PS3 Home - The Midway Update

Today Mass Media Games 'The Midway' update went live. I was personally working on this improved version of The Midway. I am so happy to see it up there and see the annoying bugs fixed. Ok, so most of the bugs i fixed were even noticed by the general populace, but it mattered to us, to me.

The main fixes are generally cosmetic, with spectators now seeing Frog Flinger players frogs being propelled correctly after the player reaches level 5. We also altered lighting on the prize board towers and that makes them much easier to see. They now read much better and I like em. Then there were improvements to the scrolling messages, and that bug fix wil make it so all 5 slots can be changed and not only a select few (bad bug, get squashed!). There are a couple of more major fixes, but again i am not sure anyone really noticed, but if they did i thank you for not raising hell about it.

We made the whole scene more efficient, raising the base frame rate and also making the scene load faster.

Then finally our last fix was for the Freeplay Frenzy. Did you notice how occasionally everyone seemed to know which game was going to be free and already be playing it? Well we had a bug where there could be a disparity between each players timer. This could cause a several second difference in when you saw Freeplay Frenzy being on. So sometimes you would be first easily and sometimes feel like you were last. Every player was however awarded the full minute to be able to try and get into the game. Now the timing issue has been fixed and now everyones Freeplay Frenzy will happen on the same second.

We also added an advertising opster near the entrance to liven that area up. Keep a lookout for future posters coming soon. Also we expanded the Ticket Booth shop to now include all of Mass Medias for sale in the Mall items. Making it more convenient for shoppers of fine virtual items :D

That's about it. I sure hope you are all enjoying your Midway.

Laters

No-Limit Poker for PS3Home

I had another fun time today playing poker in our little sandbox. This was our first real test of the updated Brimstone Poker table. This new version features a choice of what type of Poker to play and we needed to test the No-Limit tournemant mode. I am glad to report that although there were several bugs, the testing went quite smoothly, and i had a good time. Though the cards were mean to me today.

We do not have a release date for this atm (not that i am aware of anyways), but i am sure everyone will really enjoy the new version when we get it out.

Laters

Mass Media Games - Poker

Mass Media Games is the company i work for and the company that is working so hard on the Home stuff for everyone to enjoy.

Poker will be out this Thursday (tomorrow my time), and it will be only a Limited Texas Hold-em style casual game to start with. I say start with as it is destined to be so much more. I am not certain how much miore. I do know they are working on getting a tournemant mode No-Limit style Texas Holdem fully working. Only this will take some major testing once it is ready (it could be ready now i am not sure).

So those people that want No-Limit, ya just gotta wait a little bit. Though i suggest ya buy the game tomorrow so ya can beat all your friends at Poker without them just bunging all their money into the pile every hand :)

I am not sure what the plans are to expand the game into more modes, but rest assured once i find out i'll post about it. I sure hope everyone enjoys the poker table tomorrow, and i hope i get a few invites to play at some point soon. Once i have time and have finished A Shooter for myself.

I also hope that everyone enjoys the video we have created to promote Poker, that was a lot of fun to act in. (i am the girl with the Airforce hat on).

Laters.

Bit of a Poker Video

Mass Media's Brimstone poker table for ya homespace.

Ok, so i know it is only 3 seconds long. but i had enough trouble getting this. We really had nothing very suitable, and we cannot show player names etc. Enjoy...

This one does not show the interface, i have ben told we don't have any footage we can show of that because of player names being present on the screen. We have rules that tell us we cannot do that, sorry. I woudl love to show the interface otherwise.

Maybe today i can find out when it will go live, if not this thursday.

So it looks like uploading this video to Blogspot has severely reduced it's quality, bah humbug i say!!
Laters

PS3 Home - Poker Again

I didn't realise this would be such a popular subject, but as it is i thought i should do a quick follow up.

There are certain things i cannot say at this time, so i apologize in advance if i am vague about anything you care about.

I will try to grab some video footage later today, but i need to get permission to publish such a thing. I will try however, and i am usually convincing :D

Due to concerns about what can and cannot be done i have some of the Poker team testing that the Voice chat will work with our poker game seemlessly. It will work seemlessly by the end of the day regardless of wether or not it does at present (which we believe it wil).

