Blog for Guimo at GarageGames.com

Warscale 23 - Game Lobby

Guimo — 2008-10-14T00:51:04+00:00

Hi everybody. Here is another edition of the Warscale blog again.

First of all, thanks to Deborah, Apparatus and Leroy for your comments on my previous blog. This has been a really busy week so I had no time even to answer for your comments but thank you very much.

After a week were my HP laptop gloriously returned from the dead and was fully functional, it decided to go back to the undead land. Apparently he fix was short lived and the only solution by HP was... reinstall all. Well. I guess it will continue on its zombie state for now. At least it works.

On the other hand, all the development plan for this week was completed but it took me one more day than expected. I focused this week on the game lobby room.

What was planned
Avatar loading
Once a player creates or joins the game, his avatar is displayed on the lobby along with all his equipment. This way everything looks more personal and you can make a guess about the opponent level just by looking at his equipment.

Game chat
Of course any game room requires a chat so I included a minimal chat system which I plan to enhance in the future.

Player disconnection
A player may disconnect from the game at any time. The server handles the event and informs all the game players appropiately.

Player ready/unready
The game creator is usually considered the game owner. The game owner has control of the Start Game button. When players join to the game, they are set to a non-ready state by default. This means the game creator wont be able to start the game until all player have informed they are ready. The player may also unready at any time. To prevent a player from sabotaging the game startup by not readying on time, a /kick player command has been included in the chat so the game owner can remove a player from the game lobby at any time.

Game ownership control
The game creator is set as the game owner by default meaning he has the control of the Start button and the kick command. But in case the owner decides to leave the game, the server picks another player and informs all players about the new owner. If no player remains in the game, then the game is removed from the list and all players in the shard are commanded to remove the game from their respective game lists.

What wasnt planned
Equipment validation
I noticed the player may sell the equipment he is currently wearing in the equipment store thus making his equipment selection invalid. When this happens, an information message is displayed in the model store which tells the player about this problem so he may cancel the transaction. If he continues selling the equipment then the missing equipment will be removed from his selection. This means the player equipment should always be consistent so, as an additional security measure, if he tries to create or join a game with an inconsistent equipment the server will consider this a client hack and will Strike him.

Strikes
Strikes are a way to handle strange client behaviours. When the server receives a message the client is not supposed to send, it is considered an attempt on hacking the system. On each strike, an appropiate message will display in the screen. Collect 3 strikes and not even a ton of cookies baked by your grandmum will revive your account again (and this is serious because I really love homemade cookies). Your account will be marked invalid and you wont be accepted again in the game. Strikes have been included in all the system as a security measure on any action.

Future enhancements
I would love to add some dialog bubbles so that when a player says something, the bubble displays the message. I dont know if somebody has implemented a comic-bubble control or something similar.
Also, I need to add some player information like the average level for his equipment.

Screenshots![b]
The first screenshot shows the Model Store warning about your equipment sale.

This second screen shows the game room with two players ready to start the game. The image you see on the middle will be replaced with screenshots from the maps and the map selector will be added when I get at least a second map.

[b]The plan for this week
With the game room completed, the next step is to startup the game. This means we need an area to display some map information and an approppiate progress bar. The game should also handle disconnections in the middle of the loading sequence and act appropiately. I was thinkering about something like Gunbound where everybody keeps in the Game Room, chatting while the load progress is transmitted to all the clients and updated in the screen so that everybody knows the progress of the other players. When the load finishes then the game starts. After a while, I decided to go for the standard approach where you are redirected to your loading screen and must wait for the game to finish. Once in the game the server will tell you about the status of the other players.

Thats all for now! Good luck with your own projects!
Guimo

Warscale - Game creation dialog

Guimo — 2008-10-05T22:33:10+00:00

Hi again to spend precious time of their lives reading this series.

What was planned
This week I was completely focused on improving the game creation process and in the way I found a lot of bugs which were squashed.

One thing I wanted to improve was the game variations. In warscale it is handled by game types and structures. A game type is used to define the number of player and, in single player mode, if you want to fight a complete army or just the server boss. The server boss is a single large creature you must defeat with your army before gaining access to higher level servers. This wont be supported in the firsst version of Warscale but I liked the concept.

