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.

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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.

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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.

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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!
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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

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The midway Test #2

Above is where you can buy tickets to play the games.

Ok, so it was planned for Monday and didn't happen due to some unfotunate issues with Token/tickets. We solved the server spamming issues and were up and running correctly later in the evening. Too late for a real test though.

So Tuesday afternoon rolled around and were were ready. You could feel the anticipation from the people here at Mas media. Myself and the main programmer on the job were a little nervous, as we seriously hoped we had fixed a number of the issues that came out of the first test.

So with great fanfare 4:30pm rolled round. People had started popping in from, well from where avatars go when not in Home. The place took about 10 minutes to really get populated, i figured we needed at the very least 10 human players bashing on the games. Now buying tockens in the test sandbox are free, but we had of course implemented the tokens playing restriction. So everyone had to buy them and also clear their inventories of the previously won prizes. Yeah, sucked.. but we had fixed a few of those prizes, so had to have it fresh.

The test started well and we were seeing much better performance from the previous test. I was busy moving from one game to the next while observing what people were doing. Looking for anomalies, but hoping not to find any. Then all of a sudden a workmate comes to my cube and announces that he has crashed both his machines. Oh Noes, how did that happen, it was so stabel, 15 minutes in and he had two crashes. As it turns out though he had a 100% duplication. It was to press the 'Select' button. Woot! I had given out specific instructions not to do this, as bringing up that Sony menu causes us to run out of memory. This really should not happen and we of course have a ticket open with them as I speak (or type). So after that initial panic, we know it was aok to crash like this.. lol.

Then the test continued for about another 10 minutes. When we declared the test over. We had a couple of crashed machines, and they were all to do with memory running out. It appears that taking a picture in Home can also use our Dev memory. This is odd and i sure hope there is a fix in the works, or the real Runtime does not do this. Cos it's bad. They give me 9.2MB for Main memory, and then steal some for a menu or for a picture. That should not happen. Ya give me 9.2MB i am gonna use 9.2MB.. ok !?

The test was amazing. Even though we told people that the test was over they continued to play the games till way after the end. Most till told to get productive by their producers, lol. all in all an excellent test.

Today is wednesday and we would be doing a 3rd test, but this afternoon the sony servers are down. So no test as yet. We are coming to the end though. Next up is to test the Personal space we give away for FREE. Yup i said it here first :]

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The Midway getting there

This here is the Porta-potty. This one happens to reside in the Personal space. Oh... Have i mentioned the Personal space that  The Midway has ?

Anyway, this little beaut is not just for pooping in. In fact ya canna poop in home, as you cannot eat. Strange place really. It is also used to Teleport people around. Hence the name 'Tele-Porta-Potty'.

We have spent some good hours since the big test working through some of our issues we managed to accumulate during the test. We had about 10 things to do or fix. Of those we have done maybe 6 or so. We have also managed to finish testing all the prizes and make sure they work once uploaded. I had a couple of typos in two of the category xml files, but now they are done, all the prizes work. Woohoo!

So tomorrow i work on Big Bangs prizes, and then onto Trigger Happy In-A-Box.

So i was asked earlier today from a lovely person who resides somewhere in the UK, is this space going to be available in Europe. Some people may already know that Sony have sever areas (much like Xbox and Wii). Well i can tell you that the European SCEE group has requested the Space. This is awesome news for us and was a big shock. As we did not tell them about it haha. But a good friend of ours did, and we believe they will go into our Sandbox on Monday and check out the scene for themselves. They have stated unofficially that they would love a simultaneous release in Europe alongside America. I would love that to happen. The more people that get to play these games and see all the work we have put in would be great.

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A Big The Midway test (1st)

So Friday afternoon we got to do our big test. Though for some time in the morning i thought it just wasn't gonna happen.

The test is to put up our PS3Home space called 'The Midway' onto the Sony Sandbox. Once it is all up there we have lots of people in and out of the office goto this space. Then we all bash on the multiplayer games that litter this scene.

