Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

When is it fair for the game servers to switch off?

Posted on April 13, 2011

Here is a question for you. For how long after the release of a game do you think there should still be support for online features to that game?

I’m not talking MMO games here, obviously that should continue all the time any sort of subscription fee is being charged. I’m talking about games where you buy it once, and you own it, but part of the game is online. Like Guild Wars (although that’s all online) or, to a smaller extent: Gratuitous Space Battles.

Gamers are rightly angry when they suspect the servers for a game get shutdown just to encourage you to buy this years copy. EA are great at that, as I recall. The thing is, we can probably agree that if a game hasn’t sold a single copy in ten years, turning off the server is just fine. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. We also all know that most evil EULAs indicate the servers can be turned off when they fancy it, so it’s not a legal issue either.

What we lack, as an industry, is any sort of expectations or standards for this. If I buy Guild Wars today, and the server is turned off in 6 months time, is that just tough for me arriving late? Or is it understandable?

We could argue that as long as one person has bought the game in the last six months, the game should still be running, but what if that person bought the game in a steam sale or pay what you want deal for just $0.10. Still reasonable?

I guess to me, one benchmark would be profitability. If the server costs $100 a month to rent, and the game isn’t bringing in $100, it seems fair to axe it, although even then, what if 8 people bought it yesterday for $10 each?  It seems right now a long way off for me to worry about that. GSB made much more than $100 yesterday, let alone this month, and as a fraction of the server costs, it probably doesn’t cost $100 a month to run anyway. Also, the server is busy:

New challenges posted in last 24 hours: 48
Challenge victories in the last 24 hours: 143
new survival mode scores in the last 24 hours: 6
challengevictory: 170

This will not last forever though. When sounds reasonable to you as a gamer?

****Note: I can’t see the GSB server being shutdown deliberately before 2015 at this rate, so don’t panic :D****

 

Work For Idle Hands

Posted on April 11, 2011

One thing GSB does that I’m quite proud of, is run an ‘idle manager’ to smooth out the frame rate. In concept, it’s pretty simple. There are some jobs that need doing in the near future, but not *NOW*, and some that are optional. The idle manager works out that we have some spare time, and does them accordingly. In code terms it’s a lot more involved.

GSB has a target frame rate, and checks the time since last frame in the main game loop. If there is some ‘spare’ time before the next frame, it tells the idlemanager, and checks again once the idlemanager has finished. The idle manager has a list of tasks, and it cycles through them in turn. Two of the common tasks are these:

1) Check that we aren’t running low on any pre-cached particle effects, and if we are, pre-cache some new ones ready for future use

2) Check if any laser blasts which are missing their target happen to intersect with some debris. If they do, make the debris explode.

task 1) is vital for performance, task 2) is optional graphical fluff.

The implementation of an idle manager is cool because it allows you to use the fluctuating rendering-demands per frame to your advantage. It also means you eek as much usage as possible out of a single processor core. In multi-core, multi-threaded systems, this is all done much better by having a separate thread, which can spin off and do this stuff at your leisure. There can be synchronisation issues in that case though (I don’t want to change the list of cached particles while another thread is altering them too etc).

If you can’t be bothered with the hassle of multithreading, I recommend implementing something like this idle manager at the very least, assuming performance is vaguely an issue for you. I’m writing the idle code for my new game right now, and it will be a bit cleverer, and more involevd and possibly multithread stuff too. I hate to think the game would drop a frame when it could be avoided by doing this sort of stuff.

Solar update, and motivations

Posted on April 10, 2011

Regular readers of this blog might know that one of my long term goals is to get solar power hooked up at my house, a task massively complicated by it being a listed building, and the planning authority being bureaucratic gits. Anyway… we finally have the planning notice nailed to our fence awaiting neighbours comments (there won’t be any, nobody even walks past our house), so the wheels are in motion. I know some people are trendily anti-green-energy, so I thought I’d lay out my motivation:

1) Energy prices.

Clicky here: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/statistics/prices/prices.aspx to get unbiased figures, and you will discover that from 2005, UK domestic electricity prices have risen by 55% since 2005. Yup, that’s 55%. In 6 years. Assuming my panels last at least 12 years, they will preside over another (v roughly) doubling of electricity costs. We aren’t building new coal or new nuclear in the UK, and the severn barrage has been turned down, so I don’t see supply rising in those 12 years. Meanwhile the population rises and people keep buying domestic gadgets that drain power, plus people buying plug in hybrids soon will only add to the demand. Plus a greener future government could levy a tax on energy that raises prices even more. I expect the price to have tripled by 2020, personally.

2) Feed-In-Tariff.

It’s VERY generous, and some people resent this, but it’s there for a reason. It’s to make solar panels a no-brainer for the home-owner and kick-start our market. There is literally no good reason other than aesthetic to not stick them on your roof if you have a south-facing one. You are literally burning money with it sat in a savings account, on the roof, the returns are higher :D It says a lot about how behind Germany we are that even with such a high incentive, people are not doing this.

3) Geekiness / Green-ness

I’m a fully fledged Geek AND I’m a committed tree-hugger, so it’s no surprise that I want some cool geeky tech. I reckon if nothing else, the panels will 100% power everything in my home office, meaning positech can claim to be a carbon neutral game developer. bwahahaha! Plus, I like the idea that occasionally the energy company has to pay ME money.

We should know in roughly a months time if we get the go-ahead. The company to install them has been chosen, the site selected, the money (£10k) set aside at last. It’s only some jobsworth in the local council who could stop me, and if they turn it down, we will appeal. I’m a stubborn bastard, if I have to drive to London and personally harass the energy secretary to overturn it (they have that power) I will do so. Expect a ton of geeky photos and details and stats and analysis of the things if I ever get them installed. Once I’ve recovered from my celebration hangover obviously…

constant password changing silliness

Posted on April 8, 2011

And I quote:

Use the form below to change your login information.
* Make your password something you can remember and difficult for others to guess.
* Your new username/password will be effective immediately
* Password should be at least 6 characters long and should contain at least one capital letter and one digit
also, your password must start with a letter. (legal characters: a-zA-Z0-9_\-?!@#&$%^*()|)
* Password expires every 90 days.


You get no warning it will expire, and when you are FORCED to change it, they demand you reply to an email which they haven’t sent, as of ten minutes later. I can effectviely no lonegr use their service.

Somewhere, some flipping idiot at Plimus thinks this makes their system more secure. it doesn’t, it just means I switched to BMTMicro.
Dorks.

Land Air Sea Warfare

Posted on April 5, 2011

So who else has played this? it’s a pretty cool little game. If you enjoyed RTS games before they went 3D, you might like it.

I mention it because someone on the blog commented on it, so I checked it out and today added it to showmethegames here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/strategy.php

It’s one of those ‘build a metric crapload of units’ style RTS games, and surprisingly moreish. The developers site is here:

http://www.isotope244.com

My current news is very technical. A lot of waffling away on vertex buffer batching code to make my engine much, much, much smoother and faster. If I ever write GSB 2, it will run much better on older machines. Not that it’s a slouch now, but it could mean bigger fleets :D

Still a while before I begin hinting at the next game…