Rom's Rants

AngelHack 2013 Wrapup

2013-05-20T10:01:00.001-05:00

This last weekend, I participated in AngelHack 2013.

I wasn't sure what to expect from AngelHack going into it. I'd found out about it on Thursday, and after much hemming, hawing, and gnashing of teeth, I decided to go for it.

I'm used to a GiveCamp-style model, where you've got your project well-defined in advance, but for this one I was able to decide for myself what I'd do within their restriction: your code must be completed within 24 hours.

I decided I'd use the opportunity to learn some "new-to-me" technology, specifically WebRTC's peer-to-peer data capabilities. However, I quickly found out that adoption isn't what I'd hoped. Yes, it's in Chrome and works, and the Firefox nightly builds, but IE10 requires a plugin that won't talk with Chrome or Firefox, and mobile support is truly lacking.

So I shifted my focus to a partial WebRTC polyfill. I wanted it so that if either the browser did not support WebRTC or could not tunnel to the "host" machine for the p2p session, then the systems would fallback to a lightweight server interface.

I managed to get something working in about four hours, and built a simple multiplayer game to demonstrate the technology. I'm not going to link to my demo as I hadn't put any security in place and I know of at least a dozen major security holes in my hack, but I'm happy. The characters were generated using the Charas character generator. I built a simple Perlin noise level generator to allow the world to be passed around using only four bytes, and I drew the tileset and even had support for animated terrain (water and lava flowed).

We had up to seven people running in the same game world, with the world being hosted on a Kindle Fire HD 8.9", and players on Windows Phone 8, IE10, Chromium on Linux, Firefox, and more. For some reason, it wouldn't work on the Fire HD 7" or Nexus 7 that we had nearby, but that happens when you only have twelve hours of development time. The judges weren't the target market for the polyfill, but the other developers who were there were really impressed and at least three were interested in using the polyfill once complete.

So what next? Well, the polyfill is going to require a lot more work to be released to anyone, and seems like a good evening project, and actually finishing a small game and demonstrating it reinvigorated me, so back to "SiN Episode 0."

HOWTO: Get a random sampling of lines from a text file in bash

2013-04-18T17:17:00.003-05:00

Let's say you needed to get 150 lines at random from a text file and you were running Linux.

The solution involves a command I wasn't aware of until today...shuf.

The command:

shuf file-to-sample.txt | head -n 150

shuf scrambles all the lines in the file; head pulls the set number of lines for you.

Resolution Update

2013-04-08T09:34:00.002-05:00

Yes, I know there have been no updates for the last few weeks. I've had some upheaval in my personal life that has prevented me from working on the #1 problem with my project...

It isn't fun to play.

It's functioning, but there's something missing.

Once I have time to work on it again (probably six to eight weeks), I'll start updating more, but in the meantime, I'm just trying to figure out where I twisted when I should have turned.

Equipment Failure

2013-03-13T09:55:00.001-05:00

Woke up this morning to the click of death on my game development drive.

Good news is I have everything backed up, and I've already ordered a replacement hard drive, so I should be back in business on Sunday.

SiN 1 in SiN: Episodes Reposted

2013-03-09T13:14:00.002-06:00

My web host was hacked a couple of years ago, and when I moved web hosts, I didn't put back up every single file that I had before.

Today, I got an email asking about SiN 1 in SiN Episodes.

Fortunately, I still had a backup of that file, and it has been restored.

Resolution #7: Approaching First Playable

2013-02-25T00:22:00.002-06:00

I'm getting close to a first playable on the first of the two titles I'm working on this year: USESP #0.

Those of you who were following me back when I worked for Ritual might recognize the acronym and/or be able to derive it.

I'm going low-resolution and low-fidelity for the graphics and models so I can try to focus on gameplay and filling in some backstory, specifically:

1) How did Elexis get her hands on Blade?
2) How did Jessica find Blade and get him out?
3) What happened between the time Elexis escaped Blade at the end of "SiN" and the beginning of Episode 1?
4) What DID Blade get injected with?
5) Why is Elexis dressing in a more business-like fashion?

If I am able to release this when I'm done, it will be under the "SiN Episodes" mod license, so you will have to own a copy of "SiN Episodes: Emergence" to play it.

