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

Fixing a few obscure, but nasty bugs

Posted on October 9, 2009

I’ve found a few big bugs that people don’t seem to have spotted, or at least, not in the numbers you would assume would have spotted them.
First is a bug relating to how bonuses are applied to modules. In code terms it was a fairly standard ‘doh’ mistake where you override virtual functions but forget to call the base function in the derived one. (obviously sometimes that’s legit, but here it was a mistake).
The upshot of this is that for some modules which had certain bonuses, such as shield modules, the base hull bonus got skipped. It was calculated ok on the design screen, but not in the battle. As a result, there are a lot of ships that are partially missing their hull bonuses, until now…

The second bug is less of a bug and more of an unintended consequence. Because of the way target priorities were calculated, they were biased in favour of targets that were just outside minimum range. because optimum range is nearer to maximum than minimum for most weapons, this meant a few sub-optimum targeting decisions were being made.

The good news is I’ve rewritten that entire section of code that makes target selection decisions. The bad news is I need to do some serious testing to ensure this is an improvement, and doesn’t break everything. I suspect that for the first time, I may need a few volunteers from the beta players to install a ‘trial 1.16 beta patch to see if it’s safe to roll out to everyone else. If I do that on Monday, I can aim to release the full 1.16 update a few days later, and then we are getting very close to starting work on a demo and an actual releasable final game.
Yay!

Easy to contact

Posted on October 6, 2009

I feel strongly that this:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/10/promiscuous-dispersal-of-your-email-address.html

is true.

If you search my forums, you will notice I occasionally ask people to email me at
cliff@positech.co.uk
. I don’t use a NOSPAM or an image or try and get you to do some algebra before you get to see the mailto link.

People email me for a few reasons:

1) They are in the business and want to sell my games/do a deal/review my games/interview me

2) They have technical support issues

3) They hate me and want to tell me

4) They like my games and want to tell me

Only a stupid businessperson would not want to read 1) and 2).

3) is easily laughed at and deleted.

4) makes me feel good.

oh and….

5) Spam.

99% of spam is filtered out by spam filters. the other 1% is trivially spotted and deleted. I don’t think the odd click of the delete button is a hard price to pay to enable the people who play my games to get to contact the developer when they have to. I don’t respond to EVERY email, but I do read them.

Why don’t big companies do this?

Determinism

Posted on October 5, 2009

“Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.”

That’s what wikipedia has to say. In terms of gsb determinism would mean that if you field the same fleet twice, against the same enemy, then the result will be exactly the same.

This isn’t true.

I wish it was, as do a few GSB players who are doing great things with tournaments. In fact, if I knew that I could make the game work as well as it does now, but be deterministic with a weeks work, I’d do it. Sadly, the reasons why it is not deterministic go deeper than that. I spent most of today experimenting with making it work, and I never got past 6000 milliseconds of a big battle before losing synch. (Yes I know all about random seeds and how to do it. If you saw how much code is the game, you’d see the scale of the problem :()

Fundamentally, the game is not frame-rate independent in terms of simulation calculations. (although it is scaled so as to provide constant playback rates). The BIG BIG plus side of this is that games visuals are pretty darn smooth and look great, with no jitters or jumps like you sometimes see in laggy multiplayer games. The downside is it’s not deterministic.

This limits the game a bit in terms of being really competitive as any sort of online serious league style thing. However, thats not altogether a problem. The game is called GRATUITOUS space battles, and isn’t designed to be taking uber seriously. I’d love to code an ultra-complex, ultra-geeky dterministic space combat game where you even selected the rivets to use on the laser gun stabiliser panels, but the trouble is it would likely see 500 copies, and that means I’d be broke :(

Sooo…. The current limitations of GSB 1 which will always be there are these:

2D. Not 3D

No direct ship control

Not deterministic.

Everything else can be improved and expanded and bettered and tweaked. What would you like to see?

<offtopic rant>

I’m watching (as-in, it’s on in the background) masterchef. With the way these people talk, and the ominous sci-fi thriller music as they talk about cooking prawns, they take themselves waaaayyyy too seriously. I know my place, I make video games to entertain people, and play with spaceships for a living. You can do that, and take it very seriously and aim to be the best you can, without building up some big fucking hero-complex. These people are good at frying, they arent discovering DNA or serving as fucking fighter pilots. Bah! </offtopic rant>

Video TV thing

Posted on October 3, 2009

Theres a good endorsement of indie games in general (17 minutes in) here:

http://www.mevio.com/episode/187575/The+PSP+is+Go+free+Ultima+new+releases+and+Jason+Cross+talks+indie+games

And of course they cover GSB very positively (which is cool). Some of the video clips are oooollllddddd, which happens quite a lot with GSB. I guess that is inevitable when you trickle out video over time.

It’s good to see people talking about the game in a mainstream discussion of games in general, rather than just a niche indie thing.

I’m working on some new stuff for GSB, in terms of a purely visual feature (more or less) for the next patch. Details coming soon. I just had a whole day of tedious businessy stuff, because it was the end of my companys financial year, which in the wonderful UK means a ton of form filling and non-games-related bullshit that takes ages. It seems I made a profit again, which is a relief :D

In other news, here is the latest promotional vid for GSB to lure in your friends to buy a copy:

Bad online habits from companies…

Posted on September 30, 2009

I’ve encountered some amazingly silly behavior from online advertising companies recently. The first one, which I’ve spent lots of money with over the years  (for anonymity, lets called them ‘schoozle’), lets me place new image adverts, and then sticks them in a queue where they ‘pend approval’. This goes on for 3 days (or more, they are still waiting). That means that I can’t actually spend any money with them, so I am forced in the meantime to spend it with their competitors.
Imagine going to a hi-fi store and selecting an ipod, you take it to the checkout, where they say “with you in a minute”. They then leave you waiting there with your wallet open for 3 days. Do you think such a business will last long?

The second (and this applies to about half a dozen ad agencies) will not actually show me their prices, or what sites they offer ads on. Presumably I get to know this after they force me to ‘register’. During registration, they want to know what site or product I’m advertising, and what my monthly budget is. Presumably, if they think I’m worthy of giving them money, they may email me.
Imagine the hi-fi store has windows but they are blacked out. You have no idea if they even sell ipods. A security guard at the door tells you how great the store is, but demands to see your bank balance and know your home address before you are allowed to come in and look at the products on sale. That won’t be today, but at a time when they decide to review your application to be their customer.
Do you think such a business will last long?

For those of you thinking “‘duh’, it’s to keep out the cheapskates and the riff raff”, you are missing a trick. The simple phrase “Regrettably we currently can only cater to customers with an ad budget of over $10k / month” would keep everyone happy. They don’t get registrations from people they don’t want, they don’t insult potential future clients whose ad budgets may shoot up, and they don’t get a reputation for being assholes.

Smart companies always want to know if and how and why and when they might lose business. If people ever email me to tell me why they did *not* buy or could not buy my games, I may not always reply, but I always read them, and I often act on them. I’m not sure you ever get rich by learning how to turn people away.