and my doings weren’t as clear-cut as I expected. The quest flow in this area is nice, with little side trails that provide some interesting diversions from the main trail to the starter dungeon… One thing led to another as the secondpartystarty starty area of Khal unfolded it’s tale. I duly entered the Ksaravi Hollow cave.

I am something of a dungeon bunny, I like to solo them, I like to explore them, and I thought I was in one of the usual kind, which would have been good enough for me. But it was nicer than that really, not like any dungeon I’ve been in before. For one thing, eventually I fought my way to this:

(I had to come back later and take the screenshot on another alt)

By this time, it was past my bedtime in the game called Real but fortunately I was not due anywhere early next day … I mean what self-respecting dungeon bunny could resist???

Hehe – no more screenshots of the ratpalace – go see for yourself! It’s quite fun in there. I was there until near morning and got to the end boss, which I apparently killed. But I doid, and didn’t know .

And that settled that! Vanguard is an amazing game. It really is and I intend to carry on playing it.

Next though, the vexed business of “retooling starter zones”. I haven’t the time to race to see these areas before they destroy them in the name of progress and I have already missed one…. Mekalia? I think it’s called. How dismaying. How…. errr … oh well. Anyway my dark elf finished the dungeon properly the next day and! Off to find the Dark Elf starting zone isn’t it.

I’ll leave it there, but just to say I arrived safely – (having fun, wish you were here!)

What’s it got to do with games?

Referring to the Article 4 post below – I keep forgetting that people don’t necessarilily connect the same dots I do.

Games are societal minicosms and any designer worth their salt is going to be interested in how one sector seeks to dominate and exploit others. Let’s call it “loopholes” for gaming. Wurm silverdudes (and dudettes) cornering all the horses on a server (because nothing in the design stops them) is not much different to a real life hardware manufacturer ensuring that some games only run on their platform (because nothing in the law stops them). Etc. In gaming all kinds of real things get interesting. Moderation for example. I often see corrupt moderators in games. I often see misbehaving “moderators” in real life too. Quality control of enforcement is a live issue for both. Sometimes a game will find an interesting solution, sometimes life does. Need to watch both!

How exploitative people work is of huge interest to game design – unless you only want the last few pratts who drove everyone else off playing, of course.

Housing, crafting, pretty plants in pots – yes Blenkinsop it has all the classic hallmarks of PvP

DayZ, Age of Wushu, Repopulation, Archeage(?). The depressing, unimaginative list goes on. PvP continues to stick to Sandbox play like tar this year. Tar or a leech.

Sandbox players do not need PvP.

PvP appears to need sandbox. Probably to procure a steady flow of victims. If there is one thing PvP games rapidly run out of it is fresh fodder. If they were any good, the fun of PvP would attract all the players they need …no? Here are two more of my hem hem occasionally accurate predictions:

The 2013 PvP(sandbox)  games with safe zones will do better than those without.  In the PvP(sandbox) games with safe zones, the safe zones will have more players than the PvP-enabled zones. Amiright? Darn tooting I am.

Sandbox players also do not need groups, villages, cadres, guilds or huddles. Another thing that is stuck to them like knee-jerk glue, is forced grouping. Not necessary to the sandbox part of a game.

It is PvP that needs these, to make it acceptably playable by providing some protection.

All sandbox players need is a sandbox, bucket and spade (translate: creation options) and a way to keep destructive players (and devs) off their stuff and out of their face. Sandbox players are also just as sociable as anyone else. There is no need to isolate them in a single-player genre. In fact showing off what you made/chose/earned/wrenched with your bare hands from the jaws of a dragon with the help of some friends (ie people you like, not forced groupees) is a big part of the fun.

Now which bit of all that is hard to grasp, o game studios? I wonder if EQNext will break the mold. I bet the pressure is on to “include a big pvp element”.

If you add up all the sandbox players ghettoised in the safe zones of PvP games, you get quite some “niche”. 250,000 plus wouldn’t surprise me.

Inadvertant caves and a surprise (Blender, PlanetGardenShed)

Nevermind I’m sure they’ll come in handy.

As it turned out, going through the terrain was irritating me so I’ve been messing about with terrain, physics and scripting again. I won’t really be needing much bumpy terrain for TWoFB (Part I), though it is needed. In the other 2 parts it will be needed more = might as well sort it out. So I was working on that and then….

Erk! OM!G! I’ve inadvertantly done  …… LIFE!!!

And thus (with far too many calculations going on for practical use just now) was born our first Giant Primal Wooze. Oooooh!!!! (Blender Game, physics, soft body – actually Blender did it, it’s a very basic uv sphere/soft body combo, but I’m the one seeing the possibilities). There was dancing around the living room. Children were dragged from serious home decorating in EQ2 to be hugged and kissed and forced to look.

You can’t see in a still but it woozes beautifully down the hillside seeking rest and then meanders around on the plane. The low poly hillside is a shrunkwrapped ANT terrain I’m using to see if I can figure out how to stop my WASD overriding collision detection. Collision detection (convex hull on shrunkwrapped terrain) works fine if you just drop things. They spang about in a very satisfying way. I want that for WASD too. And I’ll definitely be simplifying and using that wooze.

Yes, it’s pink

(of course I do pink to annoy the boys, you don’t think I’m holy do ya?)