Info Nugget: If you obtain certain certain criteria in the game you can Win prizes (Here at MMI we love to give out prizes hehe).
Info Nugget:It is a 6 player table and supports Texas Hold-em Limited style poker.

That is all i have for now.
Laters

PS3 Home - Poker

Yep, you read that right. We have been busy producing a Poker table here at work. Well not a real poker table as we are developers and not carpenters. However this new game is a lot of fun. I am sure most everyone know what poker is and how much fun it can be to play with friends. well that is what we have made.

I got to take part along with a lot of my workmates in a big playtest and videoing session yesterday afternoon. It was to work on some video for the promo of the poker table as well as do some serious testing. What a great way to spend the afternoon. All dolled up like pretty girl (which i most certainly cannot pretend i am in real life!) for the video shoot, and then i got to do some great poker playing.

It was all going really well till my 2 pair were taken by a flush that dropped on the 4th card, ARGH! I hate that Mike guy!. The whole office (or most of it) got to take part and it was a real break from all the work we have been doing lately. A real respite. It is also really nice to actually just play ya own stuff and enjoy it.

Needless to say, Brimstone poker will be out at the beginning of September barring any issues with the full test cycle. I have a picture of us in the Neptune suite playing.

That is me on the far table on the near left seat. YAY!

I think everyone will like this item. I have no idea how much it will cost, but it is a piece of scripted furniture. So it gets placed in your personal spaces. (up to two of them, gasp!)

Laters all

Texture Swapping FTW

Working in Home on the PS3 has been quite interesting because of it's restrictions as much as anything else.

Ya see, to get the best from a next gen machine you really have to push some major buttons. You have to work quite hard to make the machine actually sweat. Managed languages put an amazing strain on the systems that they exist on. Even the most efficient ones do.

Then we have working within this managed language, it is like you have a machine but it has had restrictions placed on it, making it less of what it was. This means it is easier to work with, but also easier to reach it's limits. It works out like this on both the PS3 through Home and the Xbox through Xna. Whenever there is an update to the SDKs i get excited. What kind of new goodies have they brought me? Avatar support for Xna?  Rendering control for Home?

So today i tried one of the new features expanded in the last Home HDK, the power to Texture swap. This is an amazing thing and opens up so many possibilities. It also makes art pipelines much more streamlined for replacement of stuff, such as the digits on a digital clock. Now with texture swapping it is real easy. Less work for the programmer and artist both.

It may seem like small step for some, but to me it is very exciting. What amazing things am i goign to do with an artist and this new found power... Only time will tell,

Laters

ps. My family is now back with me, Woohoo! I am soo excited.

The Midway for PS3 Home (release report pt2)

Second Hmm… (11:30am)


We had 50 tickets that we had bought, and while we were playing the mingames ourselves spending the tickets a BAD thing happened. But before I mention this I want to talk about playing our own minigames. We had a lot of performance issues while developing The Midway. This is in part due to the strain a managed language (in this case Lua) puts onto a cpu. Also we had a lot of active content in this particular space. Certainly the most of any scene so far released in Home. We had come up with some very clever ways of maintaining frame rate while playing the games and I was hopeful that it would hold up when the scene is full of real people, not just test clones. And.. OMGoodness did it hold up. Woohoo is all I can proclaim at this point. Now back to the first REAL bad news of the day.

We had been spending our tickets and eventually spent the last one. Then at some point shortly after I was playing some Free game (freeplay frenzy I think and not Miz Fortune) and one of my workmates who had come in noticed I still had a ticket. That’s odd we thought, but we musta not noticed that we hadn’t spent the last one. So I go play another game and see my tickets go to Zero. When I come out of the minigame however we are all shocked to see that I get my ticket back. Then we quickly tried to spend it several more times to no avail. We could use it as currency to play the games, but the ticket never disappeared or got consumed. This is real bad.. Mass Media have an awful lot riding on this product. We self financed this with the hope to make at least our money back and if we make more, then we can move more effort into creating great places in Home to go to. If this flops it will cost our small company a lot of money. I cannot really stress how much is riding on this product for us, but suffice to say that it could and probably will spell a turning point in the companies history, one way or the other.

