Top Mover, me?! (Xblig)

I noticed this a few days ago. I never thought i would make it onto this esteemed list in my life. I just don't have the time to commit enough of it to Peer reveiwing anything that goes. In fact i won't Pass stuff i don't like, and that holds back my score quite a lot. This score does have some importance though, and even to me it is a good marker to see if you are even bothered to review someones game or not.

Is my score as high as i would like it to be? Nope is the answer, and yes i can most definitely do something about it. But it will have to be when it feels right, not just to make a few more rep points.

I have been very busy with my competition this week and also monitoring all the stuff going on. I have f course been fixing a number of minor bugs that have surfaced since release as well. I expect to have a new version ready for Peer Review by thursday sometime. This new version will also address the purple asteroids hit point issue. Once again i say Bah!

Back to my Rep points for a moment and i have to say that i am proud to make it onto this list. Keep up the good work all you other dedicated people, i hope to return to this list soon.

G'night

Bad Error on release

Well A Shooter has of course been out now for 3 days. In that time i have managed to get quite befuddled as to why it only manages to generate 3 stars of rating. Also why the conversion rate is so low for one of my games.

I know some people will think i am just full of it, and they are entitled to their opinion. However i take along time over my games, i also take a very long time researching and implementing things that people will like in a trial. so far i have done very well. Till this game.

I was baffled. and then it came to light thanks to several people on my twitter list. It seems the main issue is that people were not finding the powerups, and as that is Very central to my trial experience, it is no wonder people are turned off. Without collecting those powerups, you will die. It is as simple as that. also when you start my game you have a very short firepower, and then whammo 15 seconds later it is powered up to twice it's length, also with more fire speed added.

so without all that it is bad news for me. I know i won't really get a second chance at this, but i hope that myu competition will keep enough people interested until a patch can be released. I have it mostly finished now, i am just making a few minor adjustements and a few bug fixes etc.

If only i had known what i know now. It is not like anyone came up with this issue while in playtest or all my focus testing.

DOH!

A Shooter busy day

So i am finally getting into the HD revolution, though i think the revolution happend several years back. I am actually gonna setup a new tv and it is an LCD HD one. Awesome i hope.

Well anyway today apart from setting up my living room for the new TV, i have been working on A Shooter. Taking into account the latest playtest feedback. Mainly from Chris Hughes, who is a top lad and someone i respect for trying hard to do Indie with Honor. So today i added my last piece of music, the commisioned piece by Liam Tarpey that will be SorceryGames theme music. After adding that (you will hear it on the credits) i got to work on the Bosses.

The issue with the bosses is that they all look the same. So people will think they are the same. Even though they are all orignial and evolving. So what to do. Originally (this morning) i asked my artist id he could supply another definition at least. But then i realised i should take Chris's other comment and just see what happens when i tint them. And lo and behold it looks sweet. I have about 8 colors and then just reused a few and i am really surprised at the results. They look really good and i think this has added the missing element to my Bosses.

Then i gave the game a quick onve over and noticed a part of the instructions was erronous, so fixed that up and then added abit about multiplayer. Whammo i feel i am done...

I will let it rest now for a few days (ok, ill keep testing it of course). But what i am mainly waiting for is tuesday. The reason for releasing my game into Peer review on Tuesday is so i can try and make some effort (though it may be futile) to get into the new releases list for friday. Now games usually take longer to go through peer review than a week, but i have a lot of peers that i would call friends and i am hoping they will help me achieve the friday goal. And yes, of course i will publish the succes or not of this adventure. :)

G'night, i have to get up early in the morning to go off roading with my family up at Rowher again. I love off roading on my Honda 450x..

A Shooter is ready

I think i have it all sorted now.

Tonight i have stayed up stupidly late and...

1. Made the save faster by making it save so much less xml, down from 2MB to 64KB.
2. Fixed a bug my friend Ben told me about with the stars that fall from the bosses.
3. Made it so local profiles cannot be entered into the Global scoreboard. I believe i have left silver in there, but i am not sure about the privilage call i checked.
4. I have corrected an incorrect error message when a none signed in player attempts to 'Tell a friend'

Oh, i think that is it. I will have to give it a proper once over tomorrow before i put it into playtest, but i think it is ready at this early hour of the morning.

Wish me luck :)

G'night.

