NimbleBit

NimbleBit has been busy busy busy! As you can tell by the lack of blog updates, we have been busy getting things done. Here is what we have been cranking on:

I learned two good lessons last week: Printing out text to the console in windows takes way more time than it should and precompiled headers are great if compile time is the slow part of the build process. Thanks to precompiled headers and a cool python script from Games From Within, compile times went down by about half. I still need to greatly improve link time but any kind of speedup is worth it when it comes to long build times. I started getting MyGUI integrated into Zero Gear. While we already have Hikari for our GUIs, we need something a bit faster for the in-game stuff.

I am starting off this week with a search for the fastest way to print out text to a console in windows (any suggestions?) After solving that problem I plan to get back to network optimizations (which I was intended to work on last week before getting interrupted by things like the slow console printing :().

Oh, almost forgot to mention I finally joined the dark side and got one of them fancy ITelephones that I keep hearing about. Any suggestions for neat program applications? I hear the stuff here is pretty cool…

P.S. A note about that python script linked above, I had to convert the VC++ 9 build log to ASCII from unicode in order to use it.

I have been busy keeping track of all the work we have been doing and logging future tasks we need to do in order to get Zero Gear closer to another beta. I have been tweaking values and sizes of things as they get implemented, and otherwise doing any other little bits of polish where I can spot the opportunities for them. I also spent a few days modifying and tweaking our Tag Test map, to be a little more open and play nicer with vehicles.

Later in the week I spent a lot of time becoming familiar with MyGUI and how to re-skin and create gui layouts with it. So far I am finding it to be a neat little gui library with a lot of functionality. It has a neat little layout editor that is allowing me to slap together guis pretty fast. We will see if hooking them up to the game through LUA is as easy! This week I will probably continue building some guis before seeing where the rest of the week takes me.

Last week we spent some time thinking about the type of game Zero Gear is, and what we want it to be. After spending lots of time playing the different game modes over the last couple weeks I got the feeling something small was holding back a lot of potential. ZG is quite a unique mixture of FPS-like gameplay mixed with vehicle controls. One thing I’ve been finding a little frustrating is the lack of control over these cool weapons in the game.

One solution we came up with was to make each weapon somewhat guided, but that wouldn’t eliminate all the 3 point turns I seemed to be doing in the game. After some thinking and looking at vehicle combat in some other games we decided to try out a mouse look system to be able to aim weapons and gaze around the levels in 360 degrees of freedom. I’ve gotten the free look system working well and now just need to hook up the aimed weapons to see how much of an impact this feature would make on gameplay.

Last week continued to be pretty constructive having everyone working from the San Diego office. Heres what went down:

Last week I finally got around to displaying an image when the game is loading. You will not be seeing this graphic for too long as currently Zero Gear loads super fast. Some code was added to make debugging easier. The server’s framerate is now displayed on the client’s network display GUI. It is now easy to see if the server slows down for any reason. I also added some very simple spike detection code to display when a game system (networking, rendering, sound, etc) slows down for some reason. So far the results have been… interesting.

This week I will continue optimizing, smoothing, and polishing. I also hope to spend some time on making the game build faster.

Last week was split between nursing a really bad cough and head cold and working on Zero Gear. I spent the majority of the week tweaking suspension and other physics values on the physical kart model. After days of tweaking the mass, wheel friction, suspension stiffness, compression and dampening, I finally arrived at a physical model that is much more stable than it was previously. You can never totally control what happens in a fully physical simulation, but we can try and help it in the right direction.

This week I will be working with Ian to continue putting polish on our existing game modes and general player experience.

Last week I got my feet wet in the Zero Gear Lua script code by implementing “air steering” so the player can control the rotation of their karts when in the air. After that I spent the majority of my time reworking the camera system to look a little nicer with plenty of help from Brian. This week I’ll be trying to fix even more Zero Gear odds and ends.

Ian is omitted from this weeks post, claiming his last weeks vacation extends to having to write his IKWYDLW post this week. Valid point, or mere laziness? You decide!

