Archive for January, 2009
Monday, January 26th, 2009
The semi finals and finals of Krypton Factor were filmed in Manchester last week, and I was up there for my graphics libraries and one of the games. Lots of great stories, but the best is us losing the feed from one of the games during the show and me having to set up the next day and mimic what the contestant did. I never thought I’d be doing that in my life…
This week I’m fixing the multiturn bugs so that my new version of endplays (which I’m excited about and will explain later) will work properly. This does mean that with the next major beta release, you’ll be getting BOTH these uber exciting new endplays AND proper multiturn support, which is a bit of a big deal.
The art department is also going well, as long-term-friend-of-Mode7 Chemeleon has been signed on to be our technical artist and animator. I’m hugely excited to see what he can do with Synapse.
EC and I are also working on something completely out there (not a game/application) in our spare time at the moment. You may be… amused.
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
Just a quick note to say the Synapse servers will be down today, due to an unspecified problem I need to fix when I get a second. Apologies!
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Sunday, January 18th, 2009
There’s a big change coming to the beta, but it probably won’t be up for 10 days, as I go to Manchester for another few days soon and this change is nowhere near stable enough to deploy.
I think a lot of people are hitting a brick wall in understanding Synapse, and there’s also a need to get a tutorial in there. However putting a lot of work into a tutorial before we’ve got a lot of the orders and interface finalised is a bit silly. So we’ll probably keep the beta very small until we’ve got all of that worked out.
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Friday, January 16th, 2009
If I’m only doing one Synapse thing today, I’m sorting out for sure who wins when opposing units can see each other at the very start of the endplay.
It’s a sticky situation, and in some ways a bit unsatisfactory that it happens – I’ve considered the alternatives, but I can’t think of any that make even a slight bit of sense. So it’s a feature we need to deal with.
Clearly, either offense or defense needs to have the clear advantage, and I plan on implementing that by just giving a sizable accuracy bonus to one side just at the start of the turn.
But which side gets the advantage?
Clacy says, and I’m inclined to agree, that it should be the defense. After all, they’re “dug in”. But, if we’re talking aesthetically, the offense would have the element of surprise. I think it’s pretty much a tie aesthetically speaking.
So let’s look at it mechanically. I think that in general the defense has the advantage on their own turf. By that I mean (and as I write this I have a feeling it’s one of the worst written posts I’ve made in a long time) that in general, the defense is controlling parts of the map, and the offense is finding ways of breaching. I therefore kind of feel that they should have the starting advantage because it’s a continuation of that: the offense’s job is to find a hole in the defense’s coverage. If we gave the offense the advantage, then they would start off “controlling” a portion of the defense’s side, inverting the status quo, and I don’t think that works.
Defense it is.
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Something that everyone wants to easily be able to do is see when someone else puts a play in on an endplay they’ve done. If you’re defense on 1174 was KILLER then you want to see when someone posts on offense. Well that feature is in now. In the game menu is a button labelled “Next New Opposition Play”. Click on it once, and it’ll get the first new opposition play since you last looked. Click on it again, and you’ll get the next one… and so on. Until you’ve run out.
But “Next New Opposition Play” is one of the worst button titles I’ve ever seen… can anyone think of a better one?
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Think I got it. Update your game clients.
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
There seems to be a crash in the server since the last update, so apologies guys (looked like it crashed right out on Burn if the logs are telling the truth). I’m looking into it today.
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
As soon as Jimmeh gets my mail, the Synapse forums will be open. I’ll be posting the more hardcore stuff in there.
The beta has been updated with the new stuff. This raises an interesting issue. In general, all of your old plays and endplays will be still on the server, and there will be plenty of instance of plays with “new” orders and rule changes against old. Whole results will be changed completely! It’s the beta, so hopefully you guys can handle it.
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
This is a feature that people, and especially Bin and EC, have been demanding for a looooong time. It is now possibly to set a unit to look all around him (or just 270 degrees), at the cost of an accuracy and movement speed penalty.
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
If you’re not playing Synapse, this will be complete gobeldygook. If you are, take note: these are the new move aim systems.
1. Checking
The old (and crap and relatively unused) checking system has been replaced, and now will be used in a large proportion of the places that move-aim would previously have been used.
Please note (EC) that while this sounds complicated, it is designed to do what is most logical.
Controls:
Ctrl + Left click at a <location>, there is clear Line Of Sight between <unit> and <location>.
This will create an “immediate check” order, and is exactly the same as the old check. When executed, <unit> will look at <location> for a split second.
Ctrl + Left click at a <location>, there is no clear Line Of Sight between <unit> and <location>.
This will create a “breach check” order. This is used for rounding a corner while looking at a location, which was previously achieved by adding a move-aim order at <location> briefly before rounding the corner, and then a cancel-move-aim order after rounding the corner. A breach check order is a considerable improvement, as there is no need to cancel it after breaching the corner, and you can stack several and they will be executed in order. You will get an accuracy boost when rounding the corner as if you had been preparing for it.
Special note: when checking behind a box, the game will use some discretion to decide at which point you will execute the breach.
2. Move Aim
Move-aim is basically unchanged, however now one should only use it for covering a location while moving, and not breaching as well.
However, the cancel-move-aim shortcut has been moved to ctrl-treble right click.
3. Focus
This is the biggest gameplay change, and will hopefully considerably improve Synapse.
Previously, the closer an enemy was to the center of your viewcone the higher the accuracy bonus. This forced you to consider your direction extremely carefully – or rather, most often not consider your direction carefully enough and lose. This is not a consideration I want to be important to playing Synapse.
Now, there is no accuracy bonus or penalty associated with where in your viewcone an enemy appears.
This has been replaced with Focus actions. If your unit is engaged in a Focus action, he gets a substantial bonus for enemies in a very small cone. So far, so similar to the previous situation. What makes a difference is that you get a very serious penalty for enemies outside of the Focus Cone.
Focus is to be used for when you are betting an enemy is in/will appear at a specific location; at the cost of being able to react well for other locations.
controls
There are two kinds of Focus actions: focus-breach and focus-move-aim.
Ctrl + double left click: focus breach
Ctrl + double right click: focus move aim
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