There is No Such Word as Failure: A Lesson on Failure and Balance

This may seem like a strange post. But it is a reflection on the past five years that I feel sharing with anyone can help them think about what they are doing in regards to their profession, as well as where they plan on going. Be warned though: Get settled, get some hot cocoa, and enjoy the read. Perhaps it pertains to you in more ways than one, and it does not necessarily have to be about video games or your career.

So, let me continue on and start with the strange, seemingly unrelated topic first: StarCraft 2, a video game.

With StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void being released this past month, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the past five years in regards to my past pursuits in relation to video games. These reflections are on how I handle something that I enjoy, how I handle failure, and ultimately, what I have learned from the past five years in regards to my pursuit in the video game industry.

Let us start at the beginning. That is, the release of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. That was about five years ago. A lot was going on for me at that time: I had graduated high school, started my education at DeVry University, and maintaining a wonderful relationship with my now fiancé. StarCraft 2 had a major impact on my life and may have made me who I am today. I say this for three reasons: it happened at a critical time in my life, it helped define my work ethics, and it allowed me have some introspection.

I remember the day I first bought StarCraft 2. I was at a local Target with my fiancé. After some debate I bought it. I then proceeded to spend the first three nights playing through the campaign. I then logged in to online multiplayer (the real reason the game is so popular) for the first time. I began to become assimilated into the SC2 ecosystem within the course of a week.

After a few losses and one win I was placed in Bronze League – one of the lowest leagues to be put in. I played a few more games which led to me being obsessed with winning. This was odd for my personality as I played sports my whole life and didn't care about winning or losing as much as the other players. This obsession led me to spend hours watching SC2 shout-casts by HD and Husky (don't know who those guys are? Me either - anymore) and improving my SC2 skills with tips from Day9 (quite the fellow). The hours spent doing this usually crept into the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes, it would be dawn before I decided to go to bed.

With all that dedication, I started to improve.

With my improvements I began winning. I was consumed with this rush of excitement, the feeling of glory, the joy in crushing my opponents. I was winning games using my god-like macro abilities and my sick Protoss builds. I was rolling over the enemies. Within weeks I climbed the ladder from Bronze league, to Silver, to Gold, then to Platinum league. I was an SC2 super star in my head. (As a note, the Master and Grand Master leagues did not exist at that time).

A few months in I started to pay attention to the pros - NaniWa, HuK, and MC. I would download a few of the replays they would post and study them. I would watch the tournament VoDs – Videos on Demand. I would also do practice runs in game to perfect my build timings. Indeed, I was going all in.

After some time I progressed to Diamond League. The excitement! The joy! I WAS A GOD! ... I may get a little carried away with my statements but it is hard to share the complete, full body experience that came with joining the upper echelon of SC2 players. Worse still, I became a Rank One Diamond in my division for a good period of time. My ego began to tear down the walls of my bedroom around me. This is where the decline began.

The game started to consume my life, it occupied my every thought. I had transitioned to three jobs at the time and all I talked to my co-workers about was StarCraft 2. My lovely fiancé (then girlfriend) listened to me talk her ear off about every aspect of the game - even watched a few tournaments with me (bless her heart). I was a Protoss... that is how I defined myself. I was 19 at the time.

My mind started to become the barrier. I would get cocky trying out for SC2 clubs, I was disheartened by the lack of SC2 community in the Midwest region near me, and I felt alone - nobody I knew played SC2 as well as I did to practice with. It was a void that could not be filled. I began to feel lonely. For some reason, I just lost interest. I started to feel like a failure, there was no rhyme or reason to it, it just sort of happened.

I quit StarCraft 2 before Heart of the Swarm (the second part of the three part game) was even launched.

I moved onto League of Legends, another competitive based game, this time with teams of 5.

Talk about a vicious cycle. If you reread the entire section about StarCraft 2 and replace "SC2" with "LoL" you get the picture. I fell into that trap as well.

Looking back, playing video games consumed me when it came to competition. I enjoy playing the ‘regular’ games like the entire Witcher series by CD Projekt Red and the Total War series by Creative Assembly. But the competitive games affected me differently than those. They started to feel like a job, a climb to the top. I would get frustrated and feel inadequate and I would blame everything around me for that feeling – all from a silly little games.

With that being said, we will move onto my projects I worked on in parallel with this SC2 craze.

