M2H

2014-02-13T12:05:00.002+01:00

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The server side of game development

2012-01-31T18:37:00.000+01:00

Are you running your own websites/multiplayer games? You'll know that hosting and scaling of your games can be quite a puzzle.Making the wrong choices when starting development can lead to server capacity problems quickly. As we have tried nearly all possible hosting options it was about time to share our experiences.

Improvisation...

Our first "professional" server. First it ran on 5 rolls of toilet paper in the attic and was later moved to a real data center

I started developing games in 2005. Back then I ran a few simple websites and browser based games (most notably Syrnia and SlaveHack). I ran these games on a ordinary desktop PC which was located in the attic of the house. Later on this "server" was replaced by a real server..but still located in the attic. As you can see in the pictures above I used toilet paper to reduce the noise that the servers resonance made. Furthermore I put a smoke detector on top of it just to be sure..
I had to start somewhere.

Obviously this wasn't going to scale well... the internet connection from home was quite good (10Mbit or so) but a few short circuits in the house, a server crash during my holidays and the possibility of fire were really getting on my nerves. That's when I got the possibility to co-locate the server in a rack in Amsterdam.

Co-location
The co-location was a great improvement. Remote management was quite scary but actually worked great, especially thanks to remote-reboot options and the occasional on-site assistance in case the server wouldn't come back online.

Renting dedicated servers
The next step was the realisation that owning (and managing) my own hardware was just silly. My core business is games, not server management. I decided to move to Leaseweb to rent two dedicated servers there. Finally I wouldn't have to worry about replacing malfunction hardware on-site. Whenever problems did arise all I'd have to do was mail and wait. That's far better then having all responsibility at my own end.

Cloud hosting and Amazons Content delivery Network (CDN)
The last chapter of our server adventure has been quite a ride. First of all, we moved our dedicated machines to Leasewebs express cloud hosting (VPS). The main reason for this move is that I didn't want to keep re-installing our servers every year; I moved server every year to keep up with price and hardware changes. With the cloud hosting solution the specs will automatically be upgraded. Moving the virtual server to a new (better and/or cheaper) physical machine is easy as the whole installation can simply be copied.

Wooglie started to to grow exponentially during 2011. At times all our websites were offline due to the traffic demands of Wooglie. We had already upgraded our main server a few times, so that's when we started looking at hosting solutions for our game files. We assumed Amazons Cloudfront was a logical start: it would scale endlessly and was really, really, easy to setup. However, our hosting bill went up from 200 to about 1500 Euros a month: We now served 3 times more traffic because we could now cope with the new demands, but besides that, traffic was also about two times as expensive. Cloudfront charges different prices per region, i.e. South America costs twice as much as the (cheapest) USA region: 0.25$ per GB instead of 0.12$. We did not need the different regions Cloudfront supports so we moved Wooglies file hosting to Amazon S3 and served this from USA-only instead of all the varying locations. This saved us 50% on the bill because of USA's lower bandwidth costs.

The high S3 bill was really taking a big bite of Wooglies advertisement revenue. I have over 20+ domains and my main servers at Leaseweb and really like having all serves/domains etc. registered at one party. When I asked Leaseweb whether they had any plans for a CDN their support advised a single dedicated "volume" server based in the USA. This cut our costs from $1200+ to less then $150 per month for Wooglie's file hosting. Fun fact: Even with the prices being about 8 times lower, this cheaper option offers 10 times more bandwidth included in the price (100TB/month). Lesson learned? Don't make the mistake to use a CDN's luxury when you don't really need it.

Hosting solutions for (Unity based) (multiplayer) games

To sum up all lessons that we've learned I'll illustrate a possible server setup for a multiplayer game. I'll take Cubelands server setup as an example as it's not different from say a multiplayer FPS game or even a simple MMORPG:

Website
Hosting the game downloads (standalone and/or webplayer)
Game database (players, friendlist etc.)
Game server (Multiplayer servers, e.g. Photon)

Cubelands had 300,000 registered players just before it was sold. Let's design this example for about 1000(+) concurrent users (CCU). If I had to setup a game like Cubelands anew this would be my target configuration for a first launch:

Website
One good VPS server. (4gb mem, 2Ghz 4 cores)
+- 50 Euros/month
Game database
It is easy enough to run the games database on the same (powerful) VPS/cloud server that your website runs on. This can later be moved to a dedicated database server when required.
0 Euros/month
Hosting game downloads:
A dedicated traffic/volume server is most cost effective as its definitely over 10x cheaper than a CDN solutions. If you are concerned about scaling and have money to burn you can move to one of the cheaper Amazon S3 regions for a fixed bandwidth fee. If you have even more money left or file download speed is really important, Cloudfront is an amazing but expensive option.
For this example I'd use: 100TB USA based server OR an unmetered 100Mbps server
+- 150 Euros/month
Game servers (Multiplayer servers, e.g. Photon)
What really attracts me as Indie developer is ExitGames new Cloud hosting service. This completely eliminates the need for managing servers and scales extremely well. It's even cheaper than self hosting because you pay exactly for what you use.
Watch out: Amazons cloud servers(S2) are great for HTTP traffic but have a high latency for UDP traffic. This makes it a bad candidate for hosting game servers such as Photon.
Photon cloud server 1000 CCU: +- 128 Euros/month.

Overall this setup costs about 328 euros per month, for this price you can quite easily run 1000 concurrent users.

Summary of our findings:

Hosting your own server in your attic
- Fire, crashes, bad internet connection and you need to move the server when you run out of toilet paper.
Co-location
- Managing hardware isn't our business.
Amazon cloudfront
+ Amazingly easy to configure & super speedy. No worries about scaling/downtime.
- Quite expensive (especially regions like South America)
Amazon S3:
+ Easy to configure, no worries about scaling/downtime.
- Cheaper than Cloudfront, still a tad expensive (Cheapest region: 0.12$/Gb)
Dedicated servers
+ Great for file hosting because of the cheap bandwidth options
- I don't like re-installing for every hardware upgrade.
VPS servers
+ Can easily upgrade when hardware/prices change offers a level of scaling this way.
- Too bad there is a limit in scaling..but we're just spoiled with new services like Cloudfront
Photon Cloud (game servers)
+ Cost effective, scaling, no worries about servers.
+/- Server side scripting is not (yet?) possible on the cloud

Where to get your servers?
If you are about to setup your first MMORPG and want advice on a server provider I highly recommend Leaseweb. I have all our servers/domains there because of their prices and great support. They offer everything I need: from simple webhosting and domain registration to game servers and download servers. Even when our servers run great I check their website every few months or so out of curiosity regarding new products and pricing, as excited as a girl in a new shoe store!

