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

Lets talk about patch 28

Posted on December 19, 2009

Ok, so patch 28 for gratuitous space battles is out, bringing the game to version 1.28. Hurrah. Lets take a looky at the two big new things (in addition to the major crash bug that was somehow still in the game, and is hopefully now hunted down and killed).

CUSTOM CHALLENGES

This is a big deal. If you go to the challenges screen, there is a new ‘custom challenge’ map, which opens up a whole new screen showing stuff to fiddle with to basically create your own map, from existing backdrops, plus settings for pilot limits, budget, and the supply limits or spatial anomalies present. You want a battle with a 10,00CR budget, 4 pilots, no shields and no missile modules? You got it kiddo!

You can save out these custom scenarios or load them in, (if you save them out, that lets you name them, otherwise they default to ‘custom map’. Clicking the deploy button takes you to the normal setup screen for arranging your own fleet, and from there you issue a challenge as before. I hope people really investigate this as an option for the game, because it gives a lot more creative control to the player. If you thing fighter rockets are overpowered, you can issue a challenge where there aren’t any, and see what other methods people use to beat you. if you like a certain map but wished it had a ‘must have engines’ requirement, you can do that too. And if I add in extra anomalies or scenario options, they will all end up in this editor too.

MESSAGING

The game now maintains an on-line ‘inbox’ for everyone, and auto-sends you a message when your challenges are beaten or played, or when someone sends you a challenge. It also gives you the option of sending post-challenge feedback to the issuer. This means less wondering how the hell they beat you invincible fleet, and more reading the gloating from your nemesis, which is of course, all in the spirit of GSB.

1.28 took a lot of under-the-hood fiddling, but I think these two things were missing from the game, and needed putting in. I wasn’t sure the challenge stuff would be as popular as I wanted it to be, but it has proved to be very popular, so it’s been l33t to go back and add this stuff to an existing game. The game will auto-update if you have registered it on-line, but I’ll be getting updated patches to the distributors like steam and impulse and the others right away.

Scenario Editor

Posted on December 15, 2009

I’m a big fan of modding and game editors. people love to tweak a game they way they want it, and I support that 100%. So with this in mind, here is a work-in-progress screenshot of the custom scenario editor.

The idea is that there is a new way to launch a challenge (maybe from the challenges window), rather than selecting an existing singelplayer mission. That new button takes you to this screen which lets you tweak everything. Once done, you can then click deploy, and arrange your fleet like any other mission, then issue that as a challenge to anyone else. You can only use backgrounds that already exist in the game, but everything else is tweakable.  The only big chunk not done yet is changing the deployment zones. I may end up adding that later and using defaults for now. My UI coding is sadly slow and inefficient :(

Together with in-game messaging, this is the second big feature that will be in the next patch (alongside many bug fixes) which will be 1.28

World War 2 (executive summary)

Posted on December 14, 2009

I’ve been reading a huge 5 or 6 volume book called ‘World War II’. A bit of an arrogant title, assuming you can cover the whole topic, but it was written shortly after the war by Winston Churchill, so he’s allowed some slack. Obviously it’s insanely long, and I’m only on volume 3, but it’s fascinating stuff, especially when you are working on a battle game :D.
Here is some of the stuff that has stood out as interesting to me so far.

1) Invasion of Poland my ass. We get taught in school that this is when WW2 started, but thats bullshit. Hitler had already frogmarched into a number of countries by then, and Mussolini had been misbehaving too. We didn’t officially declare war with Germany until then, but the idea that this was sudden or even slightly unexpected is wrong. There was tons of obvious buildup.

2) Everyone thought England was fucked. The Germans assumed they could conquer us, The Americans had strong doubts we will hold out any longer than the French. (They wouldn’t send us arms that they secretly thought would end up in the hands of conquering Germans).  The global consensus was that England would fall next, and Hitler would have the whole of Europe soon. Nobody took seriously the idea of the Brits fighting to the death.

3) The British Navy was fearsome. We kicked ass in terms of naval combat. The Germans didn’t really try to engage the royal navy, because they were just outgunned and they knew it. The story of ship v ship combat (ignoring subs) for the first part of the war, was the royal navy tracking down enemy ships and sinking them. No wonder we have this ‘brittania rules the waves’ lyric.

