Digital Warlords

If your still out there

LordShaggy — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:46:15 +0000

Sorry, things have just been really rough. I’ll be honest with you guys, I have been struggling with some job stuff and recently my wife left me as well. I’m sorry I’ve not kept up this site like I should.

Things are slowly turning around and with that I will do a better job of trying to update my thoughts on this site and hopefully get back into the general scene of things.

I really appreciate your support.

Life is real

LordShaggy — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:06:35 +0000

My life has still been crazy since the move. My brain and I have been wondering all over the place.

I’m hoping to get time to work on our Iphone project tonight. SteamPunk finally got around to making some major improvements, but it did cost a lot of level rework. On the bright side, we both agree that it was a better choice.

Hopefully, once I get comfortable with the new setup, I will be able to adapt my completed levels, in the new set up, with haste. We want to finish this project strong, and look forward to starting our next project strong.

Silent but deadly Design

LordShaggy — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 01:34:32 +0000

So, I’ve been kinda out of the loop for a bit. I have a lot of things going on my side of things, so I thought it was about time I blog on some thoughts today.

I’ve observed two major no noes within game designers I have encountered over the years.

One, they have a hard time taking any criticism at all. Can you imagine having a debate over a feature where someone will just be angry at you for the sheer fact you defy their idea/thoughts/feelings, even if it is for the betterment of the game. Yup! this happens WHAY more than you would imagine. Now I am no saint when it comes to this issue. It happens to all of us, and we get our feathers ruffled from time to time. But if you consider yourself a professional Game designer, really assess yourself and make sure you are not committing this issue often. This leads to people not wanting to openly communicate with you, and now you have lost a chance to perhaps make your idea 10x better.

Two, designers content with no one bothering them about their creations. This kind of feeds it to one, but this might be a different genetic spin off of the first issue. These are the ones who will try to sneak a design past without any notice. If no one looks at the design, it must be a great one, or they just obfuscate till the very end when you can not do anything about the decisions they made. This is equally a horrible thing to do to your fellow game developers.

I ask any one reading this to really take time to ask themselves if they do these things and if so. You should figure out a way to start correcting it. These things will only hurt you and the projects you work on. It could even get you a black mark in the development community, and that is not something you want.

DW Console Released!

SteamPunkProgrammer — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:31:38 +0000

We have released our first product to the asset store.
For a measly $5 you can get a console just as powerful as consoles found in big FPS titles.

You can not only send logs to the console to see whats going on in your system, but you can also create commands (they work by simply forwarding a sendmessage) to whatever you want!

DW Console

SingletonBehavior – Auto gameobject management

SteamPunkProgrammer — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:56:54 +0000

Through all my development in unity, having a Monobehavior be a singleton has been very useful in a lot of cases. Making a gameObject a singleton isn’t very difficult but it can be a little annoying to do over and over again, so I’ve made a child class for MonoBehavior.

Here is the class itself

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class SingletonBehaviour : MonoBehaviour where T : UnityEngine.Component
{
static T instance;
static public T Instance
{
get
{
if (instance == null)
{
instance = MonoBehaviour.FindObjectOfType(typeof(T)) as T;
if (instance == null)
{
GameObject go = new GameObject(typeof(T).ToString());
instance = go.AddComponent();
}
}

return instance;
}
}

protected virtual void Start()
{
if (instance != null && instance != this)
{
Destroy(gameObject);
return;
}

DontDestroyOnLoad(gameObject);
}
}

implementing it in a class is super easy.

public class YourClass: SingletonBehavior
{
}

networkView.group powers

SteamPunkProgrammer — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:23:11 +0000

Something that is almost completely missed in the documentation/tutorials for networking in unity is the ability to set a networkView’s group. Because you can do this, you can choose to have a client ignore different ‘channels’ of information. To set a networkView’s group, you just have to assign it in a behavior script, like so.

networkView.group = 11;

For example, if you want the client to only get updates for the lobby chat window, you just set the NetworkPlayer to not receive these messages, or the server to not send these messages. Via the two very useful static network methods. Network.SetSendingEnabled will allow you to prevent the server from sending a networkView group to the client, or you can choose to ignore the received messages client side with Network.SetReceivingEnabled, this however will have the server send those messages to the client, they just wont be used.