How to find a Bug

Today i worked in The Midway for PS3 Home. In fact i spent quite a number of hours looking into a couple of annoying bugs in there. The first one ended up being quite easy to fix once i had figured out what was wrong. the second one took a while but i got it in the end.

The first bug is simply a sorted list problem. I say simply but in fact it took me a while to fix because it wsn't an error on an existing line of code. It was in fact a missing line of code that was the issue. So the list (actually an array) needs to be shuffled down to let in the new element. Simple enough and i could see the shuffle code was there. Only the bug happened to be the fact that although the list was being shuffled for it's main attribute, it's other attribute was not. So that mean't that a sorting element was not being suffled along with the main element. DOH! Easy 1 line fix.

The second bug was interesting as it was a network bug. We had no idea what was causing it and yet we know of certains apsects or manifestations of the bug. So i spent some time in the midway trying different things to no avail. Then i examined the code directly to see what i could see. Finally i ended up talking with the designer and another prohrammer about the bug and i got some useful ideas i could try out. As it happened the first thing i tried worked great. The fix will be easy enough tomorrow.

So how do ya find bugs?
Number 1, Find a reliable repro for it (reporoduction steps). If you have this you can find any bug. Though some are still harder than others haha!
Number 2, don't be afraid to talk to others about it, even none programmers.
Number 3, don't ignore any coincidence, however remote or inconsequential it might at first appear.

G'night and happy bug hunting.

Getting Stuck

Sometimes it happens that we think we have a bug. We can spend so many hours on this bug only to discover that it wasn't a bug at all. Today or more accurately this afternoon i had one of these experiences. I am going to share this in hopes that it might just inspire others (and maybe myself) to not waste as much time as i did.

Here is a basic timeline
1. Afternoon starts at about 1:30pm and i am working on repacing some graphics. It is going well but i need more artwork from my artist.
2. Shortly after chatting with the artist i realised i can work on some difficulty circles. These items mark for everyone to see what level of difficulty you are playing at on the game in The Midway.
3. The code was very simple and i changed it out very easily for our new coding style. This will save memory and make it run faster, woohoo! a Double win! (love those)
4. Added the new smaller assets and code and busy testing it. (2:15pm)
5. The numbers on the circles look great, however the colors lok a lot muted. That is odd.
6. Spend 1 hour trying to figure out what i have done wrong. Did i alter the shader somehow to break the colors?
7. Went for a walk to ease the fact that i have found nothing at all to help me out and suggest what i am doing wrong.
8. 4pm and still looking at the models and textures. Decide it's time to go back and see what it looked like originally. but i go half way, including old stuff and some of my new stuff.
9. BAH! the colors still look muted. now to go the whole way back.
10. Discover it looks EXACTLY the same as the new version. ARGH! It is the lighting and the angle i was viewing it at.
11. So annoyed at having wasted several hours on something that was great. Now it is about 5pm or so. Grrrr

I wish in hindsight i had not refered to how my memory visualized the colors on the circles, and had instead gone and looked at a real live version. This would have saved me several hours of confused pain.

Good luck in your issues, real and imagined!

G'night

Bugs to Fix and Tennis

I had an interesting day fixing bugs and getting bugs fixed by artists and another programmer. It all went very well and i managed to get it al put togetehr and sorted out and uploaded to Sony by the end of the regular day. That kind of thing hardly ever happens. I know i took a few short cuts by declaring C class bugs as not important.  Well not important enough to have to create new models for as exporting the original ones seems to be broken.

Then i went and supported my tennis team. I would have ben in this playoff match tonight, but with my arm still in a bad way. That just wasn't possible. So i did what i could and cheered on the rest of my team in a very tough playoff meetup. We eventually prevailed 3-2 (in courts) after losing the 2 singles courts but eventualy winning the three doubles courts. thye final match was being played with it all tied at 2-2, and in the background we could hear a bar nearby cheering as the Lakers took the win. It was all real exciting and the second set tie-breaker eventually went our way from 1-4 down to 7-5 for the win! Woohoo, Go team!

I don't feel like going back to work tomorrow, it feels like the weekend has already started for me, but work is work and pay is pay. I also heva  few things to mod for The Midway release next week, yeah next week is now what i am being told. bah! One day i promise it will be released...

G'night.

Copy and Split

In Darlas Den personal space we have a minigame called Big Bang. This game does not just do the minigame control and gameplay. It is also a way to control the space itself. Needless to say this minigame has gotten a little large and out of control. so it now falls to me to sort it out.

