UI improvements

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

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

Monday, August 9th, 2010

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

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

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

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ISP currently down

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

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

Ian

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I have returned

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

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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Normal service will resume shortly

Monday, July 12th, 2010

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

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

[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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Updates

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

I posted yesterday on ModDB with some thoughts about the current state of game marketing.  I’ve also added something today which shall be up later.  Go see.

Because we hit our 500 fan milestone on Facebook a while back, I released a little mix of lo-fi chiptune stuff taken from my old Isometric Dancefloor EP.  You can grab that here.

We now have a Formspring, which is just another way of asking us inane questions.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, things are very tough at the moment as all of our PR got nuked by coverage emerging from E3.  We hope to bring the game back to people’s attention soon, but for now it would really help us out a lot if you would be able to keep mentioning the game to other people.

And now, prepare to be HEARTWARMED…

During the huge Microsoft press conference, at which there was some talk of family gaming, I received an email informing me that someone had bought our game because his son had told him about it!  I love this: I used to play computer games with my Dad when I was younger and this brought back happy memories for me.   Big companies spout a lot of old arse about how their games are “social experiences” and “bring people together” but we really, really, really appreciate it when people have a good time with our game, particularly at LAN parties or just with a couple of mates.  Those are the experiences we LOVE to have with games and the idea that we’re creating those for other people is deeply motivating.

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Twitter drive!

Monday, June 14th, 2010

With Village going again, I’m attempting to upgrade my Twitter presence.  Please follow @IanHardingham!  I pretty much only tweet things I find amusing about the games industry.

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Symetrical Levels

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

For reasons I cannot divulge now (but will divulge on Tuesday) I have just tweaked the generator so it is able to produce symetrical levels. I don’t particularly intend for this to become an important part of FS, but I will throw the generator button into the advanced editor so that people can play around with it and see what they think.

Anyway, here are some examples:

Interesting results.  I’m yet to actually play one of these – I will as soon as Bin gets into the office.  The first obvious thing is that they look a bit weird.  To me they’re really reminiscent of those weird mirror games you have.  The units are also generally distributed in a less interesting way, which is a product of them not being allowed to spawn in sight of the enemy.

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