I went to DeVry University for a degree in Game and Simulation Programming. It was all fun and games for the first two years as with any College / University. That is why I had all that time to play SC2. However, junior year began to challenge me – which I enjoyed. I was learning project development cycles, advanced C++, networking, game design, and game engine architecture. I had also joined a few people on some professional projects during my time at DeVry. And this is where I would like to lead into. (If you really want details on my projects at DeVry, read all of my 2014 posts.)

a simple FPS cam (above) and a trailer for my senior project (below)

I had worked on several projects with outside entities while at DeVry. These projects - in no particular order - were named as follows: Super Ubie Land, Undead Fred: A Grave Tale, Invisible Battles: The Quest for Hope, War for Orion, Soccer Legend Online, and Bring out Your Dead Trading Card Game.

I was prototyping Super Ubie Land for Notion Games, LLC on the Game Maker engine. Just like when I was obsessed with SC2, I threw myself into it. I had a working prototype up and running for the developer in Game Maker. I even started to prototype another game for him. Turns out that prototypes and proofs of concept are not permanent nor guarantee a job. I spent a summer on that project and the company decided to go with a different engine that they did not need my skills for. Which I am okay with – these things happen. Was I heartbroken? Yes. To be 19 and have a name on a legitimate game would have been awesome. However, I could not help myself from blaming them and feeling like a failure for some time.

Herald in my 20s. I was looking for a project to work on. So I posted on the Game Maker community forums as a programmer looking for work. I was picked up immediately by a wide-eyed hobby developer. The project sounded fun; I was up for anything, optimistic, just getting off the high of a really fun school project learning DirectX 9 (now ancient). I accepted.

I must say, it was a team filled with talent. If I met that same team today, I would still have the same optimistic feeling. We had a talented artist, a practical game designer, talented programmers (yes, some self-flattery there), an excellent sound artist, and a game demo ready in three months. There were talks of interviewing with some small time indie game magazines. We were sailing along nicely.

test screenshot for Undead Fred: A Grave Tale

One day – it just stopped. It was strange. We went from daily emails to weekly. Skype never rang for me anymore. Eventually – I was working solo on a project. I was disheartened, frustrated. I must admit I was quite angry. I uploaded it to the Steam Community and said “ah ‘phooie with it.”

From that point on I promised to focus on school for I had, once again, completely devoted myself to something just to be tossed aside like used underwear at the end of the day. Worse yet, nobody else noticed nor cared. I felt cheated of opportunity, untalented in my skills, and completely distraught.

Fast forward a few months. I broke that oath. It was mostly out of desperation for an internship before graduation, because internships are of the utmost importance. You are doomed without one no matter the industry.

I cannot remember how I got there, but I came into contact with the owner of an indie game studio in downtown Milwaukee, WI. After some research I started to believe in the project and I worked on Bring out Your Dead TCG for Ever Fire Studios. It was a green project comprised of hobby developers and students alike. All resources were paid for by the owner. For all intents and purposes – it was an unpaid internship, which is not that uncommon.

The project was approached using the Agile Project Management methodology. This was a breath of fresh air because any project prior there was no project management. Which was fine for prototypes, but not for a complete project. We were getting along fine and having fun. The internship required seven hours of work a week and the attendance to a meeting once a week. This helped me regulate my time spent on it unlike the previous projects for Super Ubie Land and Undead Fred: A Grave Tale. Even more so, it was a far cry from my StarCraft 2 days – where I managed my time horrendously.

However, it was not meant to be. Owning two companies cost money and the priorities were on the other company – Forever Interactive – and their exciting project Visions of Zosimos. I do not blame them, this project was just getting started and VoZ had been in development for years – and a great project at that from playing it a few times. But, I was – again – heartbroken.

(above) visions of zosimos trailer

That brings my total time dedicated to projects to about two years. My total number of projects I worked on to three. The total number of completely heart-wrenching, motivation killing, talent squelching failures to three as well. I was on a roll and a nice trip down failure lane.

It was starting to feel like StarCraft 2 all over again. I would start, get excited, be optimistic, make great progress, only to see things halt and die on me. Sometimes, I don’t even know why it went south other than that it did.

To complete the overarching theme, I graduated school and worked on three more projects after that. These ones were shorter term and not as important to me but I will write details just to cover all my bases.