For this first stage I added three game types. Duel (2 players), Skirmish (3 players) and War (4 players). Even when you select a 3 player or 4 player game, you are allowed to start the game with less players, the idea is that if you only want to go on a one on one battle, select a duel and dont worry about uninvited guests trying to enter the game.

Also, here are three game structures. Fast, Slow and Strategy. The structure is about the game speed. A Fast game will only give you 10 minutes of total play time on each side. While the turn is in your control, you can take any time to make your moves but if your 10 minutes wear out you lose the game. A Slow game is similar to the Fast game but will give you up to 30 minutes on each side for your moves. A strategy game wont limit your movement time and you can pass the turn when you wish.

I also added a password protection feature. That way only your friends will be able to acess the game provided you tell them the password. That means I need to implement some kind of IM feature. Right now you must use any other IM to tell them the password.

Of course, when you create the game, your army needs to be validated. I created a window to explain why your army cannot join the game. Maybe it has too many or too little units or maybe you have sold some units since you created this army so it is no longer valid. The validator will inform you about any problem.

What wasnt planned
One of the most complex portions was about the dropdown control. Unfortunately the droplist in Torque was unable to handle the requirements I had for the UI and based on previous experience writing GUI libraries I know this is a tricky control with different things that should be handled and even when I wanted to use a droplist I really didnt want to write a full droplist control when it really wasnt mission critical.

So, after thinkering a little, I decided to write my solution using the script. A droplist is basically a label, a button and an overlay or dialog which presents your choices. So after some trials I managed to get it working and feels like a normal dropdown control.

I also finished lots of network bugs and fine tuned some features previously developed.

Screenshots!
This is the game creation dialog. You can see the options and also the drop down showing the army list.

The second screenshot shows the army validation.

The plan for this week
This week is the turn for the game lobby where players gather and chat before the battle. The original design was simpler but, based on my initial sucess with the Equipment editor, now I want to make it more visually interesting. Im planning to display all the players with their equipment so each player is able to see the opponents and their army level even when you really cant see the armies or the equipment bonuses. In the center you will be able to see and change the map (a simple bitmap will do but Handling a full map would be more interesting). And an area for the chat. Some buttons for game Ready and Start will complete the screen. Of course one additional feature will be to allow the /kick command to the chat so that the game owner can remove any undesired player from the game. Here is a sample layout based on a known game.

Ok, lots of coding ahead.

Luck with your projects!
Guimo

Warscale - Editors integration complete

Guimo — 2008-09-29T11:54:22+00:00

Hi everybody!

This was an awesome week for me. I had a great time with my family and there was also a good development on Warscale.

One of the nice things was that my HP laptop has came back from the dead, not fully restored and there is still a rotten smell yet, but lively enough to be useful again!

[rant]
If you remember the videocard died and Windows Vista 64 kept complaining about the nVidia driver and crashed with a blue screen from time to time. Well it looks like I wasnt alone. Apparently HP did something really wrong and a lot of their laptops series dv2000, dv6000 and dv9000 (like mine) have started to give the same kind of problems so they decided to clean their mess. Looks like the problem started with an update to Windows Vista which somehow broke the video card support and sent the driver crashing. So HP has issued a BIOS update in order to workaround the problem, nVidia has published a new set of drivers for the nVidia Go series and along with the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (which by some reason Windows Update didnt auto update) plus some more Vista updates completed the fix.
[/rant]

Shouldnt those tags be added to the scripting system?

So, the laptop is working again and it even runs TGE again! I havent tested the shading units yet but Age of Empires III, my only installed game even when I never play it, wont run as it says it is not compatible with Vista64 (but previously it did). I need to do more tests but my wife wont let me because she is afraid something breaks again and her work is in that laptop. Anyway at least I can run the Warscale servers there when I need.

Progress
This past week I focused on the Equipment editor and the Model store. More bug fixes have been made on the Grid control and I hope they are final. I updated the interface, created new buttons and, of course, made it work with the servers. It was required to create some additional support screens like the Load/SaveAs, Message and Wait screens. A great part of the logic has been cleaned in client and server side. New network messages added to help coordinating the information and lots of checks have been added to the client so the information is validated prior to sending it to the server and in the server so it doesnt trust the information it receives and rechecks it. The DB functions have been debugged too. Sounds paranoid but when money is involved there should be lots of testing. I'm still afraid of the packets being somehow modified by a hacker but at least some protection has been included and I will leave ptimizations to the future.