I talked to my Boss and we are not happy. How much money is this costing us? How many people is this affecting. We all went into theory and testing mode. I personally went off to look at the code. At this moment I thought it was my personal fault. I thought I had screwed up badly and left some test code in the game and somehow it hadn’t been detected before release. You see my test code allowed us to permanently have a single ticket, so this looked exactly like my code. I had a major sinking feeling in my stomach and I was a little stressed. Thankfully my workmates, boss and myself are all professional and name calling and blame can come later ;) right now we need to find and fix this issue. This could be costing us thousands of dollars a minute. The boss went off to talk to Sony, we had to cover the fact we may need to close The Midway down till we fix this. Paul one of my workmates went back to his own PS3 and started spending his tickets like a madman to see if he would have the same issue. I was of course scouring my code. Firstly I checked over my single ticket test code. This seems very unviable though and upon looking at it more I knew that it should not be possible for it to be active. Several minutes later I realized it was not my code. If it had been players would only ever see a single ticket count and not the 50 we start with when buying them. Phew…

Then me and the Boss went back to our broken ticket version. Time for more testing we thought. So we left the scene and went to the plaza and back in. This was also a good time for me to see the porta potties in the main plaza that will teleport people to The Midway. They of course look broken to me as they are not rotated quite correctly, though not terribly so. Still I hate the fact something I wrote is even slightly wrong in this way. I apologize to anyone who noticed this. Well back to our immediate issue, the fact we could be giving away infinite tickets, ARGH! We hoped that leaving the scene and coming back in would reset our ticket value. The ticket value is obtained by querying how many you have of the Sony servers, so we figured this should fix the permanent ticket issue. However it did not and this threw a wrench into our thinking that it was just our scripts that were wrong. At about this time Dan another workmate arrived and also confirmed he was able to spend all his tickets and have no phantom ticket at the end. This made us feel slightly better, as the odds of this happening seemed to be going down. What to do about it was the question, along with just how prevalent might this be?

What should we try next and what is still wrong with so many people not being able to play the minigames or receive the Darlas Den free personal space?

More of What happened next in my next post...

The Midway for PS3 Home (release report pt1)

Thursday July 1st.

Breakfast time…. (7:45am)

I woke up all excited, it was my 15th Wedding Anniversary and a day I would normally have had as vacation from work. However this was also launch day for The Midway. A public space in the PS3 Home online community. This was gonna be an exciting day as I had been nervous the several previous days. Anticipation was the major feeling I had before breakfast. I had of course woken early with the intention of getting to work earlier than normal. My boss gets in especially early and I wanted to be there for the initial excitement surrounding our area going live.

Going to Work… (8:30am)

On my to work my excitement and trepidation grew. It is thankfully a short journey to work (about 10 minutes). In that journey though I managed to go over all the things that could go wrong. This is a live space on the PS3 network and In all honesty it is just not possible at the moment for the whole experience to be tested in anywhere near the way or to the degree of a boxed game. There are simply to many variables. Also half the solution or problem set id Sonys. We are a set of games built into a black box that Sony produces in London England. We just take advantage of this environment called home. This means there are a lot of things we have no control over. Add onto that the possible server issues and you might understand how come I ma nervous. The excitement is easy to explain. We were going to be the first place that people in Home would actually be able to see and therefore co-experience with their friends. All of our games in The Midway are spectator friendly. We have made them show what a person playing is doing. Of course this caused us many challenges, but oh boy was I excited to hopefully see some full spaces and all that activity. In our own testing at Mass Media we only had about 12-16 people in a space at one time, and this isn’t quite what it is designed for, it is a bit empty with that number.

At Work…. (8:45am)

The boss David was there along with the co-designer of The Midway. There sitting excitedly in the conference room watching what was going on inside one of the (I am told 50 instances) instance of The Midway, which was full of people milling around with some playing the games. David was talking to the occasional person helping them out. My first impressions of the space on the Big screen tv we have was one of joy. There it was, live with a full complement of people running around in it. This is a way I had only dreamed of. Also nothing at this time appeared broken, which was an amazing relief.