Soccer Legend Online wanted to hire me on a contract basis. They wanted some AI programmed in with networking within three weeks for a small payout. I was arrogant and thought I could do anything, a motto I seem to have going for me as that is how I felt with StarCraft 2, the reality did not match my internal expectations. Needless to say there was fallout in communication and I did not deliver the expected product. Now, they are Greenlit, so kudos to them.

Then the game Invisible Battles: The Quest for Hope. If ever there was a time that I could relate myself to being a wormhole of confusion, it was then. I had no idea what was going on with this project. All I knew was that I was programming a game and I was getting paid some decent money for it. I had no idea where the artists were at, but I never had assets to use from them. Sound designers were non-existent. The game designer, well, I wasn’t sure who was the game designer or just a person voicing their opinion.

(above) Invisible Battles: The Quest for Hope combat, morphing, and item pickup prototype

I made great progress on that project. I was excited to work on it as it was with the recently released Unreal Engine 4. Again, I threw everything I had into it, all my free time, all my thoughts, and all my efforts.

Then the developer ran out of money. Again, I had the overwhelming feeling of failure and complete loss of worth.

This brings me to my last endeavor with an external team: War for Orion. I have no one to blame but myself on this one. I was excited for a brief moment and I was working with that team in exchange for a trade of skills. I program for them, they make art for me. We both meet halfway. I received half of the excellent art assets (and I didn’t even deserve that much) and I worked on the game halfheartedly. This has nothing to do with the project in itself – it is a great concept and I try to follow the team.

(above) War for Orion prototype video

What happened was that I was beginning to become bitter. I started on this project expecting the same thing to happen as had happened before – I start, get excited, move fast, devote my time, and then find out it was all a huge waste. My own pessimism got to me and it gave off an aura to the team.

I was asked to leave – on friendly terms – after a few months.

Again – heart broken. But this time, it happened because I expected it to happen. I conjured the event with my own mind. This is a direct relation to what I did with StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. I brought myself down in the end.

This is the point of the story where everything ties in. You see, I followed the same path when it came to StarCraft 2 and Game Development. I let failure get to me and control me at this point. It didn’t lead me anywhere useful… or so I thought.

Reflection is a great thing. It allows you to look into yourself and learn something new. What have I learned? That commitment to something does not mean going full throttle all in to get where you want to be. Commitment means taking the time to plan for the long haul and balance the work that needs to be done with the rest of your life.

Constantly, I hear about these developers and pro gamers that spend 70 or 80 plus hours a week on their goals. That doesn’t help anybody but your manager or yourself getting the illusion that you are doing something worthwhile. Damaging your health, even if it is for something you love, is not worth it – ever.

I have learned a lot in the past five years, and these are just the things I have learned reflecting on something as simple as my enjoyment of a video game and my pursuits of working in the game industry. Better yet, all of these perceived failures were anything but.

I have learned that there is no such thing as failure – only the opportunity to learn and grow. So, the next time something doesn’t work out, or you lose focus and stop a great project. Sit back, write it down if you have to, and take a look at the why. If you are writing a lot of whys about something other than yourself, stop, you are not ready for this.

Reflection takes self-awareness and introspection. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses – what makes you tick. Better yet, you need to find out your flaws and work with them, or improve them. My flaws were obvious in the above stories: I did not balance my life well, I allowed failure to overwhelm me, I used to blame outside entities for these failures, and I allowed myself to be negatively affected by these events.

I have learned over the past five years. I have learned from StarCraft 2 that I can easily become obsessed and unbalanced when it comes to achieving my dreams. I have learned from my past projects that management is a key factor in success. I have also learned from both that there are things more important than making video games, which is just a career after all.

Finally, to prove that there is no such word as failure, I sit every day at my day job, programming – a job that I love. I would not be there if I had not gone on wild adventures in regards to video games and game development. From each of my endeavors I learned a little more about myself. I have tweaked my bugs, and produced a better self. I am happy and I will continue to do what I love outside of work – like play video games and make them, and – most importantly – spend time with those I love. The only difference now than five years ago is that I will no longer consider anything a failure; I will have a healthy balance in my life; and I will only work on what I enjoy in life because life is too short to be miserable.

Now, I challenge you: sit down, reflect on all perceived failures in the past five years. Find reasons why you failed due to yourself. Then reflect and learn that they were not failures, but opportunities to grow.