So to start with i need to separate out the two main functions it has. So i copied the minigame to another minigame called DarlasDen. Then started to strip out the game and gameplay and assets from this new copy. this has been a pain in the butt and for several reasons. The first one was that i could not just add the new minigame to the scene. Oh no, we were packing it too tightly. oh wait, i mentioned that before in a previous post haha! Well today i got to work heavily on this removal and let me tell ya it was a pain. Last night i left it broken, and today it took me all day to fix it. some of the issues were my own. One thing stands out however. I always tell myself that if i cannot find the problem where i am looking, then it is porbably elsewhere.. Yeah they were, several of them.. Hours of time taken on some simple things. The good news is that i do appear to have gotten this stripped out game to control the scene functionality!

Next comes part two, stripping down the Big Bang minigame to only have the gameplay and assets, and remove all scene control. This is one i hope to find easier.

After that comes the rewrite of the scene assets and control. Mainly because i need to save a lot of memory to get the expansion in there... Wish me luck, i'll need it.

g'night

PS3Home update and Printing

I spent a lot of my day today working on the Darlas Den personal space. I branched the P4 repository for this part of our Midway development so i could work on it with abandon. So far it has worked out quite well, though i did spend most of the day copying a minigame we have and thentrying hard to start stripping it down. You see i need to take the now two identical minigames and strip them into two halves, opposite halves i think ya could say. Though this should be easy enough, nothing is ever easy.

With no precompile to tell me of some impending problems i am left to run the ting, and we are out of memory. We really know how to pack stuff at Massmedia and Darlas Den is no exception. Then i had an epiphany... I could just change the scene to a public scene and give myself a load more memory to work with, YAY! Now i could at least run without running out of memory before anything could happen. The rest of the day i stripped one of the games down.

Then just before i left work i realised that i missed something inmportant. So with the removal of a few more lines of code... Everything broke.. ARGH! and then i have my wife call me on the phone at this exact time asking me to grab food on the way home and the family is starving.. DOH! Always at the awkward times eh :S so i have left the issues to be resolved tomorrow :[]

I had printing issues tonight. I have no idea why the printer decided to print over the edges of the page. I wonder if it was a word issue, as it kept complaining about my margins, though my printer will print marginless. Either way i now have a bunch of glossy printouts that are useless. Grrr

to add to that i am still not able to get a hold of Blizzard to sort out my now Banned account. Yeah on monday they banned me. Not sure why atm, as i have no email.

Well, tomorrow is another day, and i am sure it will be chock full of surprises.

G'night.

Dang Bugs

It's funny how ya can get those bugs in your game to show up at the worst possible times. Not that it was the worst time today when it happened to me, but it wasn't pleasant...

Picture this...
There i am in my office working on some PS3Home stuff, when in pops my boss bringing along with him someone who he wants to impress. I get asked to boot up The Midway for PS3Home and away my boss goes showing off what we have and what it does to Larry. I am interjecting remarks occasionally and it is going well. then my boss asks if we can show off Darlas Den, the free personal space we have created for The Midway.
It boots up fine and the boss starts showing it off no problem. Then we wants to show off more of the space. Well i am a bright spark and i say that i can open up the space with a little addition of some of the many rewards from The Midway placed into our inventory. This should have worked. In fact it sort of did, but also sort of didn't ARGH!
The boards updated.. the meta board updated.. the score updated. But the collision barriers were still in place. Even though they should have been removed. It was quite embarassing for this to happen. After they left I spent about 1.5hours coming up with a solution. This scene is quite complicated and this close to release i am loathe to alter too much code. then it hit me, i could add just one line of code and voila.. it worked a treat. Phew.. that could have been an annoying weekend in work :O

Monday i'll reupload the darned thing. BAH! and double BAH!

this goes to show, it does not matter how much you test a thing, bugs can still reside in the most obvious of places.

G'night

Visual Studio and Xact Compression Issue Workaround

Are you having issues with Visual Studio Freezing or Hanging when building your project. Caused by the fact you changed your Xact project to use XWMA compression? I did and it has caused me a number of issues, namely, I can use a big audio wavbank file (uncompressed), or I can build them and copy them to their destinations etc and stop the XactBld3.exe file with the windows Task manager.

