Determinance screenshot

Visiting the Village: Episode 46

August 16th, 2010 by Ian

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This week, Ian and I take on the uncanny valley, erotic roleplay (in WoW), Rayman’s sales figures and a whole vast host of your listener questions. Join us!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Download

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UI improvements

August 12th, 2010 by Ian

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We’ve added some significant features to make planning easier, and we’re looking for as much feedback as possible from you guys before the weekend – check it out.

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Pathfinding

August 9th, 2010 by Ian

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I’m rather pleased with myself this morning.

The pathfinding in FS has always been atrocious – experienced players pretty much have to use shift all the time to bypass it.  It’s a pain in the ass.  Here’s a great example of it going wrong:

The reason pathfinding sucks so much is that my algorithm for it is terrible – it splits the levels up into a grid, each square about the size of a unit.  It then checks each square for obstacles.  It’s a really innaccurate representation of the level.

This weekend I was reading up on advanced pathfinding stuff, and considering using some kind of Navmesh with movement polygons.  Then I was hit by a flash of inspiration – the only thing that matters in FS is corners.  If you ever want to make a path in FS, you only ever use the corners to get there – the only points I need in my nav-graph are the corners!  Here’s my code for identifying the corners in action:

As you’ll know if you’ve written A* before, the algorithm needs to know how all the navigation nodes are connected.  Here’s the same level with that info:

The nav-graph for this level is pretty simple – here’s a more normal one:

Yikes.  Lucky computers are fast at this sort of thing!  Here’s the same level that the initial algorithm got wrong, but with the new algo I knocked up this morning:

Perfect.  You guys can play around with this pathfinding right now – the download is here.

Lots more UI improvements to come.

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Server up

August 4th, 2010 by Ian

Server up – was a screw up at our ISP, apologies to everyone effected.

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ISP currently down

August 3rd, 2010 by Ian

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Hey guys.  Our ISP is currently down – I’m trying to get through to fix it.

Ian

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I have returned

August 1st, 2010 by Ian

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Hey guys.

I have returned from honeymoon.  My wedding day was truly wonderful – much better than I could possibly have imagined.  The honeymoon (we went to Lake Garda, Florence, and Chianti in Italy) was very relaxing and I feel refreshed and ready to fix the UI!  So I shall do that.

I read some books while away, here’s a quick summary of what I thought.

The Star Fraction by Ken Mcleoud:  Good, if a bit rambling and boring at the end.

The Stone Canal by Ken Mcleoud: Extremely good – well reccomended

Fairyland by someone: Pretty interesting but it’s dated a bit.

Empire of Light by Gary Gibson: Really, really terrible.  The trilogy started off promisingly with Stealing Light, but the second and third books are just awful.

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Visiting the Village: Episode 45

July 21st, 2010 by Ian

          visiting-the-village-episode-45

This week, Ian and I discuss a variety of scintillating gaming topics including Kinect, RealID and faeces. Also featuring our annual Telescope Update from Bryan!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Download

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Visiting the Village: Episode 44

July 13th, 2010 by Ian

          visiting-the-village-episode-44

This week, Ian and I discuss the Eye of Judgment, swagger, professional wrestling’s similarity to the games industry and various other kinds of nonsense. Listen!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Download

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Normal service will resume shortly

July 12th, 2010 by Ian

          normal-service-will-resume-shortly

Hey everyone.

I am getting married this Saturday, and due to that and honeymoon I will largely be away until August 1st.  Rest assured that if anything happens to the server I will jump straight on it though – FS service will go un-interrupted.

August will bring the much-needed ui-improvements, and then work on Single Player will begin…  but for now, I have to prepare for my Bachelor night!

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Patch out

July 7th, 2010 by Ian

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[If you don't already own Frozen Synapse, go to the official site and have a look!]

New patch is out, changelist at the bottom here.

I’m hoping to find time this week to improve the speed of the scoring and thus the server.

Increased FOV of the grenade and rocket units to be same as machine gunner
Added loading indicators to main menu items
Added a loading message for all ways in which you can load a match
Removed the long ” matchmade” info for matchmade games to make the sidebar (slightly) less cluttered
You are now able to delete games in which you have not submitted a single turn
Games for which you are waiting do again show up in the Active Games list
If you accept a “game ask” and someone else accepted before you did, then you will be informed via a message box
You can now select multiple game modes to be matchmade on, and if you and your opponent dont agree on any Dark Extermination is chosen by default.
Your plans are now saved if you switch matches before you’ve committed (I am seriously worried this feature is going to break things, so you have to opt-in by checking a box in the options menu)
items in the feed are now time-stamped (x happened “a minute ago” or “2 hours ago”)
Improved the sniper unit
The generator will never give you more than one sniper in a Dark Extermination match
The generator will always spawn Snipers at the farthest spawn point from any enemies in a Dark Extermination match
Added the option to generate a Symetrical Dark Extermination match in the Advanced create game page.
Fixed a problem where the “Activate Friend Key” buttons would sometimes dissapear
Charge now defaults to 6 turns
Charge requires you to be over the line for three seconds to win
Fixed incorrect Charge scoring
Fixed a crash which occured when dragging the aim handle during playback
Fixed a very rare circumstance where a rocket explosion could case a unit very close to a wall to become stuck in a wall (thanks Mosimo)
Added the ability to import levels from .png files. SImply have a white image of any size with red rectangles for walls and blue rectangles for boxes/windows. The option is in the Editor tab in the Editor.
Biddable zones are now further away from the attacker spawn zones in secure
Asjusted Secure scoring to be a maximum of 200, and more sensibly reflect bidding – massive bids do not have much of an advantage

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