The Midway to go Live

Here we are at just two days left till The Midway goes live in the PS3 Home area. It has been a much longer road than anticipated to get it finally out, but thursday will be the time to celebrate. It is hard to conatin myself as i went to visit Home today and saw for the first time the advertisements in the Plaza area.

In the plaza we have a massive poster on the front windows of the Mall. We also have a large poster on the side of the Mall. These are great advertisements and i sure hope they generate some interest. The Tele-porta-potty I wrote is going to be taking the place of the Yoda fountain. so watch out for that, as i sure hope it works :S  Not like i could really test it you see. Fingers crossed from me on that one.

In the Plaza and also inside the Mall we have somethibg else we have worked on very recently. That is the ToyStory3 home space. There ais a lot of advertising for that around in poster form. We are very excited about this space and think it could be the best personal space within home currently.

Ok, back to work for me, i need to get Darlas Den sorted out for when we start releasing The Midway2 area ;)

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