Wooglie newsletter

2011-12-10T18:39:00.001+01:00

Hereby a repost of the Wooglie newsletter that we have just end to all registered developers.10 December 2011.

Welcome to the first Wooglie newsletter

A lot has been happening the last few months, hereby a recap. If you do not appreciate this newsletter you can easily unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of this email.

1. Top earnings

Within a few days we'll pass 30 million gameplays, we have over 1000 registered developers and are still growing rapidly!
Best of all: developer income keeps increasing, quite a few games have earned over 1000 - 2000 euros. The best performing games are racing and shooter games (On a side note, the next payments will be send in the next three days).

2. GEE contest

Participate in the first Wooglie development contest ever and make a chance to earn 4000$ in prizes.
A requirement for this contest is that your game needs to include multiplayer, any multiplayer package is allowed (Photon, Unity networking etc.).
More information: http://www.wooglie.com/games/GEE

3. New layout

In September we have launched the new Wooglie layout, this new layout supports Wooglie as the high quality Unity game portal.
Other improvements include: rating and review system, SEO, tags, plugin installer page and more.
Take a look

4. Developer API

Publishing to Wooglie is now only 1 click away thanks to the Wooglie developer API. This API can be downloaded for free from the Unity asset store.
After downloading you can add/edit your games texts and images. After completing this meta data, press the PUBLISH button for automatic building and uploading. The API adds some security to your game so that other game portals cannot link your game without permission.
The Wooglie API will be expanded with highscore/achievements, user information, language selection and more.

Download the Wooglie API

5. Cool games

Hereby some cool hand picked games that performed very well, have a lot of potential or are worth mentioning otherwise.

Thank you for using Wooglie, feel free to contact us if you have any questions, we'd love to help publish your game.
Our goal for the next months is to keep expanding the website and the API to add more features for both developers and players. Any tips/feedback? Please share!

Matt and Mike Hergaarden

M2HPatcher: patches Unity games

2011-11-17T12:16:00.001+01:00

M2HPatcher

Our Unity patch solution has launched on the Unity asset store. It supports Mac and Windows and allows Unity developers to launch updates of their games in a single mouse click. Just sit back and wait for the automated building, zipping, patch creation and uploading of the game files!

This idea of this tool was born when working on Cubelands and Verdun online. I found that development speed and motivation is much higher when updates to games can be launched regularly, instead of working on big milestones. The difference here is that the focus on smaller launches helps building a stable foundation as it can be regularly tested and improved. A side effect is that it makes development much more fun; no more waiting for months until your features are finally live. Of course you can launch updates to a game every day without M2HPatcher, but if it's not just a matter of pressing one button, in practice you'll not release updates as often. Oh, and we shouldn't forget the bandwidth this saves!

Features

The creation tool is fully integrated in the Unity editor (Mac and Win)
Supports any Mac and Windows standalone games (plus additional files)
Full source code included for both the editor scripts and the patch client
Updates can be enforced&started from inside your game
Fully automated: just click “Publish” to distribute the latest version to your users:

increases the build version number
builds a full [Windows, Mac, Webplayer] version of your product
creates patches with earlier standalone builds
zips the full builds and patch files
upload the full builds and patch files
publish the latest version number online

Links

Download it from the Unity asset store
Documentation

Demo video

Unite11 & Wooglie relaunch!

2011-09-23T21:03:00.000+02:00

We're looking forward to Unite 2011, in San Fransisco. Matt and I will be flying as of tomorrow morning. Catching our breath in the first two days; we must admit, it has been quit a busy week. We have been working non stop in order to re launch our website Wooglie, the game portal for Unity game developers.

Unite 11 is an event for developers, publishers, enthusiasts and others interested in Unity to come together to learn more about the market-leading platform for creating high quality video games, training simulations, medical and architectural visualizations and other 3D interactive content – and how to get the most out of it. Unite 11 will offer three days of learning including advanced hands-on class tutorials, technical sessions and an opportunity to attend awesome parties. source: http://unity3d.com/unite/

After, a successful and informative Unite 2011 - where we would like to meet new and known faces - we'll tweak and finish Wooglie completely. Further features will be added to the website (e.g. rating, favorite, reviews/comments, additional documentations and re designing developers pages). We are quit pleased with the overall transformation of the Wooglie's website, and hope you are too! Please, if you have any feedback or suggestion feel free to email us at .

Additionally we welcome any new or current developer to submit (and/or update) their Unity game to Wooglie. To do so, please use the newly branded Wooglie API, now listed in the Unity assest store as of last Tuesday. A free download, which will become essential for all developers to submit their game and unlock new features. Built in is anti-piracy security for your Wooglie games, so that no other sites can copy the game. Furthermore the plugin allows for one click publishing/updating of your Wooglie game. Besides saving developers a lot of time, this also ensures streamlined builds (we now know if you are using streamed loading, what Unity version is used, etc.). The end goal is to facilitate both end-users and developers. In the near future the API will also allow developers to easily integrate leaderboards and achievements.

The Wooglie API is available on the asset store for free

We are looking forward to meet you at Unite 2011! Keep an eye out on Wooglie for the next two weeks for any further updates. Or follow us via twitter - @WooglieGames and/or @M2HGames.

Check out more Wooglie games

Wooglie.com: Big changes this month!

2011-09-04T01:03:00.002+02:00

The success of some games has crippled Wooglie.com a bit the last week, however yesterday we've permanently addressed these issues. These performance improvements are the first of the upcoming exciting changes to Wooglie.

