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

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

The day before The Midway

Here we are in the afternoon before The Midway goes live on PS3 home. I.. scratch that. We here at Mass Media are all very excited to see our game go live. If it does well i hope to be partying through the day, if there are issues i expect to be programming through the night haha!

The excitement is from anyone who has worked on the minigames within the space, and of course we are all hoping there are no issues. It is amusing on some level to see how excited we all are even though we are mostly grizzled industry veterans. The excitement i think comes because this is not your normal boxed game, it is different in so many way. Less closed, and for a long time it has ben hard to push boundaries within the next gen computers and systems. This space gives us a way to push boundaries, even if they are imposed by Sony creating a system on top of the base PS3 layer.

Excitment is of course two fold, Epic success or Epic failure are both close brothers and are at this time very close by. We all here very excited to stare at the PS3 tomorrow morning and i usspect we will not get a lot of work done al day as we keep meandering past the Live ps3's we have here at work. BTW, i used Epic cos it annoys some people and i like it 8D

I hope if you go and look at The Midway you enjoy what is there,

Laters

Scene scripting simplification

I am working in #PS3Home currently with my day job. I now have the task of unwinding a few systems that are in place in a personal space script. As scene scripts cannot talk to each other, then tasks must be handled by having minigames talking to each. Sending messages from one instance to another, like the owner sending onfo to his visitors etc.

The latest part i am doing is to remove a lot of scenery setup code from the Scene script and place it into a new minigame i have been writing. this will simplify the multi send nature of what is already working. Ok, so i am breaking it badly as i move it, but ya gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. In this case it will allow me to simplify what is an over complicated system and also save memory in the process. I just hate seeing something that was working broken, especially when it is me that has broken it.

Still, i am making good progress so far, i sure hope it continues.

Laters

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.

Time to Blog

I have taken me meds tonight. The ones that will hopefully get me at least 5 hours of solid sleep. so now it must be time to blog as usual i did not make it earlier. So what do i waffle one about? should it be a directionless diatribe or something more directed?

Well i am going for the first option, as i love that idea a lot more at the moment...

Ilerion, Welcome to the whacky world of Xblig and Xna programming and playtesting. I see ya got your first one in there on Old School Racer. For anyone that wants to know, Ilerion is a cool dude that i do have the pleasure of knowing. Though darn him for finding several bugs in my game tonight haha! ;)  No really, great job. I am sure everyone in the community will appreciate you as they get to know you.

A Shooter is about ready for the Playtest section once more, however Ilerion found a bug i just cannot seem to find. Sooo, i might just put it up there anyway. Not sure. So it will have to wait till tomorrow now. so much to do, so little time.

Talking bout Meds, it is also a game that some web site i read said was worth a look. How wrong they were. I hate it when i get cheated (or feel cheated) out of living or succeeding in a game. This breakout game (i love breakout games, as you could tell from my Pong/breakout mix Aceball) sucks badly. I just felt cheated from the first moments. Not the way to start a game, no wonder it only has 2 stars. Pity as it looks like the programmer can program too!

Onto PS3.. Once again i have gotten The Midway sent off to Sony. I cannot disclose why it has not gone live yet on PS3 Home, but it should now be slated for Mid June. I know you folks are gonna love it. Well certainly gonna love it more than a lot of home. When i get more info i will post something up. Our secret agent is still on the loose in the Midway.

Tonight i don ear plugs and Vicodin.. Hmm, can i don Vicodin? Maybe i will consume Vicodin and consume ear plugs.. Hmm, nope.. that doesn't really work either. Just how would the ear plugs know where to go ?

With that random Thought i am Outta here!

G'night.

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 :(

Captain Black was caught by the establishment

This is a quick update to our last story... It seems the establishment caught up with our secret agent Captain Black. We do not expect to hear from him again.

Secret agent No2 has been despatched to The Midway, we hope he will last longer than finding out about one game.

Good luck Agent No2.... (watch out for the clowns)

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

The Midway Prizes

Have i mentioned anything about prizes in The Midway scene, coming to a PS3 in the near future? No? Yeah.. Well yeah should have been the answer. Some people are obviously not reading back along my blog, or are new to it.

Anyway...

That above is a Prize board, and here are a few details about it.

1. It is the Prize board for a game called Frog Flinger (you may be familiar with that one ;)

2. It shows 5 prizes, though there is 10 prizes for the game.

3. The check marks depict prizes i have won.

4. The yellow border depicts the prize i am currently after.

5. The number on top is the Game number (think ID) 

6. The prizes are (from the bottom). T-shirt, Earring, Terrarium, Stuffed Frog, Froggy themed dressing gown.

As you progress the prize board will update, there is a prize board per minigame.

When you win a prize you get your name scrolling along in lights, so everyone else in the Scene can see just how good you are, and be jealous of the prizes you just won!

The Midway and Frog Flinger

I realise i have been a bit lax lately on keeping the PS3Home area of ours called The Midway in the public eye. Ok, so i just haven't published any pictures, ggeeezz!

So here is one of the games.

As you approach Frog Flinger...

It has some nice signage and a lovely picture of a fron being flung, or is that flinged, lol.

Then as you get close you can see what the action is about. Once question that comes to mind is "Can i weild that hammer ?"

Trigger the minigame by entering the game from the X button woooH!