Resolution #6: Life (Gets In The) Way

2013-02-17T13:37:00.000-06:00

No real progress to report today.

I have to stop by the office to take care of some things, unfortunately, and that will sap the six hours I usually have blocked out for personal projects on Sunday.

Resolution #5: Episodic Problem #1: Content

2013-02-10T08:00:00.000-06:00

The first problem you are going to encounter when developing an episodic first person shooter is the variety of settings. Even if you have all the code done in advance, building the art assets for the constant variety demanded by today's consumer takes a significant amount of time, effort, resources, and money.

You end up with a choice: either keep your episodic shooter in a small, enclosed area so you can reuse most of your assets but everyplace has that "samey" feeling, or go big, but lose the economies of scale that most other forms of episodic gaming get.

Take the following (now hypothetical) location lists, for example:

SiN Episodes 0: Deception

HARDCorps Headquarters
- Office/Meeting Space (Cutscenes only)
- Training Center
- Medical Bay (Cutscenes only)
Abandoned City
- Hospital Interior
- Street
- Destroyed Warehouse
SiNTek Office
- Mutagen Lab (Decrepit)
- Blade injection room
- Lobby
Freeway
- Straightaway
- On/off ramps

SiN Episodes 1: Emergence

SiNTek Office
- Blade injection room
- Lobby
Docks
- Exterior
- Sewer
- Lighthouse
- Dockhouses
- Craneyard
- Warehouses
U4 Labs
- Dilapidated Sub
- Lab equipment area
Construction Site
Office Building
- Lobby
- Cube Farms
- Maintenance Area
- Building Exterior

SiN Episodes 2: Freefall

Forest (Limited locale)
Abandoned Aquarium/Zoo
- Tanks
- Caged Areas
- Maintenance/Vet Areas
Dam Under Repair
- Tractor beams
- Equipment railway
Caverns
- Lab (Decrepit)
HARDCorps Headquarters
- Medical Bay (Cutscenes only)

Not much in the way of potential asset reuse here, is there? Even if you are able to find pre-built assets for your game, assets are going to be a huge cost center for each new episode you choose to build.

Even for smaller games, the costs to create the worlds easily trumps the costs of creating the gameplay elements. Take a look at "Defense Grid: The Awakening." (No, seriously, take a look at it. The game rocks.) The basic elements of the game are rather straightforward: less than a dozen upgradable turrets and fifteen enemies that are reused on every single level, and a series of about fifty canned vocal blurbs that are used based on certain tower/enemy death combos. However, each level has a unique look and feel (20 different environments), plus there is custom spoken dialog on every level. The extra effort used to keep the same elements (enemies, weapons) from feeling "samey" costs a significant amount to create.

Telltale does a great job with their adventure games, but look more closely at how they construct their episodes the next time you play. You spend a long time in each individual location and will often revisit locations between episodes, making it easier to justify spending the effort on the location. They'll also do lots of modular work within an area so they can swap out, add or remove props to give an environment a new feel (Sam & Max's office, for example).

I'm not saying that this problem is insurmountable, but I am saying that this is a problem that will need to be solved before episodic first person shooters can truly become "episodic."

Resolution #3, #4: Dead End, Pain

2013-02-03T21:46:00.003-06:00

Nothing new to report.

Weekend #3 was just a realization that I was going down a dead end and replanning some items.

This weekend, I've been recovering from kidney stones.

Hopefully more to report next weekend.

Resolution #2: Minimal Update

2013-01-14T20:58:00.003-06:00

Sunday was spent mostly with architecture. Most of my game world is going to be grid based, so I'm setting up visibility calculations accordingly.

I hope to have something rendering by end of month.

Resolution #1: Discussion

2013-01-06T13:48:00.000-06:00

There are generally two types of New Year's resolutions: those where someone tries to improve themselves by correcting a perceived failing of their own, and those where someone tries to reach a goal that has been eluding them for some period of time. Both require publicly talking about them because once you talk about a resolution with someone, you are more committed to the path.

I have one resolution this year, and it is one of the latter ones. Specifically, I want to design, create, and prepare for release one new game this year. I may not be able to release it (yet) due to a clause in my employment agreement, but I can create it, and talk about my progress as I work through it.