A lot of thought was given again to the business model. In previous comments there was a discussion on the benefits of selling booster packs against an open unit list approach. I was forced to write my strengths/waeknessess table and on the end the open list won. Three of the main consideration were:
a. For a booster approach I need to complete a set before starting to sell the packs against just adding them as they are compete to the open list.
b. In a booster approach an extremely powerful item can break your game and you will need to ban its use (somebody said MTG Black Lotus?) against increasing its price in the open list.
c. In the open list I can create the Sword of you-dare-to-look-at-me-and-you-are-dead and price it at say, 1000000 gold pieces and it wont break the game because I can separate the players in game servers and allow people who wants to use this card to enter to the God Level server, while in a closed booster approach I just cant create this item on the risk of breaking the game.

That said, I plan to add a marketplace feature in the future so that the players are able to buy and sell their units at better prices than those provided by the store (which pay backs 50% of the unit price on a sale). For this to work, a minimal fee will be charged on each transaction like a 5% fee. Those ammounts will need to be adjusted appropiately to reach a nice balance.

By the way, I have planned to add a black lotus to the first set of units. If you will accuse me of copying MTG then read Conan stories first and you will see how many times the black lotus was used in Howard tales.

Screenshots
This week I can show you the editors with some of the additional confirmation screens.
Here is the Army editor and the SaveAs screen.

Here you have the Equipment Editor and some confirmation screens.

And finally the model store with more confirmation screens.

The plan for this week
Now that three of the major components of the game are working in place, I can continue work in the game. One of the most neglected parts of the game is the creation of the game. This is just a small window which should allow the player to create a new game or join a game in progress. It needs to allow to add a game name and game password, select the game type (single, multiplayer), how many players to allow and the army you want to use. Its a small screen but with lots of functions so I guess that will take me almost all of this week. If somehow I finish this window before the end of this week I will start with the battle lobby screen which is the place where the members of a game gather, chat and prepare before starting the battle.

Luck with your projects!
Guimo

Warscale - Update and rant

Guimo — 2008-09-23T00:24:52+00:00

Hi everybody!
This post is just to update on the progress of Warscale and make a personal comment. So, first comes the update.
Update
Things are going fine since the last post. I have improved the Login and Server selector screens making them more efficient and avoided dual messages (I dont know why sometimes clicking a button sent a command two times resulting in a dual login... strange).
Also, the main lobby has been improved and linked to the army editor. The army editor has changed and is now working in the client/server architecture. The Load and SaveAs screens have been improved and are now working fine. Lots of bugs have been removed from the Grid control. Armies are allowed to have from 24 to 40 units depending on your gaming style.
So everything is going fine. I wont post screenshots as the only new things are the Load and Save screens... not much to see.

For this week I plan integrating the Equipment editor and start the integration of the model store so dont expect new screens for a while.

Personal comment
I'm extremely happy seeing the TGEA getting more and more improvements. This week announcement of the new OGL layer which allows it to run in OSX makes it more likely to see the Linux version come soon.

On the other hand, it looks like TGE is just being deprecated. All the announced updates are related to other versions (TGB, TX, etc). No mention to any update or improvement for TGE. Even the GG website has changed and when you click the Make 3D Games link you are saluted with the TGEA page. Like GG is slowly trying to make people forget TGE exists.

Its easy to be moved to eye candy. TGEA brings lots of new visual enhancements that makes us drool and say... I want that in my game! And when you see TGE side by side with TGEA its really easy to say... how did I managed to live with this ugly engine??? But unfortunately, nobody thinks that as the visual quality improves, the development cost also increases in the same proportion and, being an indie, this is not really a wise move on the long run unless you have the funding (and even when you have the funding... just looks at Age of Conan for a current example).

TGE is for making your first version. TGE is for learning. TGE is to develop your first game and sell it providing funds to make the improved version. Games are not just eye candy. How many games with simple graphics have been a success and how many games with monumental budgets and awesome graphics have failed to recover the inversion?

I understand the GG reasons to focus on new technologies and all. In fact now that the engine is able to run in all platforms TGE looks less appealing. But TGE is like a common root and has lots of details currently not available in TGE and lots of resources in the forums are first developed for TGE. Also, it looks easier to move from TGE to any other Torque-based engine than starting from TGEA and then trying to move to say... iTorque.