First Hmm… (10:30am)

Reports are coming in that a lot of people cannot play any of the games :(. This is not good, also we are talking to people in our instance about this same issue. They go back out and reboot and they still cannot play the games. This is now getting bad as the number appears to be about 10% of the people in the space. The forums are abuzz with people having the same issue. We have no idea what is going on, then we find out that people coming into The Midway are not receiving the free item of a personal space. I know personally this can only happen if the Scene script has crashed. PS3 Home is made up of minigame scripts and a single scene script. They interact and make it all work. At this point we were hopeful that the issue was a server issue and therefore one that Sony would need to solve. Then while we were busy playing the games ourselves.

Then second Hmm came about, though this one was more panic inducing….

More to come tomorrow...

The Midway Report

Ok, so i am not actually gonna do a real report here and now.

The reason is fairly simple. I have had a really busy day and night, and am too tired to write all i need to. I want to do a sort of report telling how my The Midway Live day went, fromt before i left for work until the end of the second day. This will be a set of large posts, as i am not the best writer and i also get cramps from all that typing. Suffice to say it is on the way. Go go The Midway for PS3 Home.

I saw the Physio again today and he was very painfully stretching my shoulder, what is interesting is as he tells me how well i am doing he seems to cause me more pain. Now i do agree with him though, after justa bit more than 1 week of physio on my dislocated shoulder it can now move all over the place. It is also getting stronger through the range as well, which feels awesome. Though right now it is just very very tired..

So it is sleep time for me once i have sent off a Pellmell code to some nice people in france.

G'night

A Few mods and possibilities

Today was an interesting day. I rotated the Tele-porta-potties in the minigame i have for the Plaza for PS3Home. I had to rotate them because the minigame i was going to be taking up in the Plaza scene was exaclty 180 degress opposite from what i had written. This where things can get sketchy as far as which way around something is in an editor. If the location arrow is pointing towards you, is that correct? Or should it be facing away to show that is it's forward facing. This means for me that the porta potties could be eitehr way around to be honest.

I guess i made them the wrong way around as far as Sony and their Plaza location is concerned. Not really an issue. Though i thought it was interesting that i could not decide which way is forward. In fact we internally have had several discussion about it and come to no conclusions apart from lets leave it as we have it atm, which was probably an accident of facing. haha

I also got to discuss more stuff with the boss as far as other things that we could do for PS3Home. With the advent of the HDK 1.36 we can now do a bunch of more interesting things. such as scripted furniture and stand alone arcade games. Woohoo am i excited about what we can come up with. I'll post more as we decide what kinda things we will do.

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

Working the Weekend

So i got my bug report yesterday from Sony in relation to the latest submission for The Midway Spaces.

The Midway is a very large scale project for the Midway, and therefore needs a good deal of testing (testing time should always be appropriate for the size of the project).. Sony have thankfully taken on this job and have been testing the spaces for us. So far we have done quite well for numbers of bugs. Much lower than i expected.

Now it is saturday and the reason for my post is maybe obvious. Some times you have to do what ya have to do to get a product on the shelves on time. Or in this case, on the virtual shelves... :|

I don't mind putting in the extra time to get stuff done on time, and i believe the commitment of all i work with here at MMI have the same desire to get stuff done. We need it fixed and uploaded ready for Sony on Monday morning for their next test cycle. Sure hope it goes well.

Hope everyone has a great weekend, and isn't in work....

laters

The Midway in PS3Home - Play to win guide pt2 - Trigger Happy

So Captain Black was taken and removed from The Midway. He was the sneakiest man i have ever met, well met is a stretch, as he always stayed in the shadows. Hard to see hard to talk to, but he knew his stuff. He was one of the best under cover operators ever. So going into The Midway was a challenging prospect.

I am not like Captain Black, i am not an undercover stealth operator like him. The traditional spy. I am more of the So Obvious noone can see me variety, or the hidden in plain sight spy. So i disguised myself to fit in with the Midway carnies and their clientel. this was a bold move, but one i am famous for (well, infamous).

Here i am showing off the game i am going to reveal tonight.

I dare to beckon you close, from right in front of the game!