While tracking down some performance issues, I discovered a sort of HeisenBug. The code I was using to find slowdown was causing slowdown. After adding a function to toggle this code, the game ran much, much faster. Some code that was no longer needed was removed from the input system. I had to add a key code translation function to the input system as some keys (~ [ ]) didn’t have the expected code on Dave’s new laptop (I hope that doesn’t come back to bite me square on the ass). There were other tweaks here and there, mostly related to performance.

For this week, I am going to finish working on optimization and fix the remaining big issues on our tracker. I count 7. Perfect, 1 a day…

Last week I spent some time prototyping the early stages of a skate park inspired Zero Gear level. I always have fun trying to do stunts on our current maps, so I figured it would be a lot of fun to have a map full of nothing but things to launch yourself off of and collide with. I also helped Brian with testing a little bit to help squash more bugs.

This week I am hoping to start refining my stunt park type map, as well as help Brian out with anything he needs in his quest to root out Zero Gear bugs.

The hardest part of Mondays is remembering everything you did last week.

Making a game is really just the process of removing bugs. The very first bug being there is no game. I spent all of last week (and most of the past 6 months now that I think about it) debugging. Specifically I got some old, buggy gameplay scripts updated and debugged. I also fixed some problems in the bits of code that syncs players looks between the server and clients (what hat, kart, etc they are using and with what colors). I spent more time working on networking issues as well. Not too exciting but then 99% of game development is not exciting.

This week I plan to concentrate on fixing the remaining problems in the networking code. These problems are the last thing really holding us up at this point. I worked on a network stats display GUI over the weekend that should help me in this endeavor.

Last week was spent tweaking and adding the final graphical touches on Moon Drop as well as doing as much testing as I could. We were able to add some more personality to the game which is what makes it a NimbleBit title. Me and Ian hashed out some of the final game play tweaks and it should be headed off to submission soon! I also spent some time trying to find some sort of style we could use on our app icons to tie them all together into more of a collection, but have yet to find a style I like.

This week hopefully I will be doing a lot of Zero Gear network testing with Brian!

Last week I spent what feels like the majority of my time playing Baseball Slugger, but in between rounds we worked to get Moon Drop to the brink of submittal.

This week we’re tidying up the odds and ends and polishing it up before we pack it in a box and mail it off to Apple.

No blog posts between IKWYDLW updates… either we have been lazy last week, or we have just been very busy. I will let you decide!

*Murphy has contracted an illness which I can only assume is a new strain of “Cat Flu” due to his regular proximity to cats, so I will just mention a few things he worked on last week -dave.*

A few weeks ago we finally started using an issue tracking piece of software to nail down exactly which things we want to finish for the next beta of Zero Gear. We used Pivotal Tracker which is free and a very nice tool. So Brian has been working his fingers to the nub to whittle down the list of issues until we arrive at our next milestone for beta testing. Here are some of the issues he has crossed off the list in the last week:

Twister and Puncher weapon functional again, game bogs down when rapid input is given
graphical kart wheels not rotating properly
kart does not reset orientation when respawned
soccer ball object not graphically scaling, LUVbot weapon functional
GUI unresponsive to input
client not able to connect to a server if connection has failed in the past
camera not functional in garage
client lua error when switching maps.

wow, exciting stuff!

Last week I spent a few days working up some more graphics for an upcoming iPhone game which you should be hearing more about soon. The rest of the week I spent testing and logging bugs in order to more clearly define how close we are to the next Zero Gear beta. We finally got all the weapons working together, so I spent a few days tweaking masses and force values in order to make them all a behave a little better in relation with each other. The emergent gameplay that comes out of all these physical weapons interacting with each other, players and game objects is quite cool!!!

Last week I attended my first WWDC (Apple World Wide Developer Convention) in foggy San Francisco. It was quite the experience, and I’m glad I ended up going. Days were spent attending iPhone sessions and evenings/early mornings were spent at various parties sponsored by websites, developers, and publishers. I met a lot of great people, and learned much. I am glad to be home however, finally getting back to what I enjoy the most, making games! The long wait continues for the Bluebird and Scoops updates to be approved, but I’m wasting no time and diving in to our next iPhone game, more details to come!