To address the performance issues we have moved Wooglies game hosting to Amazons CDN: CloudFront. This will greatly improve Wooglies speed&stability and should allow Wooglie to easily scale automatically in the future. A few very successful games have made the site cripple, especially the following three are to blame: Hard Rock Racing (Decane), Red Crucible (RocketeerGames) and Soccer FK (Vanderamaral). Good job guys :)!

Furthermore we are relaunching Wooglie this month, this'll entail a new layout and exciting new features for both developers and players. Furthermore Google has contacted us to help increase the sites ad revenue; this will increase the revenue share for all Unity developers that are using Wooglie!

We are very excited about Wooglie's "relaunch", we are looking forward to support all Unity developers and remain the #1 Unity game portal!

Brand new Photon Unity API

2011-08-25T13:19:00.003+02:00

This is a revolutionary change in networking! As you'll most likely know, I am a big fan of Unity's built in networking solution. It's easy to use and still quite powerful. However...Unity networking has it's downsides: connectivity is a pain and Unity does not have a high priority on Networking bugfixes/improvements. Furthermore, dedicated servers are near to impossible (Unity really isn't supposed to run on servers).

This brand new plugin finally solves that by making use of the power that Photon already had, but now making is far more accessible!

This idea born out of two issues; Firstly I was aware I couldn't keep using Unity networking for, bigger, future projects. Secondly I hate complicated plugins/API's (Hear that "Ez"GUI?). The second item was an issue since there were no easy to use networking APIs available. To be honest, I even "feared" Photon back then! However, after being in touch with ExitGames for a while, we decided to cooperate and address this issue once and for all. I'm very pleased with the end result, it does exactly what we intended: Unleashing the power of Photon to everyone; Experts and newbies...so this includes myself!

What's in it for you?

Do you need multiplayer in your game? You'll really want to check out this new plugin. If you'd ask me, the choice is now solely between Unity networking OR Photon. I am not even considering competitors at the moment: Photons performance, price and usability are very competitive now. With the choice being between Photon or Unity networking, it simply comes down to the following:

Unity:
+ Free: Players host themselves, this saves you bandwidth/server costs (Client- Server model...NOT P2P):
- Connectivity is a big problem, NAT punchtrough doesn't work well enough
- Performance is a possible issue: you rely on the player who is the server...this player routes ALL messages back and forth all clients.
- Bugfixes/features: Unity does not actively maintain their networking solution.

Photon:
+ Free 100 CCU license (PLENTY for development & Beta)
+ More features (Load balancing, offline mode, better "master server", ...)
+ Ensured performance and 100% connectivity
+ Maintained: Bugfixes & updates
- Costs a license per server

Photon Unity Networking plugin features:

Integrated load balancing!
You can easily scale your game(s) to multiple servers whenever you want.
Much cleaner&easier handing of available rooms on the client side
No more Polling/Getting etc. Roomlists are always automatically up to date, just call PhotonNetwork.GetRooms();
Offline mode: Now easily re-use your multiplayer code for singleplayer modes.
We had to rewrite crashdrive several times to remove ALL multiplayer code for portals such as Shockwave. With the Photon offline mode your project is prepared for situations like these!
Unity networking -> Photon converter
I've made a tool to automatically convert your Unity networking project to Photon. This makes conversion only an hours work instead of days! All your NetworkViews and scripts are automatically converted, you'll only need to clean up a few game specific bits (e.g. removing IP/port references that you no longer need).

Try it for yourself!

Download it on the asset store or discuss it on the Unity forum topic.
I'm very happy with the plugin we came up with, I hope you do too, let me know!

Unity games on Android

2011-07-26T16:10:00.001+02:00

There is still no clear answer to the question whether it is worth to distribute (Unity) games on Android. There are not many known success stories. |It seems that a monopoly like Apple's iOS does have its advantages after all; The Android hardware segmentation is a pain, there are multiple Android stores, etc..

However, it is a fact that there is a steady increase in the amount of Android based devices and the platform is easily accessible. This makes it an interesting platform. We have quite some iOS games ready to port. Therefore we have bought an Android Unity license and Phone(Nexus S) to give it a try.

Let's hope we'll be one of the few to, at least, earn back the investments for Android publishing (About 750 Euros total). Matt will most likely explore porting our games to Android in the next few weeks. If we make any interesting findings you'll be the first to hear ;).

Essential Unity tooling

2011-07-01T17:13:00.000+02:00

When developing games you NEED proper tooling. This post lists my essentials.

Now that my University is over with I've took some time to sit down and think about my future plans. For the first time in my live I'm "officially" a game developer. Not much has changed, but it helps me realize I shouldn't just mess around ;).

Porting games

In spare time we've been busy finishing all the old and minigames that we already had on the shelve. It's a waste not to port games when you're using Unity. At the same time, this is very annoying: You'll be porting projects from 1 or 2 years ago to the new (Unity) supported platforms. In our case (and probably for every one of you!), that means you'll be digging trough ugly code and extend it with hacks upon hacks since "this is just a one time change". We've had a project that was ported from Standalone -> Web -> AppUp -> iOS -> Standalone.

How to support your future self

There are a few issues here. I currently see two main solutions:
1. Organization and development mentality: Never hack, not once. Every "One-time tiny adjustment" will kill you. We should have this covered now as we've recognized the problem...and otherwise we'll keep learning from our mistakes.
2. Proper tooling/technical structure of your game.
You will never have to hack if you take the time to create the right tools just once. Invest some time in gathering your tools and your future self will be thanking you!

The first issue is up to you to solve. No one will be able to explain you why organization is required. I can help you with the second solution. First a sidestep to some general game evelopment requirements of our own:

We want to be able to launch our games on nearly all available platforms

GUI needs to scale
Performance needs to scale
Support different input models.
Webplayer: filesize should be OK

Every publishers so far asked us about localization. This makes it a requirement.
For multiplayer games: If you have a singleplayer option, add an easy option to disable multiplayer completely (portals don't want multiplayer!)
Clean code: save yourself long nights in the future
Build/publish tools save a lot of time and really make development a lot more fun. Plus it's garuanteed to address more bugs

Our current asset store packages

Implemented solutions

The requirements above should hold for any of our future project, even if we have no future plans for the game (yet!). I have various solutions for the listed requirements.