Lets get closer and see what this wonderful game has to offer shall we ?

Check out the prize board

This is THE best first prize in all of The Midway. Ok, i know that is my opinion, but it Rocks. It somehow manages to transcend visual abilities and make it appear that you have a massive hole in your body. Like you have been shot through with a big bullet or something. Marvellous stuff this.

Ok, so lets start this game and see what the HUD looks like.

The Trigger Happy HUD

The Hud has the usual game timer in the top middle. This appears to be standard in all the minigames in The Midway. We start the game with 30 seconds on the clock, and it seems like an age, till you get to the higher levels. In the bottom left we have thenumber of bullets you have in your gun, and fortunately it is Infinite, yup, endless bullets. So go Ape, fire as rapidly as you can. Then in the bottom right corner we have the scoring counter, the t number is the target scorto win the prize for the curent level, the bottom number is your current score value. Don't ever pay any attention to this meter. It is just a distraction from shooting stuff. And shooting stuff gets ya points, and points get ya the prizes. You will also notice a bright green circle with a cross in it on the middle left side. this is your cursor. Your targetting device.

Let's talk about the places or items you can shoot, as they have different point values. This is a very important point (point haha!).

The Score values for targets

As you can see from the Score values. They are spread around a little bit. The secret to the game though is to FLOW. This means keep scoring as many points as you can per second. (pps or points per second). This is achieved by shooting the higher point scorers, but not letting the smaller ones go to waste. One point before we discuss what to shoot. The cursor (your targetting device) never stops moving. so you need to be in constant control of where it is going. Don't let it go by itself anywhere, as you may lose track of it momentarily.

Here is the best scoring path break down...

You start in the center of the screen, so while you are there, shoot the Bulls Eyes out,

then head downwards shooting any cuddle creature heads that pop up on the way,

then you will shoot a bottle or can and onto the BIG points.

Now you are in the fishy area near the bottom of the game. Time your movment to hit all the passing fish. It is possible to not miss a single one.

In the small amount of down time as you shoot the fish, move up ocassionally and take out a can or bottle,

but get right back down for the next passing fish.

In this way you can easily score more points than even the level 10 has you aiming for. Don't go back for the Bulls eyes, I know it is tempting, and the Midway staff want you to do it, but it isn't worth the travel time. Same for those Foosball models feet, lots points but hard as hell to hit.

Here is me celebrating winning the best first prize in The Midway. Woohoo! And not a soul here at The Midway seems to have noticed me. This is an awesome disguise!

That's me wearing the Super Frist prize T-Shirt

So now you know what to do. This is probably the easiest game to win przes at. But like all the games you may need a bit of practice.

Good luck, and I will bring another report next week.

Oh here come the clowns, and it appears they would like to take me to dinner. told ya it was a wonderful disguise, haha!

Bye for now..

Cool huh!

A youtube video of Pixels ?

Yeah, i have gone for a strange post tonight, as all i have been doing is solving bugs in The Midway and tweaking enemy layouts for my first 5 levels of A Shooter. Both not realy easy to get across what i have been doing. However someone linked this video, which i think is ace, only not HD, bah!

Video link

Yup, i liked it anyways.

So i have been working on my next gameplay video, but the night has worn on, and i have not finished it, so i am a bit tardy. I have to sleep now cos i have to get up in about 6 hours to go to Physio therapy. Geez, it's a busy time.

Hope you all have a good one, cya tomorrow

G'night.

ps. I am still in mourning for the loss of Captain black :(

The Midway in PS3Home - Play to win Guide pt1 - Rebound

Hi,

My real name is unimportant but most people just call me Captain Black (cos i look like a puppet it seems!).

I am going to spill the beans on an upcoming title for Playstaion Home. Yeah, that's right. It isn't even out yet, and i am here giving the skinny on it. I will get you an inside guide each week till i have covered all the games within the Space called The Midway. My guides will help you win the prizes Faster and Cheaper than you ever though possible. We have to get what we can, before the man catches us.....

Todays game is called Rebound. It is a skill game based on timing a little light that goes up and down the backboard of a basketball backboard. The game is easy to find, as it is one of the brightest in The Midway.