Anyway this is not a request to GG to make updates on TGE. Maybe just to ask GG to consider that updating TGE codebase and tools is as important as improving the other engines. Its just a personal comment on how sad I feel to see a good old friend slowly go away, but thats software life and if you dont embrace new technology you will soon be dead.

Luck to everybody with your projects!

Guimo

Target: Warscale Alpha

Guimo — 2008-09-15T01:12:41+00:00

Hi everybody following this series!

This was the last week for the prototype stage of Warscale. I'm completely happy with the progress achieved since my first blog and even when there is still a lot of work to do, I feel fairly optimistic. Let me show you some screens of the current state of the game.

The first screen is the Login screen. There is a hole where the Warscale logo should go. I'm still looking for a suitable new logo. The background it from a chinese artist who I'm trying to get an agreement to use his artwork for Warscale.

The second is the server selection screen. All the servers will be shown as regions in the world map and the server information with the server population and ther info (the ping time maybe?) will come up when the mouse moves over the region. The idea is that the servers should also show a difficulty level and will only allow you to enter if you are of a suitable level. As usual, this is just a temporal map.

The third image is the shard general lobby screen. In this screen you can see which people is logged in, you can chat with them and see the current available games. You may create a new game or join an existing game. Also you can enter the army editor, the equipment editor and the store.

As I said, I feel good on how this is going.

What does alpha means?
In software engineering, when a software reaches its alpha state it means that all features are complete and in a controlled enviroment everything should work approximately as in the final product. Of course there will probably exist a lot of bugs to be squashed and the interfaces will probably be replaced or enhanced, but all the subsystems should be operational and correctly linked.

For Warscale, reaching Alpha stage means:
Server changes
a. Improve the handling of connections and disconnections to avoid games crashing or ghost games or players appearing in the client side.
b. Game downloader and updater.
c. Handling at least three shards and multiple games playing at the same time.
d. First stress test. (Will need volunteers here).

Editor changes
a. Correctly integrate all the editors and the store with the server.
b. Improve the shard selection screen.
c. Correctly showing all the available games and allow users to connect and disconnect from the games, set game passwords and the like.
d. Creating at least three types of games based on the same rules but slightly different variations (like reducing the time available to make a move or increasing the ammount of mana each player receives each turn making the game faster).
e. Improve the game lobby which allows the players in a game to gather, chat, change the map, maybe change their selected army and launch the game.
f. Improve the option menues changing all the graphics appropiately.
g. Fix the key binds depending on the game state in order to make the user experience more pleasant.
h. Add sound effect to all the user actions.
i. Add support for background music.
j. Create the background art selection screen.
h. GuiObjectView control capable of handling particles.

Game changes
a. Create more maps. Includes improving graphics.
b. Improve the camera handling.
c. Create Sorceries.
d. Game rewards.
e. In game chat system.
f. Coloured game tracking system.
g. Optional. Store the game in the server so that it may be reviewed later.

As you see, there is work to do and really little time to do it. If you know about flexible and professional Updater which doesnt depend of a PHP/Java server (and is not too costly of course) please tell me. There is a wonderful one in the resources but it needs some modifications in order to get it working as I want. The problem is that the code is in Delphi and my Delphi skills are a bit rusty, maybe one of you may like to help me making this an appropiate downloader. Rewards can be discussed. Please drop me an email if interested.

Before I leave you, let me share something I learned in this time. If you need to update a Torque control/class/object/etc in order to suit your needs for your game, dont modify the original class. Try coppying the class to other file and rename all class names instead. For instance, GuiScrollCtrl may become GuiWSScrollCtrl or GuiObjectView may become GuiWSObjectView. This should work fine and you wont break the engine or any component with the change and should work unless the change is too deep inside the engine.

Good luck with your projects!
Guimo

Edit: Updated screenshot. Wasnt clear enough. Now shows the Equipment button and some improvements.

Warscale - Home improvements

Guimo — 2008-09-08T08:22:26+00:00

Hi all you in this amazing community!

So, last week I managed to get the prototype working which is a complete breakthrough for me but there were lot of things remaining and, as my real timeline for the prototype was on September 15, I had 2 weeks ahead to make things better.

