Friday, April 30th, 2010
I wanted to post another quick thanks to everyone who has bought the game so far and is taking part in our community.
The forums, ModDB page and Facebook page are all getting pretty lively; not just because we have a small community now but because our community contains a lot of GREAT people. I’m not just being a dick about this – the way that people are going out and telling others about the game, supporting us and offering us high quality feedback is brilliant.
Cheers – your efforts in building the community and helping us promote the game mean that we can spend more time ON THE ACTUAL GAME, and that’ s what matters!
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Friday, April 30th, 2010
Hello! We’re the creators of Frozen Synapse and here’s why we’d appreciate it if you’d actually like to pre-order it, rather than trying to download a crack.
1.) We’re a very small company and every sale matters vitally to our survival
2.) We like making bigger, fully-featured games on PC: this is tough; it’s not the best way to make money in the games industry; we’re doing it because we love that kind of game and other people do as well
3.) The game’s not finished yet; with your support at this stage, we can make the best game we possibly can
4.) We don’t punish our genuine customers with stupid DRM that makes our game unplayable
5.) We try to do the absolute best for anyone who has bought the game; we’re working hard on updates and try to do our utmost to offer quick and effective technical support. Again, this is tough, but we care deeply about people’s experience with our game. We can’t offer that to you if you aren’t willing to pay for it.
I know that some people who like to get stuff for free will only do it if they know they’re not hurting the creators.
If you pirate our game, you are hurting us directly; I hope you’ll reconsider and think about pre-ordering – we’ll even give you a free copy for a friend so you can have fun with the game straight away.
Thanks for taking the time to read this – if you’ve got this far, you’re obviously a thoughtful person who will take this issue seriously, and that’s who I’m trying to reach.
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Thank you, thank you sincerely and from the bottom of my heart, to all of the people who were even slightly involved with the TCP/IP stack and the implementation of it that the FS Grand Server uses.
You seriously saved my ass on that one folks.
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010
I’m looking at this desync bug, and has a screen I thought looked quite nice – here’s a picture of all plans for a single game (VecingVision vs Koreg on #-88356): (click for full-size)
Also a small-but-important new feature shown in that shot!
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Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Duplicate is an important part of the FS “ethos”, and one that really should have been in the first release. I’ve implemented it today and it will be going live for everyone tomorrow.
What is “Duplicate”?
Whenever Frozen Synaps finds you a game, you play a randomly generated map. Duplicate keeps this, but means that other people will play the same maps as you do. Whenever you get into a match, the FS server will try and find a recent “Duplicate” map which neither you nor your opponent have played. If it finds one, you play that map. If it doesn’t, the system generates a new map, which future players will also play on. (Duplicate is a very important part of Contract Bridge, a game which FS’ community aspects draw heavily from.)
So what’s changed?
On the surface, very little – if you wish to go through life never thinking about Duplicate, you can – and Frozen Synapse will be exactly the same as you’ve been experiencing it so far. Duplicate mainly affects scoring, and in addition to the current scoring systems and leaderboards, new ones will be introduced based on Duplicate Scoring.
Duplicate scoring
When you finish a match, you have two scores – the “map” score, and the “duplicate” score.
The Map Score
This is the score you’re used to seeing. In basic Extermination, it is calculated as
10 * kills – 10 * losses + a bonus of 20 for wiping out the opposing team
So let’s say you’ve just played a match against Bin, and you killed two of his guys and he killed one of yours – you have a score of 10.
The Duplicate Score
As you post your score on the match, the FS server looks at all other matches played on that map. Let’s say the following results were posted:
Ian vs Paul – Ian wins, score of 20
You vs Bin – You win, score of 10
ThomS vs Archa – Draw, score of 0
Your Duplicate Score is defined as the percentage of people you beat on this map. In this instance, you did better than ThomS but worse than Ian, so you get a score of 50%. ThomS’s score will be 0% (he beat no people), and Ian’s is 100% (he beat everyone).
Paul’s score on this map is defined as -20, ie the loser’s Map score is the negative of the winner’s. Paul’s Duplicate Score is 0 because he beat no-one, Bin’s is 50 and Archa’s is 100.
Duplicate Scoring only compares you to the other people who played as your side. In this instance, Ian, you, and Bin are being compared to each other, and Paul, Bin, and Archa are being compared to each other.
Why?
These reasons:
1. By far and away the biggest reason is that Duplicate Scoring allows you to have un-even sides in a battle, and for the result to still be competitive and meaningful. Even with the comparitavely even sides in standard Extermination matches there are still complaints about unfairness. I personally think that this adds texture and makes FS better, but Duplicate really takes away the notion of unfairness from map and unit layout.
2. A leaderboard based on Duplicate Percentage is one of the most fair and representitive scoring methods there is. Your performance on each match is no longer compared to just one person (your opponent) – it is now compared against tens or hundreds of other results. But a bad result on one match will not kill your leaderboard chances, as it only makes up a small percentage of your score for the day.
3. After finishing a game, seeing how others played the same map is really fun and interesting. Maybe they took an amazing line at turn 1, or maybe they did something stupid you’d never do. It’s just fun to interact with.
4. On a similar note, playing the same maps as everyone else gives more shared experiences in the community and more stuff to talk smack about.
So as I say, this will be in in a basic form tomorrow – look at any game’s Game Page and you will see the Duplicate results, along with links to all the other games played on that map. There will also soon be a “Daily Duplicate Leaderboard” which will be an average of your Duplicate results over the last 24 hours.
I sincerely hope that my testing of this system has been thorough enough, but it’s always possible I’ve introduced some terrible bug into the server. I’ll be launching it during the quiet time tomorrow morning and I appreciate everyone’s patience if anything does go wrong.
When the client patch is released next week the interface to see other games on the same map directly after finishing a match will be improved.
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Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Work’s going well on the biggest feature of Patch#1, and it’s totally server-side which means you’ll be able to see it in action as soon as it’s done – hopefully tomorrow morning.
And I’m teasing! So I’m not going to say what it is.
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Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Hey guys. The Icelandic ash cloud is still holding up us getting a new server – I will get it installed as soon as possible, and apologies for the slowness.
I’m working hard on Patch#1, hoping to get it up on-time with some lovely new features as well as a lot of bug fixes.
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Sunday, April 25th, 2010
I’m getting a head-start on Patch#1 by trying to fix the scoring today. That means that I am right now downloading the game database – now some 7500 large – onto my dev machine so I can run tests on them locally.
The Global Rankings will be reset with Patch#1, but the “Version Zero” rankings will be posted here for posterity.
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