For those of you interested in the projects (some now dead):

· Visions of Zosimos by Forever Interactive

· Super Ubie Land by Notion Games

· Everfire Studios

· Undead Fred

· Soccer Legend Online by True Illusion Software

Preview my portfolio website for my upcoming games by clicking this text.

DeVry Senior Project

Short announcement today afer a long time of no posting. Starbound Aces is submitted into DeVry University's Senior Project Showdown. Here is our presentation video, enjoy!

Server Side Player Properties

An after effect of our server side overhaul is that the game now has a database full of ship, weapon, and projectile configurations. This means the server can pull data from there and send the properties to players upon game starts. In conjunction with the client side GUI to configure a ship, we have a good system going for multi-player games.

The only real issue was wrestling with the timing of script execution, construction, and threads. This caused some issues where the client was not updating its properties when the server sends the data due to the script not existing and therefore not listening for the event. When that happened, the event just disappeared. Unity does allow for script execution ordering but that would not have fit my case as the GameManager Singleton and the SmartFox Client Controller needed to send and receive events before, during, and after other scripts. Therefore, I rolled some code in the C# scripts to time events the way they would work with our system.

Unity / SmartFox Senior Project Update

For the past two weeks I have been working on overhauling the server side logic to be more authoritative in our game Starbound Aces. Most of the work is done and completed to satisfaction. The parts that are complete are server side validation of input, shooting, abilities, ship configurations, and weapon configurations. All of that data is replicated well to each client.

The final step - transformations and maneuvers are hitting a rough patch.

As it works now, the game on the server is launched in a new thread that is updated every 150 milliseconds. Right now, this causes jittery game play and horrible movement. These are the issues I plan on resolved soon.

Server Replication

I have been spending the past two weeks re-factoring the server for our game - Starbound Aces. It is in an attempt to move to a more authoritative server model for the game to prevent cheating and game-play issues due to players being out of sync. The biggest improvement I have made is translating and rotating object on the server and sending the new positions to the players. With the aid of the LWJGL and the Apache Math3 API, I was able to imitate the original Unity C# scripts we had for movement onto the server in Java.

Here is the source code for that:

package com.gspteama.gamedriver;



import org.apache.commons.math3.geometry.euclidean.threed.Rotation;

import org.apache.commons.math3.geometry.euclidean.threed.RotationOrder;

import org.lwjgl.util.vector.Matrix4f;

import org.lwjgl.util.vector.Vector3f;

import org.lwjgl.util.vector.Vector4f;



public class Movement{

    public float Velocity;

    public float Acceleration;

    

    private float maxVelocity;

    

    protected Vector3f position = new Vector3f();

    protected Vector3f rotation = new Vector3f();

    protected Vector4f quaternion = new Vector4f();

    

    protected static final Vector3f UP = new Vector3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);

    protected static final Vector3f LEFT = new Vector3f(-1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);

    protected static final Vector3f FORWARD = new Vector3f(0.0f,0.0f, 1.0f);

    

    protected Matrix4f transform = new Matrix4f();

    

    public void onUpdate(float deltaTime){

        Velocity = Velocity + Acceleration * deltaTime;

        if(Velocity >= maxVelocity){

            Velocity = maxVelocity;

        }

        

        Rotation rotator = new Rotation(RotationOrder.XYZ, rotation.getX(),

                rotation.getY(),

                rotation.getZ());

        quaternion = new Vector4f((float)rotator.getQ0(), 

                (float)rotator.getQ1(),

                (float)rotator.getQ2(), 

                (float)rotator.getQ3());

        

        transform.setIdentity();

        

        transform = transform.translate(position);

        transform = transform.rotate(rotation.getY(), UP);

        transform = transform.rotate(rotation.getX(), LEFT);

        transform = transform.rotate(rotation.getZ(), FORWARD);

        transform = transform.scale(new Vector3f(1.0f,  1.0f, 1.0f));

        

        //to row major

        transform.transpose();

        

        //get the forward vector

        Vector3f forward = new Vector3f(transform.m20,

                                        transform.m21,

                                        transform.m22);

        forward.normalise();

                                        

        Vector3f forwardVel = new Vector3f(forward.getX() * Velocity,

                                            forward.getY() * Velocity,

                                            forward.getZ() * Velocity);

        

        position = Vector3f.add(position, forwardVel, position);

    }



    public Movement(float maxVelocity){

        this.maxVelocity = maxVelocity;

        Velocity = 0.0f;

        Acceleration = 0.0f;

        transform.setIdentity();