Now, I dont know you but even when the Torque engine has amazing tools, the GUI elements are a little hard to use and customize and the profiles are not really well documented and in most cases you will need to hack them in order to make them work as you want. I'm not complaining, in game development you are supposed to hack everything in order to make it work as you want, I would only like a tool to make it easier to customize everything. Creating the profiles for all the borders I need, cutting small rectangles, editting the alpha maps, testing how it works (if it works at all)... too time consuming.

One of the most difficult objects (at least for me) is the Scroll control. Just the basic number of elements it uses makes it really hard to create a mask. Also, it is designed to stretch the center of the thumb (the slider) and the scroll bar graphic and sometimes you really want to show some details in your GUI. Also it doesnt handles graphics for the extremes of the bars. So I decided to make some modifications to this control and after two days of code fixing and creating bitmaps arrays I managed to get an improved scroll control which you can see in the screenshots.

The second problem was to create some small behavior changes to the bitmap border control in order to allow it to wrap the border (not stretch it) and render the border under the contained controls in some cases. I had already wroked out some of the issues previously so it was easy to solve.

With these things solved I decided to try and improve the GUI presentation. I think have squeezed every pixel on the screen in order to keep a nice presentation while allowing for the maximum view. There are still some things to work out like the Grid being rendered over the scroll, but its coming fine and we are still at prototype stage after all.

So, on the last week, I'm deciding to rebuild the starting screens and rebuild the initial GUI screens in order to greet you with the login screen and make the menu appear with the ESC key allowing to change the graphics, sounds, etc.

Nothing else for now. Thank you for your attention and as usual, good luck with your projects!

Guimo

Warscale - Prototype finished!

Guimo — 2008-09-01T13:36:06+00:00

Hi all!
Let me announce that in the day of September 1, 2008 (01/09/2008), I have completed the prototype for Warscale!

As I imagined, the client/server architecture was ported almost effortlessly. After some bugs which were easilly fixed and one which was really tricky (in fact I wonder how the summoning packet worked at all in first place) I was able to simulate a game in my own laptop with a master, a shard and two clients. The process allowed for game creation, joining, starting, loading and finishing.

What was accomplished
The most difficult part was to update the code in order to handle equipment in the client/server mode. I had to adjust the database and adjust the queries. Also, even when porting the code from single player to multiplayer was simple, trying to debug a client server in a single PC is a real pain in the (fill in this space any part of your body you consider appropiate). As I told you I'm confined to a single PC since my old laptop died and because I usually program in the train to work and there is no way I will bring two laptops on me. Anyway painful and everything, I managed to make it work.

What wasnt accomplished
Even when the store and equipment editor works, the integration is to say the least... defective. Works as a demo but nothing else. Requires a lot of work.

Screenshots!
The images shown this week show two avatars (naked for now) with their armies of units.

The plan for this week
Even when the prototype works, there is still a lot of things to do. The first phase for Warscale ends on September 15 so, as I still have some days left in my schedule, I ca use that time to fix some issues, clean the code and program those features which were left out or really require more work. Currently the server crashes a lot but that may be just a problem of trying to run 4 torque instances in the same computer... shame on me...

A moment to honor you
I wont say the name as maybe he wont like to be molested, but the gesture was really touching for me. A member of this amazing community offered me a free GeforceGo to fix my laptop. Unfortunately I cant use this card as the HP integrates the mainboard and the video card but, for me, the gesture is really important and says a lot of this community. I have already thanked him a lot but I want to do it again here. You really raised my morale in a moment I needed it.
As a way to thank this gesture I have decided to create a resource with the improved GuiObjectView control which Warscale uses. Not right now because I still have lots of things to do but if someone may be interested in helping me create this resource by writing the text, explaining the code changes, building example scripts and so on just send me an email. Of course with this resource in place, it will be easier for me to post updates for the control.
Currently the control handles:
- Fixed mountpoints - when mounting objects in a model, the control detects the object mountpoint and uses it by default. You may also specify a different mountpoint.
- Working setskinname allowing to change the model textures. Even works in mesh subsets.
- Working skin meshes allowing to show/hide meshes.
- Object rotation - not the current rotation-of-the-scene. In this case the central model rotates so that the light illuminates in different angles.
- Model scaling - You may scale any mesh in the viewer. Even mounted meshes.
- (Pending) Particle emitters.