Using one of these methods will allow you to control when a client gets a specific kind of update. Like I said before, if you have a lobby chat, simply set the group to some group not used by any other system, and set the server to not send those group updates to the client, this will mean that the user in the lobby will only get the lobby update group. Then after they join the server they can have the other (or the specific scenes!) groups turned on.

This also means that its possible to have a networked game with multiple different scenes running at a time, you just need to control what groups are being sent, and possibly use an offset for each internal different group type, for example, the ‘dungeon of angry squirrels’ uses group 11, and the chat window inside the dungeon uses group 12 (scene group +1), or for simplicity sake, you can keep it all on the single group, but if you wanted say, global chat, or to be able to see your party members health, you’d use a group that is always left on.

Social Games Get over yourselves !

LordShaggy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:40:37 +0000

Recently, I am seeing loads of articles popping up on social games being “copied” by other game companies. I would like to say to those companies, welcome to the real world.

The only thing that is protected about a game is Content related, and that’s how it should stay. Your games are simple, and if they are successful they will be copied, and possibly done better then your original implementation. This is part of the game industry and what drives people to try to do things better or to just replicate with a different spin.

Stop trying to play mud smear wars and get off your asses and make a better game. Do you want to cry about having competition? I am sure all the developers out there who slave over FPS games will surely rub your eyes and tell you it’s all gonna be OK. I’m sure after they will whack you upside the head and remind you their genre is probably one of the most saturated and competitive.

In short, get real. You are in one of the competitive cut throat areas of game development today. You’re just gonna have to adapt! If you think I am being harsh or that for some reason your implementation should have the right to patent your ideas. Let me give you a strong word of warning:

Your game was done before, by someone else that you copied bits and pieces from. Perhaps some kid made a game exactly like the one you did on Kongragate, but just not as good as you because he has no budget. If he could patent his idea, then you would be paying him royalties as long as your game made money.

To wrap this up, get over it and welcome to our cutthroat world. This is what you have to look forward too when you make games more about money then about a good product.

In-Game Console

SteamPunkProgrammer — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:35:51 +0000

In-Game Console Screenshot

In the process of learning more about network code in unity, to our eventual goal of making an online game that is peer-to-peer it became useful to have an in-game console (like old school fps consoles that pop down from the top of the screen). I made a pretty good implementation of a console that works very well and is really easy to expand.

Console.Log(“message”); // create a message in the log

The above example would print the message to the log, (a timestamp would be printed before it). All of the needed functions for the console are static so they can be accessed easily from anywhere. This includes the following function, ‘Console.AddCommand’ and the above ‘Console.Log’.

Console.AddCommand(new ConsoleCommand(“command”,
“help text displayed, when help is called”,
CmdParameterType.None, targetGameObject,
“MethodInGameObject”)); // This method (And class) creates a new console command

The above example, would work like so, type “command” into the console, and the targetGameObject would have a ‘SendMessage’ fired to ‘MethodInGameObject’

The console commands work in a very simplistic way, they simply handle a SendMessage operation for you, as well as parsing your parameter into something useful for the receiving message method. So far the supported parameter types are, int, float, string, gameobject(a string that is used to preform a ‘GameObject.Find’ operation), Vector3 and Vector2. If anyone has any suggestions for more supported parameter types id love to hear them, but keep in mind, due to the fact this all works via SendMessage, only one parameter is possible, however, you can send a string and parse in the reviving message method.

I also plan on writing some default commands, right now there is just a help command that prints out all of the bound commands, and when a command is added after words (‘help’) it will print out the help text created with the command. I’m also looking for suggestions on what kind of default commands would be useful, so please, comment away! Apon completion it will become available on the unity asset store.