    }

    

    public void onLeft(float value){//A

        rotation.y += value;

    }

    

    public void onRight(float value){//D

        onLeft(value);

    }

    

    public void onUp(float value){//W

        Acceleration += value;

    }

    

    public void onDown(float value){//S

        Acceleration -= value;

    }

    

    public void onHorizontal(float value){//MouseX

        rotation.z += value;

    }

    

    public void onVertical(float value){//MouseY

        rotation.x += value;

    }

    

    public float[] getPosition(){

        return new float[]{position.getX(),

            position.getY(),

            position.getZ()

        };

    }

    

    public float[] getQuaternion(){

        return new float[]{quaternion.getX(),

            quaternion.getY(),

            quaternion.getZ(),

            quaternion.getW()

        };

    }

}

Hey Baby, I Wanna Know (What Have I Been Up to)!

Seems like it has been a while since I have done my last post. This is with good reason, my fingers are blistering from refactoring the server side engine. What is it that I am doing? Something maniacal in a time crunch - every programmers dream come true.

Currently I am in the middle of a major overhaul of the server side engine to be more authoritative in regards to gameplay. The key word here is gameplay. So far, the engine works great in regards to GUI systems calling server events and data. Such things would be high scores, creating games, joining games, ship configuration, and so on and so forth. The part that needs work is the actual code that handles the game logic simulation such as collisions and player positions. As it stands right now, the server just forwards all this information with no replication. This can lead to easy cheating and abuse of networking. So, I decided to fight this by doing the following:

• Player input is sent to server for processing
• Server calculates position
• Server updates game world on itself, then sends data to players
• Server handles collisions
• Server handles player elements - health, life, death, ammo, cooldown, etc.

On another note, I have also been working on the special effects in the game to make it more visually appealing. More on that on another date.

Starbound Aces Promo Trailer

Today is a good day to dogfight! Here is the official Starbound Aces Promo Trailer, featuring epic space combat!

Starbound Aces Update - The Countdown

With the impending end of our project, I have been in scramble mode. Our project Starbound Aces is coming to a close and there is much to do to get a viable product from the 16 week development period. So, first and foremost, we must focus on fixing any issues we have that reside in the game. As it stands, there are a few. These issues are as follows:

• Network problem when joining a second game after playing the first
• Sound issues
• Projectile / Weapons are lame

The last one is more or less a comment on how we have not gotten to adding awesome effects for the projectiles themselves.

Enough gripping though, I have some nice art content to show off for our game, as well as an in game screen shot! Enjoy!

Weekday Update w/ Video

I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day and weekend - I sure did. Now onto business, the state of the game.

Starbound Aces is coming along very nicely. Since my last video update I have introduced a lot of new features and changes since my last update. I will compare as they are seen in this video:

This video shows everything from a week ago. Over that time I have made a lot of changes. Many of them are simple optimizations and bug fixes. However, there are a few that are noticeable in the game. These changes are:

-Inserted a new game menu option: Ship configuration
-Changed the engine effect to a trail renderer
-Changed the tracking system of the seeker missile.
-Tweaked some variables

Here are the changes that the other programmer, David Tiscerano, incorporated:
-Cooldown system for manuevers
-HUD Display of cooldown

Many of the other busy work has been behind the scenes tweaks and optimization. Until next time - Enjoy game programming!

Systems Operational (5PM Hosting of Alpha Test)

Alright, alright, alright, it has been a long day of coding for the past six hours of my life. That makes a total of  eleven hours of coding in the past sixteen. So I have a few new features to show off, some screen shots, and later in the day, some videos.

First off, let us take a look at some of the new features. These new features are:

• Weapon Configuration in Multiplayer
• In-match HUD Display
• Weapon Cooldown
• Current Ammunition
• Damage Effects
• Server Side Configurations

The weapon configuration goes hand in hand with the server side configurations I just listed. Now a player can choose between two weapons at the moment, Cannon (More damage, straight shot) or Seeker Missile Launcher (Less Damage, Longer Range, Follows target). When the player chooses one of these options pre-match the GameManager takes a note of this and when the player spawns, tells the server to get all of the data needed to implement the weapons. Visually, they are the same at the moment and we want to add one more - a laser beam.