There are may changes which require testing so if you would like to help me with this resource is recommended you have a good experience with the engine.

Any Mates here?
I was wondering how many of you live in Sydney?

Luck with your projects!
Guimo

Warscale - A series of infortunate events

Guimo — 2008-08-29T04:30:19+00:00

Hi everybody!

This has been another disastrous week for me... if there is a saint, god, patron or any higher being who cares for the independent game developers (does anybody cares for us at all?) then he/she/it must be really pissed of with me... or maybe its just Murphy and one of his laws making fun of me.

And it affected Warscale directly. Warscale master and shard servers were implemented using TGEA 1.0 which will only run in a PC with a shader capable video card. This was temporary of course except that on Monday, while seeing an episode of Dr House, some deadly disease jumped from one of the patients to the chips of the video card of my faithful HP dv9330 and destroyed it... that... or it was one of those accursed chips which nVidia has accepted as defectuous. And, as usual in this cases, it had to happen one month after the warranty expired.

As in this laptop model the video card, and nVidia Geforce Go 7600, is integrated in the mainboard, it cripples all the laptop. I know its the HW because I tried to restart the PC using a linux instalation... the video card showed the same problem. Fortunately I managed to disable the nVidia drivers and nuke them off the system by manually deleting them. After restarting and allowing the default vga drivers take control of the video card (any attempt to install the nVidia drivers brought the Blue Screen of Death) and after some time of navigation in glorious 800x600, I found a forum with all the guys with the same or similar HP laptops with exactly the same problems. One of them recommended to install one specific type of video drivers and disabling Aero. I managed to solve the problem and get the default 1440x900 again but I just cannot run any 3D game or even play a DVD or the BSOD appears... at least it allows my wife to work fine and the camera works. I really need to contact the HP service...I dont know what happens... I never had any problems with any HP product. In fact I was in love with this laptop... no more nVidia chips for me... its ATI from now on... may have slower cards (except the latest one which is hitting nVidia where it hurts) but I have never had any problem with them.

...and... in restrospective... this was one of the minor things that happened this week... go figure.

So, I was forced to change the servers to my secondary laptop, a Dell Latitude 530 with an Intel integrated card. Of course TGEA 1.0 laughed, spit me at my face and refused to run. I tried to recopile using TGEA 1.7 but the codebase is different so it didnt want to compile... looks like 1.7 doesnt like to mix with its older siblings... looks like this engine has as many personalities as versions. So, I decided to use TGE instead of TGEA which was planned as a task for a later moment. I setup a new environment with mySQL and the DB API I use (SQLApi.com). Fixed some problems with the SQL version, changed connection ports and after a couple of days I got it all online again. The nice thing about this is that the server is now really lightweight and I can run it in Linux or Windows. Not bad at all...

At this time I noticed I had abandoned the client-server arhitecture for too long. The programming style is different. I guess this 6 months of working with Torque really have improved my Torque-scripting skills. So I'm now reworking the code. Not everything of course but I'm lifting and updating the code and controls in many different places. A nip here... a tuck here... not an extreme makeover but in the way...

Ok, I hope I can make a lot of progress this week... no shot this week unless you want to see me crying along my lappy...

Luck (lets clarify it as good luck... just in case) to all you in your projects!

Guimo

P.D. Or maybe its just the perfect excuse to convince my wife to get a new laptop... may not be so bad luck after all... any suggestions?

Warscale - Model store

Guimo — 2008-08-22T04:44:07+00:00

Hi everybody!

I had an accident this week which prevented me to progress as much as I wanted. The said accident was finding a piece of bone in a nice, tasty, juicy, large and slightly burned BBQ meat (and I must say here in Australia they have really good meat). Anyway my tooth suffered the nasty encounter and I lost the weekend in a bearable but anoying pain.

That prevented me of coding, but allowed me for some wild thinkering about the unit balance and pricing... or when a unit should be considered a common, uncommon and rare unit.

As you know, this week I was working with the marketplace. Of course a lot of doubts assaulted my mind.

There are two ways to sell units in this game.
a. Sell them in closed booster packs or boxes.
b. Allow the players to pick their units and pay a set price for them.

