NimbleBit

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” - Scott Adams

The highlight of last week was getting NAT punch through working. This means that (almost) any user can host a game for their friends to join without knowing how to configure a router or even knowing what a router is. This subtle change will mean that the game can scale to any amount of players. It took a lot of time and effort but I know it will pay off in the long run.

We are in the home stretch. I drove down from San Francisco yesterday and am now sitting in the office in San Diego with Dave and Ian. I will be here until the end of the month. This week I plan to clean up the last remaining issues with NAT punch as well as getting the rest of the server admin GUI working. Exciting times!

Much of my time last week was spent working on a launch trailer for Zero Gear, which is coming out great and will be a very exciting intro to Zero Gear for many people. Between video editing I have been tweaking some of the game guis, fixing some inconsistencies and adding a thing here or there where things weren’t clear enough. I also spent a little time on a kick ass Zero Gear promotional poster, which I will probably share sometime soon!

This week will be all about supporting Ian and Brian in bug fixing / testing as well as getting some balls rolling that will need to be at full speed by release.

According to the SVN log, last week was a busy one! Some highlights for me included adding a “Randomize” button to the garage, fixing an annoying input bug of my own creation, and improving the race and goal mode bots.

This week is just more bug fixing and polishing as we inch closer and closer to the final product!

Last week’s SVN log:

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” - George Bernard Shaw

Loading sucks. Loading while the player is trying to play the game REALLY sucks. The reason loading sucks is because it takes time. Time is very valuable. I spent a good chunk of last week working on getting Ogre’s background loading working. This allows the developer to load resources in another thread which would prevent loading from interrupting gameplay.

You may be asking why we don’t just load everything before the player is playing the game. The answer is we do. But the future is unknowable. When other player’s connect to the server they can be wearing any of our many pieces of gear. We cannot preload all of this gear so it must be loaded when needed.

Unfortunately the background loading didn’t work out for us so we are loading the content once the player is ready (the game play is over and they are waiting for the next round).

This week’s big task is to get something called NAT punch through working. This will allow players behind a firewall to host a Zero Gear server. This is going to be a huge task that is going to require us to switch our low level networking layer over to a different library entirely. Wish me luck!

Between scribbling madly on my legal pad to remind me of things that need doing, I have been tweaking maps, tweaking graphics, tweaking GUI’s and managing our issue tracker. I also spent a good chunk of time spicing up our Zero Gear website to start preparing for more people to start hitting it as we get closer to a public beta. As our private testing expands it is great to be hearing feedback from everyone and addressing what we can, and focusing on what people find the most fun.

This week I am just going to be hitting things as they come at me, and trying to prepare as best I can for what the next few months are going to bring!

Last week I started overhauling the garage GUIs, but hit a few snags and moved on to Bot work, mostly for tag mode. The tag bots now have limited functionality, enough to fill a spot or two in a server but not so great if you’re playing all alone. Zero Gear was intended to be played with real-live people so we’re debating how much time to invest in bot AI.

This week I’m hoping to get the garage back up and running with the new GUI so that our testers can go back to dressing up their characters!

Last week’s SVN log:

“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” - M. Scott Peck

We started doing limited playtests again last week. It has been a while since we have done any real playtesting (for a number of technical reasons) so it was nice to see other people playing the game. Overall the test went really well. Still some obvious problems that we will be working to fix this week. A few other highlights include: GUI system fixes, some graphics settings functional, 3D sound channels reversed fix, weapon input state fix, and other neat things.

Today I am working on getting threaded resource loading working in Ogre. I also plan to do general optimizations throughout the week leading up to the next play test.

Everyone is busy as we try to tie up lots of loose ends to get ZG looking polished to the players. I spent most of the week finishing up my new map, which we will be able to test this week. Most of the rest of my time is spent testing and fixing small graphical issues, or adding / testing / marking off things in our issue tracker.

Between lots of little tasks I need to do this week, I am hoping to make a blog post showcasing all the maps we will have in the game at release.

Last week I managed to get 90% of the game GUIs in the game or converted to our new GUI system. After feedback from our online play test I also tweaked some weapons and game modes, and fixed some bugs found in the race GUI.

This week I’ll be finishing off the remaining GUI tasks and then hopefully dive into some more bot AI.

Last week’s SVN log:

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” ~Tennessee Williams

26 weeks of logging NimbleActivity, thats 182 days! This week I am going to start posting a screenshot of the previous weeks SVN log entries to let people follow along more closely as Zero Gear enters the home stretch of its two year development phase.

I am happy to report that last week was the most productive week in a loooooong time. The game is running about 500% better than even one week ago. Mostly due to a few small networking changes. I added a concept I call time shifting which reduces the bandwidth by more than half in most cases (and even more in some cases!) that I will be writing about later in the week. After dominating the networking systems, I fixed a few more bugs related to input, the blur screen effect, error reporting, etc…

Next I plan to do stress testing using bots so I can track down remaining performance issues. Zero Gear is going to fly by the end of this week!

Things are getting pretty busy around here as we Kick Ass™ and Get Things Done™. Last week I was bouncing all over the place like usual, massaging GUI’s and tweaking game assets and level scripts due to feedback from our daily playtests. Last week I also started on a new race map inspired by the classic arcade game Ironman Stewart Offroad Racing. It will be all dirt and have plenty of twists, turns and jumps!

I will try to wrap up the new track this week, as well as dealing with all the other tasks that crop up.

I spent some time in the the first half of last week putting in a new game weapon (the Repulsor Shield) which repels all physical objects (fun!). I also added some graphical niceties including a drafting effect and random bot models (to go along with our hilarious new bot names). Some bug fixes rounded out the middle of the week before I took a break to beta test an OpenGL iPhone class being given by Noel Llopis of Snappytouch. This week I’m putting my nose to the grindstone to try and get the rest of the game GUIs up and running before moving on to plenty of AI bot programming!

Last week’s SVN log:

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” - Carl Sandburg

The start of last week was spent mostly on networking. I probably sound like a broken record but when networking is central to a game, it takes a lot of time to smooth out under all the different machine types and network conditions. I am currently working on some test code to make sure the middleware we use isn’t the cause of a specific issue we are seeing. I then worked with Ian on getting more GUIs working. After I binded the C++ GUI code to Lua script, Ian has been able to actually create the GUIs without needing to touch C++ code at all.

This week I am working more on my networking test code while taking breaks here and there to fix long standing bugs in our tracker.

P.S. A friend has recently launched the website for his new game dev company. Check out Final Form Games!

Last week I helped playtest ZG’s race mode a bunch. It is a probably a good sign when you go to test one thing and end up playing “just one more race” about 3 times before you get back to work. I also did a little bit of work helping to hook up some of the new GUIs in the game and refining them once I saw them working. I also started thinking about what kinds of changes I want to make to some of the race maps now that we have the race rules more nailed down, and I am starting to see what works well and what doesn’t in terms of course layouts.

This week I hope to mostly be helping hook up more GUIs in between tweaking maps.

Last week was a pretty productive one! Brian and I tracked down the bug that was creating Race Mode position anomalies which was giving me headaches most of last week. I also improved our race bot AI a bit, and even added a drafting boost award mechanism to liven things up. The end of the week saw me converting more of our GUIs to MyGUI which is where I’ll be picking up today.