The reason behind this resolution is two-fold. First, I've been out of game development for six years now, and I've not been able to successfully complete any of my side game projects during this window, either due to time constraints from work or motivation issues. Second, I've had a fairly significant question since we released "SiN Episodes: Emergence" and since Valve released "Half-Life 2: Episode 2" that I've been struggling to answer.

The real question is: why is it so hard to successfully release an episodic first person shooter? I think I have an answer for it, and it's that answer I want to explore this year. Specifically, I think the issue is the toolset we have for developing shooters.

Levels in first person shooters are generally broken out into encounter areas and connecting areas. An encounter area is a highly polished, highly produced area, and a connecting area is usually a hallway or some simpler area designed solely to get you from encounter area to encounter area. Combat may occur in both areas, but the encounter areas are what people remember. Connecting areas are designed to be forgettable.

The issue is that we have the same toolset for both, this toolset is designed to make construction of encounter areas easier, and generally this toolset makes iteration expensive to do. The really sad part is that due to the standardized rules of video games, we have the proper tools for both, but this toolset isn't properly linked.

Look at the simple level designer built into "Portal 2" and look at "Hammer" in the Source SDK. Using the "Portal 2" editor lets people build amazingly complex levels, including ones with almost the exact same puzzles as shipped in the retail game in a fraction of the time, but they all look the same...there is nothing memorable. However, you can quickly iterate on the puzzles and get them to the point where the gameplay is there.

Trying to build the same levels in "Hammer" takes significantly longer, but you have significantly more flexibility, can make each level visually and thematically distinct, and as a result make them more memorable. However, iteration takes significantly longer.

I'm thinking of writing a toolkit to try to bridge these two worlds: a level editor that works mostly like the "Portal 2" editor so that you can quickly generate your environments and iterate on the gameplay, and then once you are ready to take an area and turn it into a proper encounter area, you can select that area, export it out as an encounter area in an editable format for something like "3D Studio MAX" or "Hammer" or "3D World Studio," and then edit it using the proper tool for the proper job. Once that is done, that encounter area acts just like a building block. You can move it around like a block in the initial editor and have all of the links properly wired up as the connecting areas get additional edits, and the encounter area can also be handed off to other people for concurrent work.

I only have Sunday's blocked out for this work, but I think I can get this done. I'm going to be using Visual Studio 2012 Professional as my development suite, with Visual C# used for the tools and Visual C++ used for the game code.

Today is all design and project setup. Next Sunday is code time.

RomTerraria End Of Support

2012-11-04T12:04:00.003-06:00

Sorry that this is why I have to come back to the blog for a bit, but I don't have any choice in the matter.

Effective December 1, 2012, I will no longer be supporting RomTerraria in any way, shape or form, and I will have to take down the auto-update version.

The source code will still be available and is released under the BSD license.

There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes, not all of which I'm going to be able to talk about until around this time next year, but there is some exciting stuff coming which requires me to do something I don't want to do first.

Java Must Haves #1: LittleEndianDataInputStream

2012-06-10T19:38:00.001-05:00

Since I started working for Amazon, I've still been able to work with C# and JavaScript from time to time, but most of my time has been spent neck deep in Java.

Mind you, Java isn't my favorite language. The more I mess around with it, the more it feels like an iceberg of compromise. So, I'm going to start posting links to things that have helped me make Java suck less.

The first involves DataInputStreams. In the "infinite wisdom" of Sun/Oracle, DataInputStreams must be big-endian. The vast majority of data files produced outside of Java on x86/x64 systems are little-endian, and the lack of a little-endian data stream makes file interop a total pain in the ass.

Fortunately, a little-endian stream was created and the code is public domain. Thanks to Peter Franza for creating the code and releasing it.

http://www.peterfranza.com/2008/09/26/little-endian-input-stream/

HOWTO: POST a file to an .ASHX generic handler

2012-04-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

Problem:
You want to be able to POST a file from a generic HTML form to a generic ASP.NET handler (.ashx).

Solution:
First, make sure that your file input control on your HTML form has a name. If it doesn't have a name, you won't be able to access the file on the server side and it will appear not to have uploaded.

<input name="uploadedFile" id="uploadedFile" type="file" />

Second, make sure that your form action has an enctype parameter set to "multipart/form-data."