Getting things up into the Sandbox is a semi time consuming task though. It takes about 3 minutes for the small item to be uploaded, that would be things like priozes and minigames really. Large items are only really the Scene itself which can take about 40 minutes or so.

We have been uploading the prizes now for 2 days, and it was the boss that took this job from me, thankfully. As my time was taken just making sure that the right thumbnails and right placards and rigth prizes were being given out and working. This ended up being a big job, lots of small things wrong that just ate up waaay more time than anyone expected, that includes me. In fact i thought it would be a 3 day job and it turned out to be about 8. Not good time management really.

So we managed to get everything uploaded sort of by friday lunch time. Then i got to go in with my main programmer. We had a look around and found several things wrong, as well as we were running out of memory. OUCH. Not a good time. So we battled through the issues during lunch time. I put back the big test till 4pm, hoping this would give us enough time to get the major issues resolved.

Went for a quick lunch and then it was back to a major problem or two. Ya gotta eat, when development gets tense, make sure it's on a full stomach. We managed to solve our issues with some good thinking and even managed to upload mostly what we needed to by 4pm. We made some good decisions on what could be not uploaded (non fatal issues). Fatal issues being ones that would crash people out etc.

By the time 4pm came around we had the space ready to go and already had about 10 people in it, though at this time not really testing it, just doing what people in Home tend to do which is dance. I managed to get a lot of people into the space, including one person in Utah and one in Illinois and finally one more remote from Georgia. What a great way to test some online gaming :D

Initally the test was going exptremely well. Till i noticed that if 3 people played a game called Rebound, the performance went through the floor. This was bad and from that moment on we started having issues.  Something went wrong and this caused a chain reaction to break most peolpe in the different games they were playing. We have no idea what actually broke it all. As it went down like a house of cards. But it sure was interesting up to that point. We lasted about 20 minutes of peolpe bashing on stuff till it broke.

So we reset and went in for a quick second test. This was going well as i had told people not to play Rebound. Then people started runnning  out of memory. We recorded their TTY output and stopped the test.

summation
It went well, better than i epected by quite a bit. We ended up with a small list of about 10 things to fix. The only bad one being the catalyst to crahsing everyone. That is in my mind not a bad test at all.

final thoughts..
I am very excited about this product, and seeing people, so many people playing these games and the vision realised was a very powerful sight. I look forward to my next test.

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This here is the midway. Looking from the place you come into the scene, or the spawn point. As you can see there is a nice welcome message, although this does double as a welcome message and also an informative message, telling you vital things like who is doing well at what. It is a very busy place, and i hope this picture depicts it better than i could possibly verbalise it.

Hope you like what you see, as today i finally got through testing all the prizes, YAY! and the Boss even uploaded them to the Sony Home sandbox, yeah! Saves me doing ti, and to be honest i have been inundated with just making all the prizes work.

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Big Bang from The Midway

Here is a picture from the Personal space we have created. And it contains a picture of the Big Bang cannon.

Woot! is it large. I would even take bets that it is large enough a cannon to be able to get into.....

As you can see from this picture and the last one i put up, we have a very colorful space. The lighting is mood setting and the scene is lively. I cannot show you how lively from pictures though. I have no way to capture video of the game either to put that up.. That is disappointing. The scene has lots going for it, but it is busy and exciting and i love that. Especially after all the boring places in PS3Home... Yeah, plenty of those :O

Well i am not gonna play this minigame right now, as i have to get it's prizes sorted out first. And i have lots to go, so far i have completed 80 levels of prizes.... yyeeeouch!

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PS3 Home Public Space and More

The Boss tonight gave me permission to Blog about the work we have been doing the last several months.

I will write more later, but suffice to say i am very excited about our product, and the push we hope to give PS3 Home. Below is a picture i grabbed from my dev machine with my female avatar wearing some of the Prizes i have been working on getting setup. I know the lighting is not great, but more to come as i try to blog about this over the next several weeks.
Oh... It's called 'The Midway'