4) The battle of britain was vital purely because it stopped Germany having air cover for a seaborne invasion of the UK. They knew their ships wouldn’t make it over the channel without air superiority, which is why they tried to take out our air force. The whole bombing of cities was just plan B after it was obvious that an invasion was impossible

5) The Italian army was rubbish. Really hilariously bad. There were some engagements where it was literally a 100 to 1 ratio of British troops lost to Italians killed or captured. That’s just laughable. This isn’t knocking the Italians, it’s probably just that the average Italian soldier wasn’t as keen on the war as the Duce. Good for them!

6) Churchill was on the ball. This was not some upper class twit drinking port and leaving the war to the military. He was intimately aware of troop dispositions, strategy, diplomacy, economics, and always hassling everyone to get things done better, faster, and with more enthusiasm. He was determined to take the fight to the enemy, and a big believer in using new technology to win the war.

It’s especially amazing to read Churchills multi-thousand page history of the war, know all about Bletchley park, and notice he never even hints at what went on. Talk about keeping a secret…

I’m sure in 4 years time when I finally finish the books, I’ll have more to report :D If you have a million hours of free time, I recommend it as a fascinating read.

I’m working on the UI for a custom challenge editor thing…

Fixing a single GSB bug

Posted on December 11, 2009

Step 1:
Where is the game crashing? it crashes here:
void GUI_TitleBar::SetTitle(std::string str)
on an assert
GASSERT(Width > 0);
Width is clearly not set right when we set the title. Cue lots of hunting through every window that uses that code to check that they never set their title when they are yet to set their width. No luck.

Step 2:
Sudden realisation that the window width is a red herring, it’s the titlebar width itself that isn’t set. Sudden discovery that a function in the dialog class is virtual, but the function it supposedly implements is not. Possible confusion? certainly sloppy and needs fixing, but I can’t fix it *now* because I need to know *exactly* what causes this, rather than changing stuff and hoping I found it.

Step 3:
Realisation that the negative width may be an infinite high width wrapping round, which implies width has never been set. Maybe this is why I never see the crash in debug? A check shows that window widths are always set to zero, but that would still trigger it…

Step 4:
Reading up on related bugs suggests something to do with the race changing, combined with the ship editor. Decide to test in release mode deploying, then changing race then going to design mode. W00T! It crashes, although release mode debugging is far from trivial. It looks like a null pointer though, meaning it should reproduce in debug

Step 5:
Reproduced it in debug, which normally means home and dry. A module type pointer is set to 0xcdcdcdcd. This means uninitialised, and this seems to be the case. I’m assuming it is null without setting it to NULL. If it had been set to NULL, then a module would have been selected.

Step 6:
Temptation to fix an obivous unintialised pointer error here, but that would be BAD. The task is to really understand the bug before fixing it. For example, why does this not *always* crash when launching ship design? Lets test… It seems to always crash for me in ship design. That cannot be right…Aha, it’s handily crashing in some code inside the STL library, but only in debug build. A quick check of the shipped release build shows I can’t now replicate the bug there. Even stranger. Could I possibly have shipped a debug executable in a patch, this explaining why not everyone has the issue? No, the file size difference is 3MB.

Step 7:
Tests shows that the same exe does not crash taking the same steps if outside the IDE. The IDE is clearly setting those debug values and trapping an error. Is this actually related to the titlebar error crash and change race crash everyone has? If the module pointer is invalid, all hell could theoretically break loose. Getting tempted now to just fix the obvious errors, at least to see what happens next.

Step 8:
There is just no way that this pointer is correctly set to null. Unless it’s null by happy co-incidence, the game should crash whenever the ship builder is viewed. (if null, the game assigns it a valid value). Adding an assert for this, which still triggers in my release builds. It doesn’t trigger. How the hell is that pointer being set to NULL?

Step 9:
I suspect I am being lucky in release build with this. The pointer is uninitialised and being set to NULL most of the time as a side effect of something else, but this is not guaranteed, hence the randomness of the crash. It’s clear this pointer should be initialised, so I’ll just do that, and move onto new stuff.