Unity Integrated Networking

SteamPunkProgrammer — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:10:34 +0000

I’ve been trying to learn the integrated networking (Raknet) for unity over the last few weeks. We are planning on making a peer-to-peer game using it in the near future. After a lot of reading of tutorials and looking at projects source code I finally understand it to a pretty good degree. In the process I developed a very clean master game server connection script that includes the ability to create a server, find servers with the same game type name, and verify the connection before moving the user onto a new scene. Below is the script I ended up creating.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class MasterGameConnector : MonoBehaviour
{
	public int port = 31337;
	public string gameTypeName = "change this name";
	public string serverDefaultName = "some server";
	public string readyScene = "sceneName";

	enum ScreenState
	{
		Start,
		Create,
		Find,
		Setup,
		Ready
	}
	Vector2 serverScroll = Vector2.zero;
	ScreenState currentScreenState = ScreenState.Start;
	string serverNameField;
	bool connected = false;

	Vector2[] windowSizes = new Vector2[] {
		new Vector2(150, 75),
		new Vector2(200, 120),
		new Vector2(200, 300),
		new Vector2(200, 75)
	};

	Rect GetCenteredRect(Vector2 size)
	{
		return new Rect((Screen.width*0.5f)-(size.x*0.5f),
		                (Screen.height*0.5f)-(size.y*0.5f),
		                size.x, size.y);
	}

	// Use this for initialization
	void Start ()
	{
		serverNameField = serverDefaultName;
	}

	void OnDisconnectedFromServer()
	{
		currentScreenState = ScreenState.Start;
		connected = false;
	}

	void OnServerInitialized()
	{
		connected = true;
	}

	void OnConnectedToServer()
	{
		connected = true;
	}

	void OnGUI()
	{
		if (currentScreenState == ScreenState.Ready)
			return;

		GUI.Window(GetHashCode(), GetCenteredRect(windowSizes[(int)currentScreenState]), DrawWindow, currentScreenState.ToString());
	}

	void DrawWindow(int id)
	{
		SendMessage("Draw" + currentScreenState.ToString(), SendMessageOptions.DontRequireReceiver);
	}

	void DrawStart()
	{
		if (GUILayout.Button("Create Server"))
			currentScreenState = ScreenState.Create;
		if (GUILayout.Button("Find Server"))
		{
			currentScreenState = ScreenState.Find;
			MasterServer.RequestHostList(gameTypeName);
		}
	}

	void DrawCreate()
	{
		serverNameField = GUILayout.TextField(serverNameField);
		if (GUILayout.Button("Create"))
		{
			Network.InitializeServer(32, port, true);
			MasterServer.RegisterHost(gameTypeName, serverNameField);
			serverNameField = serverDefaultName;

			currentScreenState = ScreenState.Setup;
		}

		if (GUILayout.Button("Back"))
			currentScreenState = ScreenState.Start;
	}

	void DrawFind()
	{
		serverScroll = GUILayout.BeginScrollView(serverScroll, GUI.skin.box);
		{
			HostData[] hosts = MasterServer.PollHostList();
			foreach(HostData host in hosts)
			{
				if (GUILayout.Button(host.gameName))
				{
					Network.Connect(host);
					currentScreenState = ScreenState.Setup;
				}
			}
		}
		GUILayout.EndScrollView();

		if (GUILayout.Button("Back"))
			currentScreenState = ScreenState.Start;
	}

	void DrawSetup()
	{
		GUILayout.FlexibleSpace();
		if (connected)
		{
			if (GUILayout.Button("Ready"))
			{
				currentScreenState = ScreenState.Ready;
				Application.LoadLevel(readyScene);
			}
		}
		else
		{
			GUILayout.Label("Connecting...");
		}

		if (GUILayout.Button("Cancel"))
		{
			connected = false;
			Network.Disconnect();
			currentScreenState = ScreenState.Start;
		}
	}
}

Unity overlay

SteamPunkProgrammer — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:47:57 +0000

I’m not much of a web developer, but over the last few weeks my work has made me learn a lot about jqury and javascript, so I figured I would put that into effect.

So, I made an overlay function in javascript and jquery that would create a frame for unity play in and append it to the content div for wordpress, so It would dynamically load content. This is a much better way for me to show off samples and demos then directing to a new page so I figured it was worth the effort. I included the code in the link below, Personally I just dropped this into the theme header so it would be loaded, and then use a link to call the javascript function like so.

‘http://www.aWebPage.com/WebPlayer.unity3d’,
1000,600, ‘GameTitle’);”>LinkText