<form action="Upload.ashx" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" />

Now in your HTTP handler, you can either access that file by the name you provided it on the form:

context.Request.Files["uploadedFile"]

...or you can iterate through the files by key...

foreach (string f in context.Request.Files.AllKeys)
{
context.Request.Files[f].SaveAs(
HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/" + ...));
}

Forgive the silence...

2012-03-27T14:29:00.000-05:00

Sorry that I've been so silent this month. Between my grandmother passing at the beginning of the month and me scrambling to catch up from work after getting back from the funeral, I'm not exactly on top of my game.

I'm hoping to return in force in April.

Minor RomTerraria Update

2012-02-08T09:33:00.003-06:00

In this release:

- Fixes some minor incompatibilities with 1.1.2.

Back In Action

2012-02-08T08:51:00.002-06:00

My machine is set up in a temporary location in the new condo now, and I've already found the root cause for several of the issues that have been affecting people in RomTerraria.

I'll have the patch up either tonight or tomorrow. Keep those auto-updaters ready...

Also, does anyone know if the retail version of Terraria will require Steam or not? I need to know so I can properly update my protection mechanism to work with retail.

Move (Almost) Complete

2012-01-24T12:24:00.002-06:00

The movers will be at my condo sometime within the next hour to unload the truck containing all my belongings. It will take a few additional days to get unpacked and settled, but I can't wait to get back into the swing of things.

Ad Hominem

2012-01-20T12:22:00.002-06:00

I love ad hominem attacks against me.

When I get attacked for who I am or what I do for a living rather than getting the substance of my argument attacked, I consider it a win.

Terraria 1.1.2 and RomTerraria

2012-01-17T15:08:00.000-06:00

I have no idea if the 1.1.2 release of Terraria that was released today is compatible with RomTerraria or not.

If it isn't compatible, I can't fix it until February 1. I'm not going to even have a broadband connection at home until Thursday night, and my computer won't be in up here from Dallas until January 30.

Sorry about the inconvenience. If there are bugs out there that I'm not aware of, please reply to this post with them.

Stealth Update

2012-01-06T21:25:00.003-06:00

Minor update tonight to allow smaller maps.

See you guys in Seattle.

Last RomTerraria Update Before The Move

2012-01-04T22:51:00.003-06:00

In this build:

- Higher quality minimap
- Minimap remains centered on all resolutions
- Minimap colors of solid bricks are now a closer representation of the actual color

As a reminder, after you install RomTerraria, it does appear in your Start menu inside the "Michael Russell" folder.

Also, the source code has been updated. No new updates until after January 24.

January's Minimal Posting Schedule

2012-01-02T10:43:00.001-06:00

Here's my tentative schedule for this month.

Wednesday night, I'm going to post my most recent source code for RomTerraria. The reason being is that after Friday, I won't be able to make any further changes to RomTerraria or make any updates to the software until almost February.

Saturday, I fly up to Seattle to start my new job. I'll still have net access, but only from the office and from my mobile phone for two to three weeks, plus my machine won't arrive until February 1 when the movers get up there.

I will not be as responsive as I'd like over the next month, but I'm looking forward to coming back re-energized in February.

RomTerraria Update (Now With Lava Cleanup)

2011-12-27T19:54:00.006-06:00

Update for RomTerraria:

- Stronger warning if you try to enable lava rain.
- Option to remove all lava in the top quarter of your map.

Twisted Christmas Carols

2011-12-23T12:21:00.001-06:00

I like writing off-kilter song parodies. It's a fun hobby. Here's one that I wrote yesterday and posted to Shacknews which I find rather seasonal...

Time To Bury Christmas - to the tune of "A Holly Jolly Christmas"

Now it's time to bury Christmas,
It's the best time of the year,
Stash his toe beneath the snow
And get me another beer

Now it's time to bury Christmas
Dragging Saint Nick by the feet
Broke my axe off in his ass
Now he's just dead meat

Oh ho
The sled does glow
Burning so brightly;
Reindeer will fly no more;
Deer jerky for me!
Now it's time to bury Christmas
And in case you didn't hear,
Tell the coppers
And we're gonna
Bury your ass next year!