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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Ian

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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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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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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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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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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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Retro City Rampage

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Number of games completed: 22788

—

Number of games of Extermination: 19775 ||| 71%
- average turns: 3.33674

Number of games of Disputed: 2169 ||| 7.8%
- average turns: 6.03273

Number of games of Secure: 3426 ||| 12%
- average turns: 4.48657

Number of games of Hostage: 2217 ||| 7.9%
- average turns: 3.66576

Number of games of Charge: 335 ||| 1%
- average turns: 3.74328

—-

Number of ratings: 735

Number of comments: 1002

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- have a new patch out at the end of June which fixes as many of the existing issues as possible, while buffing the sniper and addressing a couple of the map generator balance concerns

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Ian

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Despite moving house, I managed to release a new game mode last week. I’m going to update the rules of it slightly to require you be over the line for a minimum of three seconds to win, but apart from that (which will have made no sense to most of you) I’m a big fan of it.

I’m pretty sure the next full client patch will have an auto-updater involved, because that’s something people want (and rightly so).  However, that patch probably won’t be out for about 8 weeks or so, so grab the dev version (instructions in the afrore-linked forum post) if you want the latest.

My ISP are now receiving death threats from me in relation to our server.  They have promised me a nice shiny new one will be in place this week.

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(I’ve had to resize it to fit on the blog – click through to see the non-scaled version)

Love it.

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While that’s happening there will be some weirdnesses, most often a “score mismatch” error which you can safely ignore.

I am now turning my attemtion to speeding up the server – both with new hardware and better database code.

Here’s the eventual changelist – not that much larger than the initial one posted:

Changed max number of active games shown on list
Fixed random generator to not spawn units in visibility of each other
Fixed not allowing the – character in email addresses
Fixed Extermination scoring – no more weird -3 kills
Hostage scoring fixed
Added Client “status” to the opponent token in the top right
Added Dark/Light to the gamemode display in the opponent token
Relegated Challenge Messages to an ignorable pop-up message
The game mode is displayed in the Challenge Message
IRCBox has been made smaller and defaults to a (hopefully) better position
Added the ability to send quick-messages to your opponents (open the irc chat and type a message and click “Msg Op”)
Duplicate
Bug fix: in Duplicate Disputed the boxes were appearing in different locations on the same duplicate map.
Friends lists added.
Sidebar now shows more personalised leaderboards, showing the top 10 players but outside that only showing your friends.
Made the “user is already logged on” message more informative, to indicate that if you’ve recently been eroneously disconnected you will need to wait 90 seconds to log back on.
Serious error which was producing “desync” situations found and fixed
Another serious error which was causing “desync” with explosive units found and fixed
Your friends appear first in the “People Online” sidebar section
Admins are only emailed for “lonely” players if number of people online is < 8
Added feature: opponent ghosts show time since you last actually saw them
Stopped the crazy-mouse-pointer behavour on disconnect
Added a quit button!
Defenders in hostage games now get turn1-fire advantage
Added option to not get emailed by FS about new games/turns
You are allowed to see Duplicate Data for Duplicate Maps you haven’t played after that map has left the rotation (currently 24 hours)
Only games which have a “new turn” are shown in My Active Games
Increased the length of time that games will show up in My Active Games to 4 days
Posting a comment now clears the comment text box
Added license text for several APIs we use into the readme.
On pressing “(<)” when in an online game, you will be taken to that game’s gamePage rather than the feed.
Previously was requesting your own player page whenever you log in – now only happens when you actually press the “Players” button.
Draws are now correctly reported in the player page.
Draws are now correctly reported on the feed
If you don’t have any friends, the feed will show 20 entries.  If you do have any friends, it will show the top 4 entries regardless, and the rest up to 20 from friends.
“Hide all other units” has been moved from the ‘h’ key (where it was being hit accidentally) to “shift+h”
Probably fixed the “matchmaking yourself to yourself” bug
Fixed a bug where you could see the initial orientation and stance of Dark Secure opponent units
Added working generators for all 4 game modes into the “Advanced” game creation screen
If you select a Hostage, there will be lines drawn to the exit zones
Fixed a bug where games were sometimes not showing up in a user’s Player Page or My Active Games list.
No longer possible for terrorists to kill hostages in their Hostage Zone with explosives (CTs can still kill them with explosives)
Fixed a bug where you could drag units outside of their valid deploy zones (thanks to Blindsight for helping with this one)
Fixed a bug where corpses could trigger the “unit stuck in a wall” message.  Really surprised I didn’t see this one reported more!
Added the ability to choose the colours of your units and your enemies’ units
Previously if you were kicked from the server and clicked “Play Offline” the game would freeze.  Fixed.

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The patch will go live around 10am GMT tomorrow – it’s in final testing today.