Once you have located the game, go stand in front of it, and stop watching other people playing it. Their playing can be a distraction, and you want all your attention focused on the task at hand.

Here you see me staring down the games name. Now press X already and lets get this game going.

Now we have our game started let me tell you what you will see on the screen. The HUD (or heads up display), tells us many things. Well ok, all the important things for this moment in time.
1. In the top middle you willsee the game Timer. Once this has counted down the seconds, the game is over.
2. Bottom left you will see how many balls you have available to throw. Infinite in this game.
3. Bottom right you will see a nice counter. The top of which tells you how many points you need. The bottom number tells you how many points you have currently.

The aim of the game is simple. Throw those balls into the basket and rack up a score good enough to win that level, and then advance to the next level and the next prize offering.
The game is controlled by pressing the X button when the travelling light is in a good place. If you stop the light in the wrong place, you will miss the basket. So listen up and i will point out the SWEET spots for making basket after basket.

Sweet spot #1

Sweet spot #2

Those sweet spots are right next to each other, this llows you some slop in your timing. There is a couple of other spots that can get ya a basket, but stay away from them. concentrate on hitting right under the basket rim with each light.

If you follow those simple instructions you will get your prizes with a fast and furious style. And will see lots of these Winner displays.

Good luck, and next week i will tell you all about the Easiest game to win prizes at.

now shh.. I hear someone coming, and it may just be a clown.....

Submission is busy time

Just when ya thought ya were done. Ok, just when I thought i was done, and could move onto other projects within the company that need a little TLC, and Whammo. submission forms and more.

I have been filling out this major form all day today. Been very busy and worked hard on it. But still i go home with it not quite done. this is due to other unforseen interruptions, like crashes etc. all minor, but distracting nonetheless.

What i recommend is, studying what the submission procedure really is before ya do it, before it gets to be that time and you think you have enough time, but ya don't. Noones fault but your own. The otehr thing i recommend is a dry run. I was planning on this a few weeks ago, but somehow let it slide. Now i wish i hadn't as i see all my time going away, and fighting to get stuff done.

good luck to anyone in a submission phase, i feel for ya, but am also happy for ya. Your project is in it's final stages. That is something to celebrate! Woohoo!

One last part of The Midway news is... Sony tell me we should have our transporter (the infamous Teleporter potty) in the Main Plaza. Woohoo! I sure hope that works out. We wrote the minigame today for it. It's silly, but cool

laters

The Midway Space Invaders

No, and no. We do not have a space invaders game inside The Midway. We will leave that to when we either get paid by the licensor, or until erm.. It becomes free to do so. I just wanted to clarify that fact before i continue with this post..

"If ya haven't got a space Invaders game, then what are ya gonna post about then I hear ya say!" (or maybe i am just talking to myself ?

This post is a little story of what happened last week. when we found ourselves with our very own invaders, invading our home space. here is a piccy to start, just top get ya warmed up before the Story really goes on. Please note that this picture is a mockup of the real event, and the likenesses have no bearing on real life whatsoever. (i cannot show gamertags, sooo ya have the mockup ok!)

Just a mockup of the Real live incident...

About 2 weeks ago...

We noticed that two people who we shall call invader 1 and invader 2 appeared in our online space. They never seemed to try and comunicate with us. Though we did try our best to talk with them. firstly we tried typing in English words to see if they would react. But it was as if we did not exist. Hello is fairly universal so we figured it would be aok. Next we tried to communicate through gesturing, greetings and such like waving. Again to no avail. It was a mite frustrating i have to say. Both me and my colleague were left with very few options of communication. however it did not seem to be an issue so we let it go.

About 1 week ago...

I had a crash that was very odd. I may have blogged about it, i know i did several days later, as it started happening mor and more. However 1 week ago, we were unaware fo the invaders power... What I did notice however was the fact that they seemed to be able to levitate. No surprise that an alien could levitate, but in the world of PS3Home, that should not be possible. This was a clue, though a subtle one that soething was wrong... just how wrong we would find out later.