Above is what you actually see whilst playing the game. In fact i can answer that previous question as well. YES, you can use that hammer. It is carefully picked up by your avatar when you choose to play the game. Thgen you can smack the launching frogapult and see if you can time it well enough to land your frogs onto the spinning lillypads. now those lillypads turn quite slowly at first, but later they turn with a more devilish desire to make ya miss. You have to land three frogs out of 5 attempts to win a prize in this game. Remember there are 10, yes 10 prize levels in the game.

I hope that introduction to Frgo Flinger is interesting to people. It is the first real show of a minigame i have done, besides more of a tease. Now if i get some ineterst in this kind of review, i could expand it, or cover the other games in the same way.

laters

The Midway 'The Story ending'

You may remember that i was a bit drunk in my last story. Well now i am on the up, and when someone is recovering in this way they have to have someone to talk to. Myself i have a large stuffed animal to discuss lifes little problems with. Problems like, how come i took all those bottles of beer from the fridge, adn yet they are still there ? How come i don't age etc....

Well here is a picture of me with my freindly and always attentive stuffed animal.

The Midway "A True Story"

This is the story of a slightly overweight fella with nice hair. some say hair too nice for a beer swilling slob, but then they don't really know me. Noone really knows me. They all look at me as they pass me standing there playing games and think i am some sort of zombie. Some sort of dude, who occasionally plays a girl. At least when i do that i get some attention.

But this isn't about cross-gendering. This is about me. The real me, the one noone pays attention too. hold on, i need a beer....

Not a lot of choice for beer, but that's ok. I have had quite a few already. Probly why there are only a few left. I wonder though where the heck i have put my money. I realise now i came out without my pants on. That can happen when youre in a stupor. at least i remembered my glasses, or everything would be more blurred. I think i'll just take all the beer they have left. They can put it on my Tab.

Some small time later...

WOAH! I am feeling frisky. Geez, that was the good stuff. I need to go play some Poker, and then go meet some chicks in The Midway. That's a happening place.

Some small time later...

Ok The midway was great, but all those flashing lights have made me feel a bit queazy. Just too happening and too much fun, and that can lead to bad things. 'Buuurrrrp'. Maybe i need a lie down. Maybe after i use the potty.

Oh boy! you have no idea how much this stinks. Now get outta my face i need to finish up!

This was just One story of a guy, playing a guy in PS3 Home, and he has great hair too.

The Midway, waiting for ?

I know you were all on tenterhooks wondering what my character was waiting for eh! I am also fairly sure that you expected me to reveal the answer next time.

I'll come clean and tell ya that i forgot about revealing any answers. Yup, i forgot i put in the question in the first place. I have been so caught up in finishing this place. It is so exciting, but the 3rd test produced some unexpected results and so I am worried about my delivery date to Sony (Monday!). However my Boss met with some great Sony Home dev dudes from England and the States yesterday at GDC and they have offered to help.

This is awesome news as i am sure they have a real toolset to with which to see where our performance drains are. Thanks in advance Sony dudes. Till we talk to them again, we are going to do some final tests on prizes and also make sure we crush our final 20 or so final thoughts (changes). all minor which is awesome.

Till then i leave ya with the new picture of my character revealing more of what he was waiting for. If i get chance tomorrow i will post up the Final and Revealing picture. Otherwise it'l be monday.

Laters

Oh Man, The 3rd The Midway Test was good. but..

Yes, we did another test. This time I had to have a discussion with the team abuot the new update to 1.3.5 for PS3Home. Do we ? Don't we ? Pros cons and all that.

In the end we decided to update one machine to 1.3.5 and see if our scenes would run aok. They should, but would they ? In the end they did. So i made the decision to change ALL of the Home installations in the comapny to 1.3.5. It seemed like a tough decision to make, but people playing 1.3.2 would not be able to see anyone playing in the newer HDK runtime. So i updated quite a few of the machines myself. Then we were ready for the 5pm test.

It went very well. Better than the previous tests. We ended up with a few known problems, but they are basic bugs. Like the wrong prize showing etc. Easy stuff. also some text alignment issues. They are always there, even when ya ship usually. The test went so smoothly i was actually able to really look at profiling numbers and memory, as much as one can on PS3 Home.

This was Bad. This is the part where i do a 'what went wrong' bit i guess. The profiling showed that we could run real slow, at about 40-44ms. This is bad when our target is about 35ms. It adversely effects the gameplay we have in our minigames. Yeeouch, not good. It is hard in home to see just where the time is going as well. so today we are looking into what is slowest and speeding it up. I just hope we can get the performance upgraded fast enough for our deliverable to Sony. time will tell, and the weekends work of course.

I really had hoped that 1.3.5 would speed up the rendering or any other system to be honest. It did speed up the load times, so that is a plus. There were also some bug fixes, the most notable to us is the fixed Queues for playing minigames.

I hope to grab some more pictires, but all of a sudden my time is taken up with looking for performance optimizations.. ARGH!
laters

Bonus Midway Piccy

I have not posted enough pictures from The Midway the last several days. So here is another....

What am I waiting for ? I can see it is gonna be a long wait though, Geez, 16 hours. OMGoodness.

And finally my last piccy for the day. Yeah i was gonna do more action shots of what goes on in The Midway, but the servers are down, so no group playing for me :(

I am hoping this does not give me a Tom Hanks moment. After all I am quite happy being the age I am. Though this is in the PS3Home space, so would it just effect my Avatar ? One wonders... /ponder

Laters