Multiple platforms (GUI/Performance/Input/Filesize)

With Unity, the requirements to multiple platforms are reduced to mainly performance and GUI. For performance there's mainly the Unity profiler. Supporting multiple resolutions and input is up to your game and GUI design. Unity's OnGUI has severe performance problems. For now there's EZGUI to solve that. Hopefully 3.5 will contain the new Unity GUI system, as while EZGUI performance is great, it's usability is poor. For webplayer filesize you need to make use of AssetBundles (and use the cache!). Furthermore when Substance is added to Unity this can save heaps! Therefore ALL materials needs to be substance materials from that point on.

Tools: Once Unity 3.5 lands, Unity only.

Localization

This is one of the fields I had to develop my own solution for. Much effort has gone into polishing the usability: it should be dead easy to implement. The main reason for this is that there should be no reason not to integrate it in a game, even when you don't plan on offering translations at all. Furthermore it is a plus to have all your games texts outside of the code to allow others to improve the texts.

Tools: Localization package

Multiplayer

For Unity networking my package has been around for a while now. However Unity networking does not work well for all games. For any other game I would use Photon. However, Photon isn't as easy as Unity networking. I've been working together with ExitGames to address this once and for all. This Unity API for Photon will make all competitors useless; it'll be either Photon or Unity networking. This Photon API will contain a offline mode so that networking code is usable for singleplayer gameplay as well. This solves our multiplatform requirement.
Tools: Ultimate Unity Networking package, Unity photon API coming soon...

Code tools

Stick to only one code language per project, preferably C#. I have made tools to save hours in converting scripts from JS -> C# or vice versa.

Tools: Visual studio OR Monodevelop. JS->C# converter, C# -> JS converter, Obfuscator

Build/publishing tools
This summer I'll be releasing an all-in solution.

Tools: Will be released this summer..

Conclusion
I have some big stuff going on right now, but I'm also really looking forward to future projects as that'll finally allow for a fresh start: Crashdrive has been our first project and we're still re-releasing it to a new platform every few months. If only we had the above tools and knowledge back then...

Do you have any additional tips to improve game development workflow and/or support multiple platforms?

Crashdrive on the iOS!

2011-06-20T17:16:00.004+02:00

After succesful releases on Shockwave, Netlog, Wooglie and the Mac store we want to release Crashdrive on the iOS. Crashdrive is pretty much ready for an iOS release but we'd like to make use of a publisher for this release. Does any of you know any good publishers? Tips are very welcome! support[A ]M2H.nl.

Landing page: www.Crashdrive.M2H.nl
If you are not yet familiar with Crashdrive, you can play the Wooglie version here: http://www.wooglie.com/playgame.php?gameID=4

Proof!

Bye bye University

2011-06-17T16:19:00.002+02:00

I've finished my Masters Computer Science in Multimedia!

The official graduation will be early September, but all paperwork is filed and all grades are in (and pretty nice too!). After five years of University I can finally focus on M2H full time :)! While this is actually a big step, there is too much going on for me to be amazed.

The first thing to do is to finish all currently running projects. I can't disclose all of these projects yet though, but all of these should be public (soon after) this summer.

Photon
There is some exciting news for all Unity multiplayer developers: Together with ExitGames I'm working on a Unity specific Photon "plugin" which will really make all other network solutions useless. For very simple projects you can use Unity networking and for anything else you'll be using "UnityPhoton". Upgrading from Unity networking will be very easy, so it's fine to continue to use that for now. That's all I can share right now though ;). Related news: Unite might finally have a Multiplayer session this year as I've applied as speaker on this subject. Whether Unity accepts the session or not, both of us will be going to Unite for sure.

Other projects
Verdun Online is coming along nicely now.
Thanks to external help Syrnia is receiving well required updates & fixes.
Updates to Slavehack seem to be progressing well.
...there will be more news during and after summer ;).

Unity as a presentation tool (Die powerpoint!)

2011-04-20T18:18:00.000+02:00

Good bye to boring powerpoints!

Last monday I gave a presentation at the Universiteit Twente for the +/-25 bachelor students of Creative Technology. Last year I gave a similar presentation, even though it was more focussed on Unity only. This year was also motivational talk; sharing my story about getting into indie game dev etc. and try to convince everyone to create games in Unity. Last year I used powerpoint, Prof. Eliëns asked me why I didn't use Unity instead (he invited me for these presentations). This question "confused" me a bit at first, but this year I gave it a try and I'm pretty happy with the result.

See the presentation here

One of the slides. Standing in the middle will zoom in to a full-screen view, similar to a normal powerpoint slide.

Using Unity as a presentation tool didn't sound too attractive to me at first, since it could be very distracting. Sometimes a more fancy presentation will simply kill it's efficiency. To ensure the application was still a valuable presentation tool it should be easy to control, and text/images should still be clearly visible. This is why I chose for a platform game style, furthermore the billboards smoothly enlarge their contents to full-screen display if you stand in front of them. This works for both video and static images.
I did not add any audio on purpose: There's usually a lousy (or no) audio setup in presentation rooms, plus I didn't want to shout.

I also enjoyed designing the slides: I had my favorite image editing tool set to 1024x768 and just pasted images/text in there. Powerpoint feels more cumbersome once you're used to your image editor.

Game trailers inside the presenation (streamed video).

I believe the presentation was very well received, two students who missed the presentation asked for the links as they were told it was "quite cool". That's why I'm playing with the idea to make this tool my portfolio tool from now on. This could be a great tool on conferences to show my games/projects; I use(d) to browse trough screenshots/videos on the iPad, which is rather dull. Plus, this tool really allows me to show any kind of images/videos/3D/animations easily.

The only downsides of this being that it takes a bit more time to set up..but I've got the basics laid out already plus the end result is way more valuable then an ordinary power point.

One final advantage of Unity as a presentation tool is that you'll never have to watch someone search for the "Start fullscreen presentation" button anymore. It's embarrassing, F5 already!

UnityCollab progress

2011-04-12T15:42:00.002+02:00

It's been a while, but I finally have a breakthrough to report on the front of UnityCollab.