A few days later...

 i happend to be in the space when i saw one the of the invaders walk smoothly up from where i was standing in front of them, he walked up into the air as if climbing an invisible staircase. I was shocked, and bemused at this time. We put our brightest brains on this strange happening. But were then distracted by a full The Midway test.

The test went well (i blogged about this). But right at the end of the test EVERYONE in there crashed. This was bad. The rest of the test went well. We had solved our frame rate issues and memory issues to be suddenly confronted by a crash we could not trace. And it was fatal to everyone in there.

Lots of Time...

What followed was a painstaking investigation using brains and brawn and soda. Lots of soda. Me and my colleague kept going into the scene trying hard to duplicate the crash. We noticed that the Invaders were in there. Then Pop we crashed. WTH we thought, we were jus standing there. It was at this point our suspicions about these seamingly inoffensive aliens began to appear. Suspicsions that they are not quite as calm and inncoent as they appear. So we kept going into the space to see what they were up to. We saw the fact that they did not appear to crash.. Ever. We also witnessed them walk all over the sky without a care in the world.

Then we had a revelation.. We saw them pop forward and a few seconds later pop back. This is a sure sign of entering a minigame. Woah! they had their own minigames. Which would also explain the fact they walked all over the sky.. it mean't they also had their Own scene. Like in a parallel dimension, and we could only see them, not their world. Something was very very wrong here.

Two days ago..

We tried once more for the whole morning to communciate with the invaders. We sent them private mesages only to be ignored. We felt they ust not be able to see us. how were we going to solve this issue. As we had now traced it to the fact that when the invaders play their minigame, they send some distressing network message thruogh some strange subspace portal to our minigame system, and our minigame system tries hard to translate their message only to be doomed and crash when index 48 is out of range (whatever that is!). Their alien tongue was literally killing us! ARGH!

Yesterday...
As we were investigating who could possibly be in our reality with their own landscape we got lucky. We had tested our systems and various crossovers and had conclusively determined what was going on. The invaders were using Our Key.. the special number that Sony give us to access our space online. They were also using our key. This was not supposed to happen. but it was. We knew we had to get rid of the invaders, we had to repel boarders!

We communicated..
although we thought they could not see us. Yesterday one of them spoke. He said 'please do not play 'Pliers Spice'. We were shocked the invaders have spoken. what followed was an intense conversation that led us to expel the invaders as they moved onto another spaces key. No longer our problem we could now safely test our crashes.

Today, i am glad they have gone, the world is a much more peaceful plac without Space invaders in it. We are now also working on the submission of the Space, so wish us luck.

So...
If you are ever confronted with space Invaders, the most important thing to do is communicate with the. Good Luck!

laters

The Midway latest Sandbox test

It went very well. I love starting with something so incredibly positive.

We have been plagued the last few weeks with performance issues, and with no real tuner to help sort this out we have made sevral stabs in the dark to make the whole experience faster. Then a few days ago we made a breakthrough and with that breakthrough we managed to shave off 7ms of time when playing the minigames. Woohoo!

It was great. So much code was aleterd though that we had to get another test in. Always best to retest altered stuff, however confident the programmer or team are that 'It's all good, the same as last time!!". Never believe them.

So we got a few new bugs from this test, ones probably made during all the reworking on the performance or server flooding we have done. Easy fixes though. but just as the test was ending we asserted in some Sony code. Yeeouch, i hear ya say. I would be depressed about this at this point, as it crashed all 18 people in the scene. But i am not gonna be, as i have no control over this. It might be my bug, but I need help from Sony to show me the way, or simply put.. WTH does their assert really mean.

So onto another stress test hopefully on monday then maybe submission, only 2 weeks overdue.....

Laters

The Midway Music

In The Midway there is music, like in most places in Home on the PS3. Well we have the obligatory music with Disco ball and also some other more scene related music. Check out the pictures to see both of these places. Though i cannot put sound in pictures for ya.

There is High Roller and me dancing along to some music. This is Home after all.

What the heck is that thing with pipes coming out of it ? Something Mcgyver created ? the answer is.. well actually i think i will leave the name for now and let you all wonder what it is. Needless to say it plays some wonderful Midway music. I love this music and it never gets old, only issue is that ya prolly don't wanna dance to it.

laters