Secondly, we now have some information in the game during a match in regards to combat. This information is minimal. The first is a cross-hair, that when within a certain distance of an object - tells you the distance to that object. Two other key components of the HUD are in the lower right hand corner - weapon cooldown and total ammunition in relation to clip size. Pressing escape will bring up a menu that lists all players in the game as well as the ability to logout / leave the match.

In game screenshot of a match

Finally, I added some visual fidelity to the combat by add damage effects. The damage effects of ships takes place when a player reaches 30% or less health and then again at 10% or less health. Right now it is some simple particle effects of fire and smoke.

I will also be hosting Alpha testing at 5 PM (Central Time) today, so if you want to join in please leave a comment on this blog and I will get you the required information.

Spit and Polish

Its that time of the year again. Spring, everything is clean. Everything that is, except for my code and our project.

It seems that with the rapid development we have been going through, the code has gotten a little messy and non critical errors are leaking through to show themselves in our final product. With only five more weeks to go, we need to fix this and get a nice, clean, game up and running. That is what I have devoted my past few weeks to - cleaning code, cleaning game play, and implementing some necessary features.

Soon, I will have a video up to show all the new features and game play for you to see. I know I keep promising it, but as all programmers/software engineers know, the coding is never done.

Until next time, enjoy!

Massive Game Overhaul

I spent most of today and last night going over the game and overhauling a lot of the features and the UI for the game. There are some massive improvements to all the scenes as well as textures for our ships now. Here is a list of all of the improvements made:

• Remote Players who connect to a game no longer have oddly rotated ships.
• Colliders for both the remote players and the client player are now properly oriented.
• Users can now join games that were created earlier that their login time.
• Scrolling view for all of the current games queuing.
• Uniformed GUI re-sizing for various resolutions. (minimum 1024px wide)
• Updated visual effects for space ships
• Better feedback when registering.

If you want to start a game, leave a comment and follow the link here to play the web player version of the game: Starbound Aces Game

And here are snapshots of the new ship models by Valentin Oprea:

Player Ship 1 - Texture

Player Ship 2 - Untextured

Game Persistence Implementation

For the past week I have been going over a lot of my school project code and figuring out what core gameplay elements still need to be added in regards to the server. If you have been keeping tabs on the github project, you can see that a lot of it was fixing code that caused errors as well as adding data persistence to the server engine.

Let us talk about the first issue at that I ran into and fixed this past week. The issue was players trying to log in twice. This was something simple to fix, remove the request to log in. Well, this caused the client to not know it was logged in and therefore I reverted that change. The second issues was automatic room removal. rooms where not being removed properly as they caused exceptions to be thrown. Turns out it was the extension's overriden destroy method causing the issue. This I found strange because the tutorials said that if I implemented the login assistant component, I needed to call the components destroy method in the extensions destroy method. Well, I removed that and have thus far to receive errors since then.

Onto the fun part now. I have added a full, new feature to the game. This is a game list that pulls up games created during your session as well as queued games created while you were picking your nose and not logged in to our game! This is very exciting as it allows for a whole list of data to be populated in the game list field. It also works, right off the bat! Unfortunately, I do not have the new Webplayer out there for the public to play just yet, but I do have all source code for it at our repository, so take a look there or even download/checkout the project and build it from source.

The final installment that I worked on in the past week was all GUI systems for the pre-login stage. Most of it was just a design change as they are using our common template. This is taking some time because I have never used Unity's built in GUI system and did not code for GUISkins. So most of the styles are hand configured and have their parameters set in the editor through public properties.

I am not sure when, but soon I will have a new game play video out as well as a walk through of all the new features. After that we will have the new player available for playing on the web. I also plan to do a desktop build as well. But first I will need to revamp the GUI for the lobby as well as the high scores.

Until next time!

Dumb Coders be Dumb

Today I have learned a very important lesson. This lesson is that in life, spelling, is of the utmost importance. Think about it, if you can't spell your own name, how will people know who you are? If we spelled cities differently each time, how would we navigate to Palo Alto or Aplo Aito? Well, even though computers are logical creatures, they definitely need you - the user, programmer, engineer - to know how to spell.

One of my issues, one of many of my issues, was caused by a simple misspelling. The stack trace told me where the error is. I thought I changed it, but when I uploaded it, I misspelled the directory, therefore leading me down the rabbit hole of "I swear I fixed that" and "I don't know why my code doesn't work."

I may have posted about this twice, but it is a stupid thing to do, misspell words. I really hope it does not befall you on your adventures in game programming.