First a recap of the last few weeks and some latest findings:

I've been finishing my second-last course for my Masters, now there's just one more course and the actual master project left; I'll be done at University in a few months.
AssetCloud beta had been announced, at first sight I assumed it was similar to UnityCollab but AssetCloud has no real-time/automatic synchronization, which is what UnityCollab makes stand out.
Unitys Ninja camp had some interesting projects going on: I would love a Unity release full of stuff like this. One of these topics was exactly the same as UntiyCollab, titled "Collaboratorive editing". They're probably cheating though, having the ability to change Unitys inner workings while I have to apply workarounds and bugreports :P. I'm very curious whether this project will be released in some form and when/how. None of the Ninjacamp projects have been released yet and it will probably take a long time for most projects to launch.
I discovered there is already a game tool that supports real time synchronization, namely the Hero engine. Quite cool...but I want collaborative editing in Unity.

UnityCollab specific:

UnityTextScene has been integrated in UnityCollab (thanks ToreTank/Terravision!). I'm using it under the hood to synchronize scenes using their text equivalent. Thanks to this, Synchronizing now works in real time! Ordinary gameobjects etc. have a few minor hiccups. But that's for later, I'm first focusing on one specific usage purpose:

Use case: Collaborative editing in a lab environment

I'm creating a test case scenario where two or more test subjects create a game level together. They will only be using predefined prefabs. The goal of this use case is to be able to research user feedback and interaction. User A could place a few trees with user B giving or taking some "kudos". I still need to define how the users can judge/rate each others work..

Next to the lab use case I'll be working on the theory/research side of the project. After this I can expand and polish UnityCollab further.

The horror of delegates!

2011-04-05T12:42:00.004+02:00

...contrary to what the title implies, delegates are awesome. However the available tutorials all look way too scary for someone who never tried working with delegates. So here's my attempt to a quick and practical tutorial to delegates.

Our notifications system in Verdun Online. Delegate proof!

Delegates: What?
The easy explanation:
A delegate can been seen as a variable that holds a reference to a function, 'calling' this variable will actually call the function that you have specified. The power of this is that you can give as input your desired function dynamically. I.e. you can create one popup function that asks for a yes/no response and use it from several functions with it calling the right response functions.

Use case: Why & How
Delegates can make your code much cleaner and wil even safe you time. A very common use would be in GUI popups/dialogs. Having to check a variable in Update() every time, or yielding until the user responses is quite hacky/sloppy.

Hereby, in reversed order I'll show you how delegates work. Let's go back to the GUI dialog case. We don't want ugly yielding or waiting for a response. So with delegates you could use

ShowYesNoDialog("Do you really want to quit", QuitResponse);

Note that QuitResponse here is our delegate "variable" that we pass. QuitResponse is actually a normal void function, nothing scary here yet! QuitResponse is declared as:

void QuitResponse(bool result){ Debug.Log("Result="+result); }

We are now allowed to pass QuitResponse to the ShowYesNoDialog because it accepts a delegate variable.

public delegate void VoidDelegate(bool result); //Define our custom delegate definition only defined once (!)
public VoidDelegate currentDelegate; //This holds the current delegate - we use our delegate via this var.
void ShowYesNoDialog(string text, VoidDelegate answerDelegate){
   currentTitle = text;
   showDialog = true;
   currentDelegate = answerDelegate;
}

First, we define a delagate. You need to define it's output and what parameters it takes. In this case we want to be able to call a function with a boolean and we don't need it to return anything thus it's void. Note that we only need to define VoidDelegate once, but we can use as many VoidDelegates variables as we want. Now, on to the displaying of a simply "dialog".

void OnGUI(){ if(showDialog){ GUILayout.Label("Title: "+currentTitle); if(GUILayout.Button("Yes")){ CloseDialog(true); } if(GUILayout.Button("No")){ CloseDialog(false); } }}
void CloseDialog(bool result){ showDialog = false; currentDelegate(result);}

You should be comfortable with the OnGUI code. Remember the "currentDelegate" function that we set in the ShowYesNoDialog. We are calling it in CloseDialog with the desired bool. This will result in "QuitResponse" being called with either false or true, as if there would've been a hardcoded QuitResponse(result) instead of currentDelegate(result). Remember that we don't want to hardcode QuitResponse(result) in there since you'll want to pass different response functions for different dialogs.

Where to go from here?
Most times you'll actually want to use a void function with no input, or a boolean. However, you can define any delegates you want, i.e.:

public delegate void VoidDelegate();
public delegate string MyDelegate2(bool result);
public delegate int MyDelegate3(bool result, string bla, int myInt, List<string> myStringList);

To make this tutorial as easy as possible I showed you the manual definition of delegates. However you can skip this part using Actions! Actions are part of .NET and can be used for general functions with one argument, see the Action docs.

FAQ

Do delegates work in Unity JS? Convert to C# already! But yep, it looks like it.

Further reading

Unity: Serialization of project&scene settings

2011-03-11T17:18:00.002+01:00

To make a start in the actual UnityCollab synchronization of the Unity editor I decided to begin with the scene (RenderSettings) and project settings (Time, Physics, PlayerSettings, etc.). Using reflection it's relatively quick&easy to generate a list of all settings. Below is an example of what I was able to generate so far. The beauty of this code is that it supports any updates/changed to the Unity API. It would only need an 1-line update if a new settings class would be added, but that's not very likely. However, the big downside is that Unity still does not expose all available settings.