Both have their pros and cons so let me describe the options.

In the first case, the open market, you sell the player a group of units but the player has no control over what he will get. The player pays an ammount for this surprise box and is guaranteed that the pack holds common, uncommon, rare and exotic units usually in a scaled probability. Something like a 70/20/9/1 proportion. The business here is that in every set there are the usually the same number of cards of each type, like 30 common, 30 uncommon, 30 rare and 30 exotic. So in order to get the 30 rare units you need to buy at least 30 packs. Of course getting the 30 rares or exotics by buying just 30 packs is almost the same than hitting the lotto so you need to buy more and more packs. On the end you are swimming in common and uncommon cards and if you consider you need to get 4 of each type of units then continuing to buy packs may not be the way to go. Of course it has all the thrill of opening a pack and... maybe get that unit you were looking for and which is valued way more than the pack you paid for, but usually you get really crappy units.
So the player may decide to stop buying units by boosters and start trading. So the player comes to trade cards and may find some nice pople who makes a fair deal, but usually what they find are a lot greedy people that makes their lives by trading and have no problem at all in cheating a new player. I have seen a lot of kids getting ripped of their best units and cheated. I was banned from a couple of stores just for trying to stop some guys to practically steal the units from some childs.
Thats how life works you may say but I really dont like to make Warscale a place where you feel frustrated.

Thats basically how I get to the second option. A controlled market. In this case the units are always available in the marketplace and you may search for any unit and when you find one you like you pay for it. If you are tired of some units you can go to the marketplace and sell them for 75% of the original price so you may buy new units and use them. This way you create your army anyway you want and if you get tired of you army, sell everything and buy new units. A nice thing is that at least you wont get stuck with mountains of common units you really dont have any use for except for making some armies as a gift to some cousin.

I must say that I was even tempted to change the idea of marketplace in order to be able to sell the units in packs, thats more money after all, but after a lot of thinking I decided to stick into my decision to allow the players to pick their units and pay an appropiate price for a unit. I feel this is the right way to do it. Maybe its not as profitable as the other method but for me its a nice way to do it.

Which leads to define the price of the units.

I must say I have learned a lot while designing Warscale and this is one of this things. At first I considered the rarity of a unit should be the same as the unit level, and its close but its not the same.

For example say we have different versions of a fire spell.
Fire Dart, Cost 1 mana. 1-6 fire damage to a single target. Price: 50 gold.
Fire Blast, Cost 3 mana. 3-18 fire damage to all targets in a 3x3 area. Price: 500 gold.
Fire Ball, Cost 6 mana. 6-36 fire damage to all targets in a 5x5 area. Price: 2000 gold.
Greater Fire Ball, Cost 10 mana. 10-60 fire damage to all targets in a 7x7 area. Price: 10000 gold.

So, which one do you consider has a greater rarity?

Answer... none. All are common spells.

Why? Because they all follow a simple and common rule. 1 mana allows you for 1-6 damage gradually increasing the area. None of these spells break this rule, so, this is a common spell no matter If I decide to create the Star Storm spell which costs 20 mana and deals 20-120 damage to all targets in a 10x10 area. Thats still a common spell.

The rarity of a spell comes from the ability to break the rules. Say I create:
Fire Rain. Cost 3. 3-18 fire damage to all targets in a 5x5 area. Price: 5000 gold

So I have a spell which costs the same 3 mana to invoke as the Fire blast and deal the same damage as the Fire blast, but in a larger area! Thats an uncommon spell. Now think about this one:

Fire Spikes. Cost 2. 1-6 fire damage to 3 targets of your choice. Price: 500 gold.

So, a spell with a slightly higher cost than the Fire Dart but allows you to pick up to 3 targets instead of one of the fire dart!

Finally consider this one:
Finger of God. Cost 1. 1000 fire damage to all units in the game. Price: 50000 gold. Awesome spell... extremely rare, extremely costly, combine this one with some kind of protection against fire and your enemy is done. Completely justifies its cost. This is a ultra-super-extreme-guimo-only-spell so dont expect to see this in the game, but its an example of how a spell is rare. If this spell would cost like 50 mana to play then it may not be rare at all.

