Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Midway for PS3 Home (release report pt 3)

It’s a blur… (12:30pm ?)


This is where my memory gets a bit fuzzy. What quite came first.. where did all the hours go etc. I know I spent a few more hours in The Midway itself. Talking to people and playing the games. We didn’t believe the phantom ticket was our fault. Therefore it was very unlikely we could fix this. So we were left to look at what else was happening. I started looking at some aspects of The Midway that may need fixing up or improving for the next version or upgrade for this one. Mostly the afternoon went very fast. As I said, playing the games and wandering around chatting to people. I cannot honestly remember much else about Thursday afternoon, it’s all a blur…

july 2nd -Friday (9am)

Friday morning started bright and early and I was looking forward to seeing how The Midway survived the night. So I eagerly headed off for work a bit early and got there at about 8:30am. The place was fairly quiet. Then the boss comes in and starts to tell me about the PS3 forums and what has been going on in them. This was the time we were informed that the forums had mentioned a possible fix for The Midway not working correctly for some people. Someone had figured out that it was due to having the Video settings set to SDTV mode and not widescreen. Whhaaat? How can this be? They also mentioned this fixed Andy’s room and the jumping on the bed minigame in there (Andy’s room for Disney is also one of our recent jobs). Woah, I had to run to my code immediately. A quick search for code specific to the aspect ratio of the game soon turned up an answer. This took me approximately 20 seconds to figure out what was wrong. Needless to say I was not quite as disappointed as I expected, in fact I was rather happy I had the solution to people not being able to play or get rewards.

So armed with this very startling information I headed off to the computer. I happen to know we have very little code pertaining to the SDTV functionality, so I knew I would be looking at a very small selection of code. (handy knowing what we test for). First thing I did was a sanity check and I downloaded The Midway to a PS3 I have set in that mode. I saw the crash of the Scene script immediately. I saw there was no HUD, and I also saw there was no Darlas Den given at the start. Finally I saw that none of the games could be played. This is the exact problem as described by people in The Midway having issues. So it was time to look at the code. I popped up my Codewright and searched through all the Lua code for Widescreen. BAM… I will say that again. BAAAM!! There it is. Yeah it was that easy. Staring me in the face was the widescreen test, and inside the If-then statement were a couple of lines that we should not have there. It was the dreaded test code. In fact you might all be interested to know that the test code was to show the current Prize score while in The Midway itself. So what had happened was the definitions and code for these variables had been commented out. However these two had been left and not noticed.

This was a real downer for a moment, till we all realized that we had at least got the answer and it wasn’t so in depth a code change that we could not get this online asap. So I altered the code and packaged it up. Then I tested it of course. It worked as expected, so now we need to get it uploaded to the Sonys CDS.

ARGH! (9:30am)

Here we are with a quick fix. A simple fix and one that I had the fullest confidence in. Which is unusual for me as I tend to always expect things to break if they can. And here it is, the break is simply that after an hour of trying to upload the scenes package file it crashes. Yeah.. so I am trying all sorts, going out to the internet through a second jack and therefore the T1 line. It did not matter, the CDS was having issues and I could not force them to be better. So after some time I settled on looking at the Bouncing on the bed code from Andy’s room.

Bouncing bed of fun (11:30am)

I went right in on this code and looked up the widescreen variable as before. Lo and behold it quickly sent me to an If-then-else statement. In that statement were two possible routes for the code to travel. In the first half there were a couple of variables for counting the number of stars collected. It had the declaration inside the If statement. In the else part though there was no declaration of the variables, but they were still used, exclusively in widescreen mode. This was the culprit, a nil varable. So after commenting out 4 lines of code the Bouncing on the bed worked fine in SDTV mode. YAY! Two fixes in one day. I passed the fixes over to the guy who was looking after Toystory and he was going to upload the fixed minigame. However CDS was still having issues. So it must have been lunch time. So off we went to lunch, and I cannot even remember where.

In the afternoon we managed to get the version up into the CDS, but could not quite push them through to Sony test. It did seem like Sonys servers etc were being inundated and we hoped it was a successful launch of The Midway that did this. So we filled in all the paperwork and emailed Sony the relevant information. Then I went back to The Midway to spend the Bosses tickets :D such fun haha. I was also helping pass the word about the widescreen mode fixing the SDTV mode issues. This was a good way to work on a Friday afternoon.