RenderSettings.fog = True
RenderSettings.fogMode = ExponentialSquared
RenderSettings.fogColor = RGBA(0.500, 0.500, 0.500, 1.000)
RenderSettings.fogDensity = 0.01
RenderSettings.fogStartDistance = 0
RenderSettings.fogEndDistance = 300
RenderSettings.ambientLight = RGBA(0.127, 0.127, 0.127, 1.000)
RenderSettings.haloStrength = 0.5
RenderSettings.flareStrength = 1
RenderSettings.skybox = null
Time.fixedDeltaTime = 0.02
Time.maximumDeltaTime = 0.3333333
Time.timeScale = 1
Time.captureFramerate = 0
Physics.gravity = (0.0, -9.8, 0.0)
Physics.minPenetrationForPenalty = 0.01
Physics.bounceThreshold = 2
Physics.bounceTreshold = 2
Physics.sleepVelocity = 0.15
Physics.sleepAngularVelocity = 0.14
Physics.maxAngularVelocity = 7
Physics.solverIterationCount = 6
Physics.penetrationPenaltyForce = 0
QualitySettings.currentLevel = Good
QualitySettings.pixelLightCount = 2
QualitySettings.shadowCascades = 2
QualitySettings.shadowDistance = 100
QualitySettings.masterTextureLimit = 0
QualitySettings.anisotropicFiltering = Enable
QualitySettings.softVegetation = True
QualitySettings.maxQueuedFrames = -1
Network.incomingPassword =
Network.logLevel = Off
Network.sendRate = 15
Network.isMessageQueueRunning = True
Network.minimumAllocatableViewIDs = 100
Network.useNat = False
Network.natFacilitatorIP = 67.225.180.24:50005
Network.natFacilitatorPort = 50005
Network.connectionTesterIP = 0.0.0.0
Network.connectionTesterPort = 10737
Network.maxConnections = 0
Network.proxyIP = 0.0.0.0
Network.proxyPort = 10746
Network.useProxy = False
Network.proxyPassword =
PlayerSettings.companyName = Leepo
PlayerSettings.productName = MasterProject
PlayerSettings.defaultScreenWidth = 1024
PlayerSettings.defaultScreenHeight = 768
PlayerSettings.defaultWebScreenWidth = 600
PlayerSettings.defaultWebScreenHeight = 450
PlayerSettings.displayResolutionDialog = Enabled
PlayerSettings.defaultIsFullScreen = False
PlayerSettings.useAlphaInDashboard = False
PlayerSettings.runInBackground = False
PlayerSettings.captureSingleScreen = False
PlayerSettings.usePlayerLog = True
PlayerSettings.alwaysDisplayWatermark = False
PlayerSettings.firstStreamedLevelWithResources = 0
PlayerSettings.resolutionDialogBanner = null
PlayerSettings.iPhoneBundleIdentifier = com.Company.ProductName
PlayerSettings.keystorePass =
PlayerSettings.keyaliasPass =
PlayerSettings.bundleIdentifier = com.Company.ProductName
PlayerSettings.bundleVersion = 1.0
PlayerSettings.strippingLevel = Disabled
PlayerSettings.defaultInterfaceOrientation = Portrait
PlayerSettings.apiCompatibilityLevel = NET_2_0_Subset
EditorBuildSettings.scenes = UnityEditor.EditorBuildSettingsScene[]
AudioSettings.speakerMode = Stereo

Project settings:
Time manager
Physics manager
Tags
Layers
QualitySettings (only current settings)
Network Manager
Input Manager
Build Settings
Audio Manager (only speakermode?)
Scene settings:

RenderSettings

So, reflection on the Unity API isn't a complete option: The API does not expose Tags, Layers, QualitySettings levels, InputManager. Why bother synchronizing this stuff when still some vital parts are missing? UnityCollab will be easier and more useful to use when it's clear what it can and can not do.

The most useful settings are the Physics, Time and Render Settings, I'll only implement synchronization of these for now. Someone hinted that Binary deserialization of the asset files could be an option. I have no experience here yet though, any pointers are welcome :).

I'll return to actual scene object synchronization for now..

Running a game full of hackers

2011-03-06T17:28:00.001+01:00

In this blogpost I summarize the history of SlaveHack. Today I signed an agreement with Brian Ewing which means he will take over running SlaveHack. Hereby a look into the past 5 years.

What is SlaveHack?

In SlaveHack every player owns a computer with an IP address assigned to it. Players can manage their own hardware and software. The 'story'/puzzle mode of the game features the riddle trail, where players solve riddles (hidden in server logs and text files) to find the latest and best software versions. For example, you need the version 2.0 "cracker" software to hack the version 1.9 "Firewall". All computers you've hacked are labelled as your Slaves.

Everything features multiplayer: Whenever you connect to a server other players could be checking this servers log to grab your IP address, hack you and wipe your files or enslave you by install viruses on your computer. Money is made by installing spam viruses on PCs or selling warez. None of this requires any technical background and no real hacking (skill) is involved. However, the same thrill can be experienced; Adrenaline pumping to your veins after a successful hack, not knowing if you hid your trials quick, and well, enough.

How it started
Right after I finished my last college tests (June 2006) I made the base of SlaveHack, an unique multiplayer hacking game. It was mostly inspired by Uplink, although very different. The base was set up in under a week and launched publicly, incremental updates would keep expanding the game after this very simple launch. This was my fourth browser based game using PHP+MySQL and later AJAX. The preceding games were Warrior Fields, Robot Revolutions and Syrnia.

I would not have expected the game to boom very quick. I was at the barber getting ready for the college graduation when I was called by my server provider about expansion; the server was overloaded. DIGG featured SlaveHack on the front page! I put restrictions in place to allow only max 1000 players at once to keep the server alive. The game wasn't really ready for this hit. Transferring "-1000" euros from your in-game bank account would add cash, being one of the embarrassing bugs ;). With hundreds of players registering every few minutes I was fixing bugs and improving the game like crazy. There was no time to enjoy/realize the success of this DIGG post and how it even got there. I hope to experience this same chaos again some time though :).

Problems
Due to the nature of the game, certain problems could've been expected. Several times I've received extortion emails demanding cash (in real life and in-game currency), otherwise an "DDoS" attack would be launched. Sometimes this was bluff other times these attacks did commence and took the server down for a bit. Surprisingly, the SlaveHack server has never been hacked! In 2010 SlaveHack has been mentioned in court and therefore in Australian newspapers and was even shown on the national television. Some hacker was busted who claimed to be playing SlaveHack and other online games for 15 hours a day. Luckily this was/is the only case I know of.

My interests have moved to Unity based games the last few years. As I'm trying to build up the M2H game company plus finishing my Masters I could no longer support SlaveHack. Brian already ran SH for me, having him take over completely made much sense. Selling a browser based game like SlaveHack does not even seem to be an option, as I've explored this possibility as well.