And thats the point in this kind of games. Uncommon and rare spells are not about more powerful spells. Its about being able to do more things for the same invested resources. And in Warscale the most important resource is time. Time allows you to get more mana, mana allows you to get larger creatures and spells. Thats it.

Its a simple concept when you think about it.

So, after all this verborrea, here I present you a shot of the current state of the unit store.

Screenshot

The plan for this week
I thought it may be easier but the store is taking more time than I previously thought. Lots of code in all the editors have been simplified and cleaned. The good part is that everything is on its place now. So the plan for this week will be focusing on sinchronizing the code so that it works networked again.

Luck with your projects!
Guimo

Warscale - Equipment editor 2 (w/shots)

Guimo — 2008-08-15T03:15:59+00:00

Hi everybody still reading my posts!
Again, a very productive week.
In a previous post I mentioned the agreement to use artwork from Jonathon Earl Bowser. The main idea is that the screens should float above the art but shouldnt really affect it. The backgrounds will be picked at random when the game starts and will be used during all the current session. A new set of artwork willl be picked the next time you run the game. The artwork must stand out so the GUI should be minimalistic but at the same time should stand out over the art colors.

What was planned
More equipment for the equipment editor
I managed to add about 16 new piedes of equipment including weapons and armor. I wanted to include more art but the Medieval Weapon pack requires some small tweaks to make it work properly. I guess it should be easy to do but I lack the experience so I will do that later. Anyway I was able to add like 8 new weapons and 8 new clothing which brought the equipment count to 20. Not bad at all.

Improved clothing management
Besides being able to use boots and gloves, the equipment manager now accepts two layers of armor. This way I can have a chainmain under the breastplate.

Action messages
Right now the GUI shows the actions executed during the game. Still work to do but it works.

Model store
I'm workin on this right now. I spent a lot of time trying to decide how to present the information. On the end it got a look very similar to the Army editor. I'm still coding it.

What wasnt planned
Transparent equipment
I spent a lot of time trying to make transparent materials work with the MACK. Unfortunately there is a bug somewhere (Milkshape or dtsExporter) which prevents me to export this. I wanted to use this option to customize more equipment.

Equipment separation
MACK brings up a lot of items but they have to be separated one by one. A long tedious process but it worked. Now I have a lot of DTS shapes thay I can use.

Using MACK instead of Kork
I used a lot of time in this one. There were many problems to solve. The first one was to change the object definitions so that Kork was no longer the player avatar. This came with new problems.

Multiple setSkinName in a single call
The equipment editor allows to select new equipment but this equipment needs to be setup and some textures swapped. But when I tried to swap the textures it just didnt worked. It took me a long time to understand the problem. When you call setSkinName in the server side, the name of the texture is stored and a dirty flag is set so that when the network packs the updates, the new texture name is sent.
The problem here is that it is not an inmediate process, you have to wait for the message to be dispatched before you call setSkinName again. So if you call like setSkinName 5 times in a row, only the last update will be executed, the others just get discarded.
The solution here was to add a monitor variable that I may query in order to see if the messages had been already sent so I knew when to try the next update. It works fine now.

Fixing the unit info view
Other problem with these changes was that when the mouse pointer moves over a unit, it should be loaded in the mini view in the lower left portion of the screen. The problem is that MACK is just too large and each time it was loaded it took just too long (waiting 1 second or it to load and show is too long). So I was forced to modify the GUI in order to be able to preload the avatar in a special GUIObjectView which gets visible when the avatar is pointed. When another creature is pointed, the ObjectView of the avatar is hidden and the ObjectView of the other creature is loaded with the appropiate mesh. This systems works just fine.

Screenshots!
The first screenshot shows the euipment editor with more equipment and the avatar dressed with a full chain mail, a breastplate and two swords. If you notice it has gloves and boots too.

The second shot shows the same avatar in game with all the selected equipment.

The plan for this week
Finish the marketplace
This week I will try to finish the marketplace in order to allow the players to but or sell new units and equipment. If possible, I will try to improve the other editors as well. A lot of work to do in this area yet... thats why I feared these editors a lot.

Coordinate the client/server code
This should be the final monster to slay. Starting from this week, I will start the sincronization of the client/server code. This should be fairly easy I hope but I want to test this extensively.

I may say that Warscale, as a prototype, is almost finished.

Luck with all your projects!
Guimo