We have a couple of forum posts asking for help with random questions:

Fonts

Color-blind colors

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Fixed Extermination scoring – no more weird -3 kills
Hostage scoring fixed
Added Client “status” to the opponent token in the top right, it shows that your opponent is “here”, “in another game”, “in the menu”, or “away”
Added Dark/Light to the gamemode display in the opponent token
Relegated Challenge Messages to an ignorable pop-up message
The game mode is displayed in the Challenge Message
IRCBox has been made smaller and defaults to a (hopefully) better position
Added the ability to send quick-messages to your opponents (open the irc chat and type a message and click “Msg Op”)
Duplicate
Bug fix: in Duplicate Disputed the boxes were appearing in different locations on the same duplicate map.
Friends lists added.
Sidebar now shows more personalised leaderboards, showing the top 10 players but outside that only showing your friends.
Made the “user is already logged on” message more informative, to indicate that if you’ve recently been eroneously disconnected you will need to wait 90 seconds to log back on.
Serious error which was producing “desync” situations found and fixed
Another serious error which was causing “desync” with explosive units found and fixed
Your friends appear first in the “People Online” sidebar section
Admins are only emailed for “lonely” players if number of people online is < 8
Added feature: opponent ghosts show time since you last actually saw them
Stopped the crazy-mouse-pointer behavour on disconnect
Added a quit button!
Defenders in hostage games now get turn1-fire advantage
Added option to not get emailed by FS about new games/turns
You are allowed to see Duplicate Data for Duplicate Maps you haven’t played after that map has left the rotation (currently 24 hours)
Only games which have a “new turn” are shown in My Active Games
Increased the length of time that games will show up in My Active Games to 4 days
Posting a comment now clears the comment text box
Added license text for several APIs we use into the readme.
On pressing “(<)” when in an online game, you will be taken to that game’s gamePage rather than the feed.
Previously was requesting your own player page whenever you log in – now only happens when you actually press the “Players” button.
Draws are now correctly reported in the player page.
If you don’t have any friends, the feed will show 20 entries.  If you do have any friends, it will show the top 4 entries regardless, and the rest up to 20 from friends.
“Hide all other units” has been moved from the ‘h’ key (where it was being hit accidentally) to “shift+h”
Probably fixed the “matchmaking yourself to yourself” bug
Fixed a bug where you could see the initial orientation and stance of Dark Secure opponent units
Changed max number of active games shown on list
Fixed random generator to not spawn units in visibility of each other
Fixed not allowing the – character in email addresses
Added working generators for all 4 game modes into the “Advanced” game creation screen
If you select a Hostage, there will be lines drawn to the exit zones

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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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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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You seriously saved my ass on that one folks.

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Also a small-but-important new feature shown in that shot!

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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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And I’m teasing!  So I’m not going to say what it is.

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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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The Global Rankings will be reset with Patch#1, but the “Version Zero” rankings will be posted here for posterity.

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Here, for your discussion, is a list of features I am considering for Patch#1.  No guarantees yet:

Features forum post

Ian

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It’s just a gift that keeps on giving.  Everywhere you look there’s a different piece of insanity.

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1. Some server fixes today which will hopefully improve speed a little bit and remove any downtime.

2. Server upgrade for Monday Morning (fingers crossed on this one – our server company are having trouble getting new computers because of Iceland).

3.  Client patch on Monday May 3rd solving as many bugs as I can by then.

Apologies for the server downtime between about 12am and 1.20am last night – I hope to have removed that problem now.

It’s been exactly 72 hours since we released the beta, and so far 4400 matches have been played.  Nice work everyone!

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Please let me know of any weird behavour.

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If you have pre-ordered the game and would like to try the Mac version, please email me your cd key to ian mode7games com.

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First off, I’ve just put in an update to the RMG effective immediately which should solve a lot of these problems.  It is now impossible for two opposing units to start with line of sight to each other.  Previously, they could be spawned with a box or a window between them, and I believe a lot of the problems were coming from that situation.  I’d like as many people as possible to give me feedback on the changes to the RMG.

Part of the allure of random Extermination maps is the thrill of seeing a new map and suddenly being presented with the situation, and I believe an important part of that is sometimes being in a fairly dire situation, and sometimes having a big advantage.  The RMS prior to this update was clearly creating situations which were too one-sided, and hopefully I’ve fixed that.  I want to ensure that there are still some situations being generated where there is only one “clear” escape route for a unit, with all of the inferences you can then make about what your opponent is going to do.  I’m looking forward to everyone’s feedback.

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1500 matches played
More than 80 people playing online at once for about 8 hours straight, with a max of 95
A lot of nice comments

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If you have bought Frozen Synapse and have not received the license email, please please check your spam folder (especially if you are on gmail) – it is most likely in there.

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The action is in our irc channel and in the forums.

Wish us luck!

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