Over 175 000 players have registered for Slave Hack and I hope Brian will be able to, say, double that in the future :).

SlaveHack.com

Creating a .msi installer for Unity games (e.g. for Intel AppUp)

2011-03-03T14:58:00.003+01:00

Last week I've struggled with a AppUp submission deadline. It was a frustrating, but rewarding experience. I hope to save you a lot of time by showing you how to create an MSI installer for Unity games, which are required for Intel AppUp submission. Don't be afraid by this posts length, after having submitted an AppUp game once you'll be able to do it within 15 minutes.

Firstly, AppUp specific: You need to connect your game to the AppUp API. Bakno has a plugin available on the Unity asset store. Their API works great, even though I personally didn't like the code they provided, I completely rewrote the (small) Unity part (Go C# and use a static class plx :)). Furthermore their bundled instructions to create an MSI using WinInstall were outdated: WinInstall (and other MSI creating tools) do not pass the AppUp validation. So, the only useful part of the Bakno plugin is that it's saving you the time to create some AppUp API hooks to use in Unity (even though this might be very easy to do yourself).

Step 1: Build the game
Create a build in Unity. If you use the Unity player log option make sure that you run your game once so that the output_log.txt is in the Data folder. If you're using this logfile you better include it in the installer so that it knows it should also delete this file when uninstalling. The same counts for any other files your game might create, but per default it's just "GAMENAME_Data/output_log.txt".

Step2: Open Visual Studio
I'm using visual studio 2008, but 2010 should work just as well.

Intel has an AppUp specific guide to create the MSI: Video, Text. I'll guide you trough all steps and note the Unity specific needs below. Note that the text guide shows you how to create an MSI for an existing VS project, however for our built Unity game it's even easier; simply drag&drop your files to the "Application folder" (the fourth step here). So we'll have to stick to the video and this blogpost only.

2.1 Choose "File -> New -> Project"
2.2 In the new project window: "Other project types -> Setup project". Enter a name, e.g. "Crashdrive3D" and press "OK"

2.3 In the solution explorer, right mouse click on your project and select properties. You'll need to change the Author and Publisher name to your own company name.
2.4 Drag&Drop your Unity build folder to the Application folder, which is in the File System tab.

2.5 AppUp requires at least one shortcut: Add one to the "User's Desktop" and one to the "User's Program Menu".

Via the property panel you should specify the target of the shortcut, this needs to point to your main .exe (Crashdrive3D.exe)
Also create an .ico file of your application and drag&drop it to the application folder. I placed it in the Crashdrive3D_Data folder. You can convert images to .ico online here. Then, for both shortcuts specify the ico file via the propery window again.

2.6 One more AppUp specific requirement: They prefer/require a clean install (double click the MSI and the game installs without any prompt). To do so you can remove all GUI for the user installation

Now, normally you would now be ready to build the installer. However, Unity has some exceptions. Firstly I'd switch the target from the default Debug mode to Release mode. The Unity related problem is that VS adds dependencies automatically. If you try to build right now it'll refuse to do so because mscorlib.tlb has been added:

Error 1 'mscorlib.tlb' should be excluded because its source file 'C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mscorlib.tlb' is under Windows System File Protection. C:\Users\Leepo\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\Setup1\Setup1\Setup1.vdproj Setup1

The solution is to simply EXCLUDE this file from the build (right mouse button -> Exclude). Building will now work. However do note that VS also added a lot of double files, From Assembly-CSharp-firstpass.DLL to System.DLL, all double files seem to be marked with uppercase DLL. These files will generate warnings in the build console, and when verifying the .MSI with ORCA you'll see similar warnings. Furthermore it could be very nasty if VS decided to add different versions of these .NET files, luckily that doesn't seem to be the case. Anyway, I suggest you to exclude all files under detected dependencies and delete the System.DLL (since we already have System.dll)

You should now have a clean .MSI. To verify MSI files you can use the free tool ORCA, I believe I downloaded ORCA here. The .MSI you made for AppUp will have some errors in ORCA because the user GUI has been removed though, but our installer(s) have been accepted, e.g. "Stacking Island".
If you want an MSI for other purposes than AppUp, simply customize the shortcuts and installer to your liking!

A proper .msi and shortcut really make the games look more professional on my desktop, haha!

Random ramblings: Unity Newsletter, Mac Store, AppUp

2011-03-02T14:44:00.001+01:00

I was very honored and surprised to discover my UnityCollab master project has been mentioned in the official Unity newsletter! If you got here for UnityCollab, here's the post that was mentioned.

In some spare time we've been adding some of our games to AppUp and the Mac store. Hereby our experiences.

Feature meh!

Mac store
First of all, submitting games is remarkably easy. Seons (Sector3) validation plugin also saved lots of time. But we'll see how the Mac Store sales/marketing side is. Once again, simply getting featured there is a BIG plus.

Bomb factory has launched on the Mac store. We had to wait 14 days to receive a "random rejection" stating the game file was corrupted. Surprisingly, the resubmittion was accepted within 24 hours! Sadly, bomb factory was not highlighted and can only be found when searching, or when specifically looking at the Games -> Puzzle category. I doubt it fits that category though.

Crashdrive 3D[first promo page!] has been submitted to the Mac store and should launch 8 - 14 march somewhere(?). An iOS version will be submitted shortly as well. I do sure hope at least Mac version will be highlighted in the Mac store..

AppUp
It was because of AppUp's sponsorship of the GGJ that I discovered about this new app store. It's still fairly new and there's not a lot of sales. But after having finally figured out how to submit Stacking Island to the store, submitting Bomb Factory and Crashdrive was very easy.
Stacking Island is live and I just noticed it had it's first sale. I don't expect anything from AppUp but we'll see how AppUp moves.

About UnityCollab
I need to do some theory work now. While the practical side is very exciting, the theory/paper is very important for the University.

UnityCollab: Multiplayer Unity editor

2011-02-16T17:56:00.003+01:00

Whew! As I have set myself some deadlines for the master thesis I had to catch up on Mondays deadline. The target was to get basic photon connections working inside the Unity editor. I've achieved that and more.