I did hope that Sony would get back to me before the day was out, but that did not happen. So I was left to wonder over the July 4th weekend. Or was I ?

G'night

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

The Midway Prize Point System Explained

I realised there is no reference to how the Meta Prize points are doled out per level won. so here is the information for anyone who is interested.

EARNING POINTS

You earn points for winning levels in the 10 carnival games in The Midway. The number of points you win equals the level number times 4. Level 10 gets you an additional 30 point bonus. You use these points to win Meta Prizes that are shown on a board in Darla's Den.

Win Level 1 = 4 points
Level 2 = 8 points
Level 3 = 12 points
Level 4 = 16 points
Level 5 = 20 points
Level 6 = 24 points
Level 7 = 28 points
Level 8 = 32 points
Level 9 = 36 points
Level 10 = 70 points (40+30)
TOTAL POINTS = 250 per game, 2,500 for all 10 games

(NOTE: Points are not awarded for Trigger Happy In-A-Box or Big Bang that are found in Darla's Den)
 
META PRIZES


You win the first meta prize for 250 points, second meta-prize for 350 points, third for 500 points and so on. That way, you can get the points by playing a few games well instead of having to master them all.

Meta Prize win levels:
1. 250 (Clown Shoes)
2. 350 (Clock in Darla's Den)
3. 500 (Clown Gloves)
4. 650 (Access to the Hot Tub in Darla's Den)
5. 800 (Clown Pants)
6. 1000 (Access to the Disco Darla area in Darla's Den)
7. 1250 (Clown Shirt)
8. 1500 (Unlock Big Bang, play for free, win 5 levels for 5 prizes)
9. 2000 (Clown Wig and Nose)
10. 2500 (You win a Gold Leather Jacket and Darla comes to dance in the Disco Darla area. This is the maximum number of points you can win in The Midway. )

Yes that DOES in fact leave those 5000 and 7500 points prizes as unattainable. That is because they are for the planned future expansion of the Midway (hopefull in a couple of months depending).

BAR KEY
You need to buy the Bar Key to open up the area that contains Trigger Happy In-A-Box and Bell Ringer. Both can then be played for free by any visitor in the space, including the owner. You can win 5 prizes with TH In-A-Box, or win all 10 prizes in Bell Ringer.

KCPM-J9BP-J8H6
Hope ya found that info useful.
 
Laters.

My Kickstarter project is GO!

Here is the link, go check it out and then come back.
A Quality Shooter

Woah eh!
Well there it is, i have spent way too much of my time over the last 2 months getting that setup (yeah 2 months to write that and do the video). ok, so i have been busy with The Midway and actual coding and other work. What matters is that it is now there. I sure hope some of you people that read my blog will want a piece of the action. Then you really will be part of my family.

I know you all expected more about The Midway (report pt 3), but i have to admit to it not quite being ready for public viewing. You see i have had a headache all and day and i do not write very well, in fact i can hardly face my PC when i feel like that. It is half written, and so i expect it to come out tomorrow along with prossibly part 4, the final part of the report. we shall see how busy a day i have i suspect.

So back to the Kickstarter project. This is very exciting to me and i sure hope to see a lot of interest. I have tried hard to provide what are original and exciting rewards. Of course a lot of those rewards are going to cost me a lot of time in development. That i am ok with of course. It is just hard for me to want to spend all my money on a project while i am also spending all my time. I am hopeful this will see the light of day and i can know the kinds of improvements that i can get done. Being a one man army can have it's down sides. But knowing other talented people is definitely a plus!

Please tell anyone you can about my project. The more it spreads the more chance i will have of succeeding and making a better shooter than i expected to make.

If you have CC membership, go check out the comments that were made on the game when it was in Playtest many moons ago. There you will it as it was, and it has already come a lot further along than that.

Ok, i will write more when my head can stand it.

G'night

Sunday, July 4, 2010

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...

Saturday, July 3, 2010

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

Friday, July 2, 2010

15th Wedding Anniversary

I know a lot of married people get to their 15th wedding anniversaries. Mine and my wifes was today July the 1st. It made me feel very wonderful in so many ways, yet it is just a number, and not even a really nice number at that. Why is 16 not a better number to be married, it is a power of 2 :)

I have had 15 amazing years with my wife and of course i now have 2 kids as we well. It is amazing to me the time can fly by this fast, but it does. I wish everyone all the best in their emotional connections for now and the far flung future.

I love Eliza, my beautiful and wonderful wifey.

G'night