Midway3 Golden Penny

As I cannot get on the Sony Forums today (something wrong with me signing in). I figured I would post something here.

Firstly lest talk about this special difficult prize the golden Penny. This should be won by completing Penny Pincher with 5 perfect throws of 250 (that means hitting the red hexagon).

at present the prize cannot be won as we made level 10 only require 1000 points to win level 10. which means if you are throwing perfectly then you will WIN the game before you get to throw your last penny. We appologize for that error. We had tested the winning of the Golden Penny when the top level was harder to achieve. Then we made the scores per level lower (easier) and Whammo we cannot win the Golden Penny.

We have put in a fix for this and that fix is simply to make level 10 require 1025 points, which we feel should not really make it any harder for the most part for people to win level 10. This fix will not of course effect anyone who already has completed this game, but it will allow those people to go for the godlen Penny prize.

I am not certain of it's release date on Home at the moment, but once I do I shall post it, though It may only be a couple of days before release. At least you will all know it is time to go for the prize once again.

Thanks for all the information that everyone tweeted and Pm'd me about this. I am very glad we got the information to allow us a quick fix.

And those of you that are US residents, Don't forget to make sure you sign up for that Amazing contest before you go play the games. And don't forget to check out this weeks prize in the Hot Zone as well.

Good Luck

Da Voodoochief

What a High Score

I just checked a few days ago and was very excited to see somone new at the top of the Hot Chicks Card Game leaderboard. They had barely beaten the previous top scorerer and I was still excited to see someone play so well to get that score.

Then over the next several days that same player jumped up several hundred points. I was even more surprised to see that new score, as I figured that would be real tough to acheive. Though I personally figured that obtaining a 5K score would be possible.

Then I see that the person on top improved their personal best again. Now they are in fact head and shoulders above the rest of the players. Check out the top 10 below.

As you can see that is a very large margin of score from player 1 to 2, compared with the Rest of the top 10. Now if there was  away to find this player I might like a chat. Though with that default name given by the Scoreloop API, I think the person is untraceable.

Good luck out there,
Da Voodoochief

Better Tools are Great

Well I have known this for years, but better tools just allows even amateurs such as myself to create better data. Improving my production quality no end and for a small price when in fact I have borrowed the equipment I am using.

One of the Nice things about working for a Games company is all the hardware they have to carry to make good products. Some of these pieces of kit can be rather expensive. Such as a Microphone and Audio mixer for example.

This is what I have borrowed form work as My own recordings sounded a bit muffled on my personal microphone I spent a buncha money on years back. Well the borrowed system not only makes a huge difference in basic quality (like 5-1 i reckon). It gets rid of the muffled sound completely and also allows me to record the audio at a better starting volume. Another good thing is the reaction of the microphone to being blown on when pronouncingf my P's etc.

I am not quite sure how to link in the audio for comparison at the moment. I will ask and hopefully get an answer at some point. I would love you all to hear the difference using a professional grade microphone has on the reading audio for Five Golden Coins.

Have fun out there,
Da Voodoochief

Load times reduced (images)

After my very successful return on audio loading time reduction. It was time to attack the Image load time.

I am using Marmalades Cross platform development system and this means there are a few things that are going to happen when loading files etc. Though there are several ways to achieve loading data within Marmalade I chose to use their resource manager. This is a useful and efficient tool. It did however complicate my new image loading spread technique slightly.

I did a LoadGroup on my data block using the ResManager and this happens to load and uncompress to memory ALL the data in that group. My initial group was called AllData, as it used to contain ALL the data I was eveer gonna load (except audio). So changing this full loading behaviour mean't I was required to make another Resource file, or I could of course just make another Group.

So I split off the Main Page artwork and the 5 golden coins I have into another Resource file called 'pages.group', and of course removed this artwork from my alldata (which is now misnamed, gah!). Then I load in the first group when booting into the game.. the dreaded initial load. Once it is all in the Title page comes up and the Whole of the title sequence and menu works fine. Only when the title page fades out to go to the actal pages/game itself do I do an on demand load while the screen is fully faded out. There is no noticable hiccups or anything and yet seamlessly the new page comes up and works just fine.

I am very happy with this change and have now reduced initial load time to 10 seconds on the iPod3 (my worst performing load times by far).

Next up is to do the final recordings of the pages being read by my Daughter, who is supplying the female reading. She has been very busy lately playing as Falkor in a stage production of Never Ending Story in a nearby town.

Have a great day
Da Voodoochief

Audio Load Time sorted out

So funny that I have sorted out the load time for the Audio used in Five Golden Coins before sorting out the image loading time. If ya remember I posted a week or two about the issue i was facing... Depressing initial load times. I discovered the iPod3 had the worst loading time of all the devices I have at my disposal and so have targeted that as my main focus.

So the load time for just the initial Audio load was tremendous, being at approximately 18 seconds and more Audio to add. I wanted to try and get this down to 3 or so seconds. And that I have done, in Fact it is much quicker than that.

I have a multi-stage plan now in place.
1. Initially load only the Audio that can be heard at the start of the game. This is just a button click and the first pages audio. Takes approximatley 0.25 seconds to load.
2. Once the game is running just keep preloading any audio I might encounter before I get there. This makes it seem like the audio is always there, as it is loaded slighty before demand.
3. Once a SFX is loaded, mark a flag so I know it is now resident and don't bother loading again.

This is working so well that I am now done with Audio load times. Now All i have to do is something similar to the artwork.

Have a great day,
Da Voodoochief

Midway3 Not the best start

The release of Midway3 went world wide today and in some ways it looks good and some not so much.

Great:

1. The new games seem to be very well received
2. The nearly 50K dollars in prizes Contest that is included with this midway release is Exciting people
3. Servers seem to be quite busy
4. Got to watch and participate in some very exciting Air Hockey games
5. Lots of PS3 sites have covered the Contest release

Not so Good:

1. Freezing Midway3, and to a lesser extent Hot Zone (this is a crash)
2. The Contest does not appear to have made even a mention on a lot of the Big General gaming Web sites
3. Not allowed to discuss the issues openly is VERY annoying
4. Sony forums do not even mention all the work we at MMG and Sony are doing looking into issues

I hope you are enjoying your time in Home,

I am Aggravated and Annoyed!
Da Voodoochief

Playstation Home Contest plus Midway3

Well finally the cat is out of the bag. There is a contest associated with the Release of Midway3 and it has a whole bunch of REAL WORLD prizes and money (though only open to US residents).

Check out these two pages for more information. The first one has an interview with our designer Paul Mithra as well.

http://www.yourpshome.net/content/paul-mirtha-mass-media-talks-about-midway-448/

and this one is a little more succinct

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/05/14/coming-to-home-step-right-up-to-midway-3-and-25000-in-prizes/

And Here is the Contest Promotion Video on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2m5D_AfQkU&feature=player_embedded

Yes, It is REAL, and people will win weekly Sony prizes and later in the Contest they could win 1000 dollars as well as part of the prize.

I am personally hopig this kind of promotion will bring lots of new interest into Playstation Home and along with that interest lots of Playstation 3 owners will come check the place out.

Good luck in the Contest you US residents. As for the rest of the world. I sincerely hope you enjoy the Midway games and the prizes you earn along the way.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

ps. I am hopeful I will be able to obtain more green tickets to give away. So follow my Twitter account if ya don't already www.twitter.com/Voodoochief