Photon has been fully integrated in the Unity editor, developers that are working on the same project and exactly the same scene share a multiplayer 'room': They can see each other and chat. When the editor switches to play mode UnityCollab is switched off, it'll continue running when you return to edit mode. You are also free to turn off synchronization. As I was very curious where I could take this I quickly hardcoded synchronization for one object; it's position, scale and rotation are synched in real time!

The UnityCollab window (bottom right) allows chatting with those who are working on the same scene

Hereby a short recording of me moving, scaling and rotating a scene character on windows. This is synchronized with a Mac editor running the same scene. Both run edit mode.

Now that the photon implementation has been covered I need to look into Serialization in Unity. If anyone has any tips; do share! There was an interesting Serialization talk at Unite 2010, but I believe the video never made it online, ugh.

See http://m2h.nl/unity/cgd.php for more info about this project.

PS: thanks to Tobias (ExitGames) for hints&pointers about photon :).

Casual connect 2011 @ Hamburg

2011-02-12T15:26:00.002+01:00

I've finally recovered from the casual connect Hamburg. Next to Unite (last November) this was my second big game conference. Who knew the game industry conferences are all about listening to lectures while recovering from your hangover? Hereby a recap of the best points for those who are considering visiting the CC next year.

While there was only little time for tourism, I've had a look around Hamburg.

Party
First, the important stuff. At both Unite and CC there are party's every night except the last day of the conference. There is an "open bar": All kinds of drinks you'd possibly want are totally free. Thanks to this I only had to spend a few euros in Hamburg, just transportation and dinner.

Angry birds

Lectures
The lectures in general were 'ok'. I'm not into the social gaming stuff too much and while I enjoyed lectures such as AngryBirds' they are not fully applicable to me: I do not yet care about setting up merchandising for my games, I need to achieve the same success first. However do not misunderstand me: The lectures were good and even at the boring lectures you filter out things yourself and new ideas begin to shape in your mind. The keynote session by Bigpoint was actually most inspiring to me as it recapped the game industry for 2010 and used that to make predictions for 2011. It was an eye opener to get back to the broad picture of gaming and not just the platforms/areas I focus on.

The four most important notes I made at the lectures

gameforge talk: after BINC?(BrazilIndiaChina...?) there's now CEVAC(?? Egypt and some others) - I was too hangover here plus there were too many numbers
bigpoint keynote: gaming 2.0: freetoplay
bigpoint keynote: gaming 3.0: cloud,mobile, play whenever you want, multi platform
angrybirds: created around characters

Networking
This is the most important part of the whole conference: Networking from beginning till the end. Start preparing early and also keep in touch after the conference. I met some great people, some of which I'd like to do business with right away, other I'd like to do business with in the future. It's so much fun and inspiring to meet all the people in real life, plus it's already starting to pay off for me.

Other
I left Hamburg the last day of the conference since I learned at Unite that it's common to leave right after the conference. It's no use to reserve some days for meeting afterwards unless you set them up beforehand.

Now with this experience behind me, I'm back to work on all the stuff I've got running. Several mac store launches, Crashdrive iOS launch, Cubelands needs some work, Wooglie needs to get a big update, Verdun beta needs to launch and there's also still Syrnia, Stacking Island and Slavehack.
Enough to do! I'm seriously looking into hiring staff/freelancers/internships.

Master Thesis: Collaborative game development

2011-02-04T16:26:00.002+01:00

Simply put, my master thesis is about bringing google docs-alike synchronization to the Unity editor. The goal is to allow multiple people to edit the same Unity scene at the same time. I'm working on this thesis from Jan - June 2011. I do not expectto realize a perfect synchronization, but it would already be awesome to have the tool synchronize transforms(position,rotation,scale) and predefined prefabs.

Ideally artists would add objects to a scene, coders add scripts to them, and together they make the world come alive real-time. Multiple level editors will be able to work on your game scene real-time, conflicts and synchronization is handled automatically. This could greatly change game development, or at least level editing.

Since this is quite a big project, I have divided into several sub-goals. It would be great if I can at least achieve the first few sub-goals. The outcome of the project does not affect my master thesis itself as the thesis is more concerned about research/theory. A failed project would make great food for research! (I am very optimistic about achieving something cool though)

For detailed information see my master thesis page: http://m2h.nl/unity/cgd.php

Current status
I'm exploring how to add a multiplayer library inside the editor. Because of this Unity networking is a no go and I've decided to check out Photon. While I'm sure Photon is great, it's not that easy to get in to. I might make a Photon tutorial similar to my Ultimate Unity networking project. Photon really needs a simple foundation for Unity, it's too sourcecode-y to my taste. During the process of exploring photon I'm already making notes to make a Photon tutorial + "EasyUnityAPI" possible.

Now, I need to run an application inside the UnityEditor. There are various options to extend the Editor, but only a few are usefull in this case.

EditorWindow - is only run when GUI changes are done (mouseover etc.)
OnSceneGUI, ExecuteInEditMode(), .. - only works for custom inspectors

So, my final solution (and last option) is using a combination of:

EditorApplication.playmodeStateChanged
EditorApplication.update

I have an EditorWindow that is used to start running the UnityCollab class, it sets delegates to this class for update and playModeStateChanged. This works perfectly, except that there's one unity bug(?) here: the playModeStateChanged delegate is only called the first time when starting the game, but not on any later changes. I have even tried re-registering the delegate after that first delegate call, but I found no workaround. Let's hope Unity fixes this soon. Otherwise people will need to manually restart the UnityCollab tool after every play session, ugh.

M2H Blog

2011-02-04T16:01:00.000+01:00

I need a first post here to be able to link this blog to Facwbook, Twitter etc. So here it is.

Why this blog?
I'm in the last year of my Multimedia master, my master thesis is about a Unity application, codename UnityCollab for now. Various people asked me whether I would blog about my master thesis. Furthermore a blog could be usefull for M2H news/developments in general. Back in 2009 we decided to stick to twitter only for a while as an empty news section on the site is quite lame. However, we've got quite a lot going on nowadays; enough for a blogpost now and then ;).

M2H

Blog moved! Go to M2H.nl/blog