Well it was time to put this thing to bed. My games when published have been way too large. Annoyingly large in my opinion. So I decided to look and see if anyone had a fix for this yet. I first ran into the problem more than 6 months ago i believe. What follows is a workaround to deal with this issue. And now my game is about a 4th of the size it was!

Steps i took to work around the Xact Compression in VS problem...
Important Fact:-
My Xact file will create my sound files all in the same directory it is in. I will use this to my advantage as Xact does not have a problem exporting the files locally. It is Only the VS integration that is broken.

1. I removed my Xact file from the project.
2. I added the XGS, XSB and XWB files into the content\audio folder (this was where my Xact file once resided.
3. You must then alter the 'Properties\Build Action' on all three of these files and select 'None'. Or you will get compile errors on these assets.
4. You then have to alter the 'Properties\Copy to Output directory' and set it to 'Copy if newer' (if you do not do this step, if you publish the game it will not copy your audio files.
5. I then created a Batch file to do the donkeywork for me (the copying). This was so much easier than trying to get VS or Xact to do the right thing with all the files. Believe me when i tell ya that i tried :S Following this is an example batch file.


     Copy_SndFiles_2_Bins.Bat

rem windows version to Release and Debug
copy soundbank.xsb ..\..\bin\x86\Release\content\audio\soundbank.xsb /Y
copy ashooter.xgs ..\..\bin\x86\Release\content\audio\ashooter.xgs /Y
copy wavbank.xwb ..\..\bin\x86\Release\content\audio\wavbank.xwb /Y

copy soundbank.xsb ..\..\bin\x86\Debug\content\audio\soundbank.xsb /Y
copy ashooter.xgs ..\..\bin\x86\Debug\content\audio\ashooter.xgs /Y
copy wavbank.xwb ..\..\bin\x86\Debug\content\audio\wavbank.xwb /Y


rem xbox
copy xbox\ashooter.xgs "..\..\bin\xbox 360\Release\content\audio\ashooter.xgs" /Y
copy xbox\soundbank.xsb "..\..\bin\xbox 360\Release\content\audio\soundbank.xsb" /Y
copy xbox\wavbank.xwb "..\..\bin\xbox 360\Release\content\audio\wavbank.xwb" /Y


copy xbox\ashooter.xgs "..\..\bin\xbox 360\Debug\content\audio\ashooter.xgs" /Y
copy xbox\soundbank.xsb "..\..\bin\xbox 360\Debug\content\audio\soundbank.xsb" /Y
copy xbox\wavbank.xwb "..\..\bin\xbox 360\Debug\content\audio\wavbank.xwb" /Y
pause

As you can see the batch file is very simple. all it does is copy the local files to the bin directories for both the Xbox and PC. You can have these things anywhere which is nice.

There might be a more pleasant workaround, i am not sure. I always export what i alter in Xact, so adding a single extra step when I am happy with the alterations is easy enough. Double clicking the batch file ain't no big thing. Yet, I would like it to be more automatic, so later I believe I will add this batch file to the pre-build steps of my project.

I hope this writeup helps other people stuck on this annoying bug.

If anyone has a better solution I would love to hear it, as i searched the web and found more annoying and cumbersome ways to fix this. Extra projects and the like.

G'night

Level 10 is done for A Shooter

ok, so when i say 'done' i should use air quotes or something. what i mean is it is now in Alpha-Beta state :)

Either way, i now have the first half of the game created. Tonight i solved bugs in the single and multiplayer games. I added some niceties that i probably shouldn't have bothered with, but i like them.

for example.
When you play as a single player game, you start the game in the vertical middle. Seems correct now.
when you play as a two player game, you are both offset from the middle by a nice looking amount.
Three player games are the similar vein. One in the middle and two spread nicely out to the sides.
Well i like it, so i guess that is all that matters. Stupid professionalism. bah! costs me time ;)

Anwyay, i got level 10 in, and then decided to play through all the first 10 levels again. To my dismay i got beaten up on the Boss from level 8 again. This is the 3rd time in a row now he has manhandled me. I may have to change him. Or just practice him, lol.

Maybe i should do anotehr gameplay video of just how nasty he is. He is the one that fires a stream of trajectory bullets that number... 65. Yup, he rapidly fires 65 bullets at you. It's freakin cool!

I really need to sort the audio out better, but i guess it's just on my list. Which is actually quite a short list after tonight. Mostly i have 10 more levels to do. then balance them all together. So far, the first 10 are pretty good.

I'll do another video of what's going on real soon.
G'night.