Now for some real updates. I have finally fixed the code in the Client application to properly display names of users in a game that the player joins. This issues was brought on by how Unity loads levels and some shuffling of code.

If anybody has taken a look at the source code they would know that when a player joins a room, the game manager is prepped with a queue of players who are already in the room, or are joining the room. It supplies the script with both the player's name and the player's id on the network. If the queue is filled, it will copy this data to a new dictionary and iterate over this to put the relevant data in an instantiated object in the game and put it in the player dictionary.

This method worked fine, until player names were not showing up and they had to be added in the update method when the client received a foreign transform message. The instantiation turned out to be happening before a level fully loaded and so was creating players in the previous scene in Unity, and destroying them. This meant they existed, but then didn't exist at the proper moment.

I fixed this by only allowing the queue to be emptied in the multi player or single player scenes. Now the player names and ids are displayed properly and data is passed back and forth without incident. I also set the labels for names to clamp to the view port. This will prevent players from seeing a name of a player who is actually in the opposite direction. It will also now act as sort of a radar on the HUD. I like it, but I need to see if other players enjoy it as well.

Next I will be fixing one last server issue in which multiple death notices go out when a player dies, leading to a whole flood of errors.

Until next time, enjoy game programming and check out the revised version on my google drive.

Senior Project Update SmartFox Server

So I spent yesterday looking at the code in regards to a server issue I am having. The issue is that the socket reader is throwing an exception whenever the player leaves the room.

Quite frankly I have been stuck on this for two days now. I even made a post in the SmartFox forums to see if anybody could help me out with it. To see details, here is the link: Socket Reader NullPointerException .

Other than that I have not been doing much in regards to Unity or SmartFox Server. However, when all the issues server side are fixed I plan on cleaning up the presentation of the game GUI. Our other programmer is working on the camera scripts for the game so that the camera doesn't follow the ship perfectly, making for dull looking gameplay action.

Unity Senior Project Update

I decided to get cracking at fixing some issues that were left over from the last half of my Senior Project. The issue was players were trying to join rooms twice when going into the lobby. Turns out it was just bad programming on the client side. Mistakes happen.

Now I need to fix the final issue on the server which is a null pointer exception being thrown by the Bitswarm socket reader when the last player leaves a room. I am thinking it may be protocol related in regards to data trying to be read from a socket. Not one hundred percent sure, but that will be my goal to finish tomorrow.

Sorry for the lame update, but there really isn't anything cool to show when working strictly server-side.

The Final Stretch

I knew this day would come eventually. The beginning of the end, as the cliche goes. Today marks the last eight weeks of my time at DeVry. With it, comes the closing hours of my Senior Project - Starbound Aces.

This week we will be spending time organizing data about Alpha gameplay reviews and comments to make some bug fixes as well as fleshing out the game. However, to be quite frank, any efforts to have unbiased third parties to test the game were a complete, miserable flop. Any attempts - on two forums and a couple of social media websites - resulted in only one comment in regards to the game. Thankfully, there are some close friends and allies who were able to play the multiplayer version of the game with me and give some feedback.

Most of the feedback was as follows:

-How do I x?
-Where are you?
-Am I flying?

Indeed, a lot of that is just questions. Which means there are some things in the game that need fixing. First off, a help menu for those who don't know how to play. I spent too much time assuming that people playing would have a natural assumption of 3rd person PC gaming controls. That was ignorance on my part. Secondly, the movement/camera scripts need and overhaul in regards to the actual gameplay. This is the task of the other programmer on the team. Finally, fixing the player name displays to be locked on viewport will give players an idea where other players are at in regards to the game world. Space is too big to hide player names by not locking them to the viewport. A later screen shot will show what I mean by this.

Until next time, enjoy your game programming, because I certainly will - until it doesn't works when it was working before and I have no idea why so I just restart my computer hoping that will fix the issue but that obviously wasn't the issue because it turns out to be some stupid thing I did late at night when I was obviously too tired or drunk to remember doing it and sure I thought it was a cool thing to add into the game but it clearly wasn't a good time to put it in and of course I forgot to commit my latest changes and I already saved and closed so there is no mercy in the Ctrl+Z department which I think is stupid but oh well that is how it goes and it turns out to be that I overrode a method in a class and so the base class was not being called so really the big issue is stupidity and one line of code then that is when game programming is not enjoyable but I still enjoy it anyways.