Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: gsb2

JOURNALISTS..COME TO US…COME TO US….

Ok, this is my last day of peace and quiet amongst the fields and the cows and the sheep and the gentle tweeting of birds and clip-clop of horses. The next five days are one of BANG BANG BOOF-BOOF_WAH-WAH-ARGGGH. Or as most of it’s inhabitants refer to it ‘London’.

See what I did there? I subverted the conversational expectation for comedic effect. I’m wasted in games. Anyway…

Positech Games will be at the Eurogamer show, the big loud games Expo in Earls Court where gamers pay money to see early builds of games that developers have paid money to show to them. There is a discrepancy here somewhere…. Anyway, we have TWO yes count them TWO games at the show. On is the game we developed ourselves, called
Gratuitous Space Battles 2 and it looks like this:

gsbs

The other is developed by a third party developer and we are publishing it. It’s a strategy/tycoon/sim game called ‘Big Pharma‘ and it looks like this:

bp1

Both games are on the show floor playable by press and public alike. GSB is not quite alpha. Big Pharma is very early, but both are worth your time to check out. Me and Tim (BP designer) will be there all four days. You do *not* need an appointment to come play the game or interview us, or ask us questions or anything like that. We will be there, just come say hello. You don’t have to be someone amazingly super-famous like Alec Meer to ask us for an interview, we will talk to anyone, even if you just have a blog with a dozen readers or a youtube channel with 10 subscribers. It must be ten though, none of you 9-subscriber losers.

We are not frightening or intimidating, we are like tigers, we are probably more scared of you than you are of us. We sit in dark rooms all day hitting keyboards, this is scary scary time.

egx2

Please come along, get a free badges or two and a free leaflet. Ours are glossy!

 

Optimizing dilemma of the day

Below is an image from Gratuitous Space Battles 2‘s ship design screen. On the left is my problem. That’s a load of ship components you can add to a hull, rotate, change size, color etc. All very cool. The problem is that you might choose to have BIG versions of some of them, as main structure bits, so the source graphics have to be big, normally 256sq for sub-components.

blog

Ok, so that’s cool, but the problem is, when I load in those icons I’m loading in a DDS file that is 256 square, which means about 170k in the format I’m using. If I have 300 of them (rough guess) then that’s 51MB of file access, which is bad but not catastrophic, but it does mean 300 distinct file accesses, which is slow, even after I’ve rewritten the DDS loader to be massively faster. As a result, when you click on ‘edit appearance’, there *might* be a slight delay, which is intolerably awful for someone like me with zero patience. And I have a FAST PC, I want this to be fast and smooth on low-spec.

So as I see it the options are:

1) Only load visible ones, then load the others as you scroll (could be irritating for scrolling)

2) Load in placeholders, and spin off the file accessing portion of the texture load into a separate thread, then when they are all there, interleave the texture creation with the display frames of the main thread (DX9 so only main thread may do DX stuff). This seems ultra complex and hacky.

3) Save out small preview images for each item, and load those instead. Less memory, but a bunch of useless duplicate files AND still 300 file accesses.

4) Stick em all in a single big pak file and see if that’s quicker. This is easy, but I find it messy during development as I’m always adding/removing/editing files in those folders, so I need a hybrid debug/release system.

I think I might have to go with 4…

Gratuitous Space Battles 2 : First battle video!

Well I’ve been working on this beast long enough, so it’s time to share my efforts with you wonderful people of the internet. I have a whole bunch of stuff I’ll eventually talk about and show to you, but I thought I’d start off the Gratuitous Space battles 2 videos with a decent 9 minute explanation by me of the stuff that is new (so far) in the graphics engine for the GSB 2 battles. There is a lot to talk about:…

I tend to do more written stuff than videos just because I find the majority of video content moves ‘too slow’ for me. I want all the information and spectacle of stuff condensed as much as possible because I take information in very very fast. If someone has a really slow speaking voice it’s even more agonizing. But hey, I’m not the audience, you are, and the good people of the internet seem to prefer video content to written, so I’m going to try and do my bit to keep up with your youtube-watching ways. or twitch, or whoever is cool this week :D

It’s difficult because I hate my own voice, and I have broadband (ha!) delivered by a sliver of copper the size of an angels nostril hair, so my upload speed is about 45kb/s on a GOOD day. This vid took nearly 4 hours to upload. Grr. Luckily I should have a chance of getting fiber here in December.

Anyway, enjoy the vid, post any comments here or on youtube or on the GSB2 official forums. I have more stuff to show off in a few weeks!

 

Gratuitous Space Battles 2 in multi-monitor mode!

At last a shaky-cam (well not shaky, but you know what I mean) video of GSB 2! I wanted to do this to show off multiple monitor mode with a lemon for scale. The video shows my dev PC with the game running. My PC is a i7 3770 quad-core 8gig RAM, windows 7 and a GeForce GTX670 video card, powering two 27″ monitors for a total GSB2 fun ratio of 5120×1440, or other 7 million pixels of lasers and explosions. Here is the video:

I’ll be doing more videos over the next few months to keep you all updated, plus other things are in the pipeline :D. In future I’ll capture normal in-game footage I just wanted to do a multi-monitor one :D Help me spread the word about 7 million pixels of explosions with ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. I reckon I’ll be more popular than these youtube kids by tomorrow!

BTW the games current website is at www.gratuitousspacebattles2.com (it will get a makeover eventually), I blog about the game here, occasionally tweet about it (@cliffski) and there are forum discussions here.