Reddit Alien Mk.II

Thursday 6 January 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized

Since Rosanna has had some time off work, she’s been knitting again:

The pattern will be available on Github shortly.

3 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-01-06  ::  admin

OpenRA Reddit Postmortem

Friday 1 October 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

Yesterday, we unexpectedly hit the front page of Reddit. We’ve more or less survived, and learned a fair amount – including the obvious “how not to write things if you want them to scale.” Here’s what we learned.

1. What went right:

• We were able to patch a number of issues in the master server live
• We got the main website up again fairly quickly thanks to RobotCaleb having a box available
• The people who *could* play it generally gave very positive feedback
• We’ve finally been able to test on a wide range of hardware and platforms
• 13,000 downloads (9,000 of which were in that one day)
• (>0 people playing most of the time)

2. What went wrong:

• Webhost couldn’t stand up to the traffic. (Reddit is BIG)
• Master server on hosting server meant people who did manage to download it couldn’t play
• Far too many people who didn’t read instructions – e.g. forwarding ports, turning off compiz, download Cg – and/or our instructions were crap.
• Download counter glitched out
• Our lobby code was shown to be garbage.
• When things broke there was no way for someone to fix it until NZ woke up – we needed trusted people in other timezones.
• Mirrors went down and we had no way of dealing with that
• No published "minimum requirements" list caused a lot of confusion
• Minor PR disaster
• We have no graceful upgrade path for these 13K or so users up to the next version

For more details, see below the fold.

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1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-10-01  ::  admin

OpenRA Update 9th September

Friday 10 September 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

Well, looks like this traffic storm isn’t stopping. We’ve got a lot of mirrors deployed now, and my web host is still unhappy with me . This is actually a *good* thing, of course – there’s not much point in building software that noone wants to actually *use*. We’ve got a lot of useful feedback from everyone who has tried the game so far, and we’re looking at how we can improve the areas you’ve all pointed out as deficient. Also, lots of changes since last post:

• New team members: KatzSmile is joining us to help with art. So far, we’ve got new TRAN sprites, and a new unit for RA:Soviet – a Flak Truck, which will be available off WEAP, and is a decent AA and AP scout. This rounds out the soviet midgame arsenal pretty well. Welcome also to Iran, who has been helping get the game running on Debian (including Ubuntu).
• Lots of crashes fixed
• Lots of performance issues fixed

For the full changelog, see the forum post.

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-09-10  ::  admin

OpenRA Update 4th September

Saturday 4 September 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

Interest in OpenRA seems to have just exploded in the last couple of days. Naturally, this had to happen when our website build was critically broken (crashed on joining a multiplayer game), but that’s fixed now, so we’re winning.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s been done recently:

• Bob did a whole pile of work on engine internals, which roughly doubles performance on weak machines.
• Paolo (welcome to the team!) has clamped the camera to the edges of the map correctly. We still need to work out what to do with the bit of the map obscured by the chrome UI.
• Paul has done some polish work on CNC, and added support for a production queue per building – so there’s a point to building multiple airfields now, etc. You still don’t charge support powers faster with multiple buildings, and we might keep it that way.
• If you have the CNC CD content (movies.mix and scores.mix), you can play the first GDI mission by selecting it in the map chooser. Note: You need to copy those mixes to mods/cnc/packages/ and rename movies.mix to gdi-movies.mix, for it to work.
• There’s the beginning of a multiplayer bot. It’s kindof lame at the moment, but will improve in the next few releases.
• I’m sure I’ve forgotten a whole pile of other improvements, but that’s a good thing. Features that aren’t painful to build & stabilize are the best kind

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-09-04  ::  admin

HomebrewFMS starting to take shape

Thursday 2 September 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

Because I clearly don’t have enough stuff on the go currently, I’ve started hacking on a tool to help with my flying – a flight management system to run on my HTC Touch 2. Yes, these kind of things exist already, but they tend to have at least one fatal flaw: extreme cost, extreme slowness, extreme lack of freedom (which I care about far more than cost) or just plain incorrect data for NZ. By “incorrect data”, I mean really basic things like placing the runways at the right aerodromes. This has since been fixed for NZFI/NZDV in PocketFMS. If you like closed-source proprietary software, and don’t mind bad performance, perhaps you should check it out: http://www.pocketfms.com/

So far, I have a toy tile renderer which should accept local or remote tiles from GM [both MT and KH servers], OSM, and possibly others; a KML polygon renderer for airspaces; georeferenced sprite support; nice font outlining for contrast; a primitive HSI, and a few other little bits. The data is all converted from CAA’s downloadable PDFs.

Here’s some screenshots of it running in the test environment:

And one (crap photo) of the renderer limping along on the crippled GDI of Windows Mobile:

Next steps:

• Uncrapify the mobile renderer
• Render correct runways rather than using my generic aerodrome sprite
• Do something about the clutter of VRPs
• Stop using GM tiles, since that’s technically against their TOS.
• Display aircraft track
• Display tags for airspace info, etc
• Provide audio and visual alerts on approaching controlled airspace, etc

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-09-02  ::  admin

OpenRA: Time for a chrome overhaul

Tuesday 31 August 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

As part of the general polishing of everything in OpenRA, we’re talking about replacing the ingame chrome with something a little more… polished. We know we need a few things that the current chrome doesn’t have:

• Orders palette for selected units
• More useful unit stats in production tooltips
• Objectives display for singleplayer missions (oh, yeah, we support singleplayer now, sortof)

I’m currently thinking the new orders palette should be combined with the production palette – and the whole thing reworked to be more like SC / Generals / AoE. To that end, I’ve started painting new square production buttons, which are looking surprisingly like the old C&C DOS sidebar buttons. I’m not really surprised – massaging the in-game art is a far easier path to having something recognizable (with few pixels) than fussing around with captures from the FMVs. Here’s the CNC AFLD, in normal, rollover, disabled, and partially-built states. The CNC HARV is done the same way, but with a different rollover effect – which I think I like better. BIKE shows some shortcomings of this technique, though – large areas of blank, with a tiny unit in the middle.

We’ll probably do one more for “locked” tech as well, for singleplayer use. We’ll probably also use a different color for each side’s chrome – GDI will most likely be yellow, and the RA sides will be blue and soviet-red, which is a bit purer than the tone I’ve used for this Nod mockup:

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-31  ::  admin

MSN Spam Takes It Up a Notch

Tuesday 17 August 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

MSN spambots which just throw out context-free malicious links have been around for years, but recently I’ve observed a far more clever variant in the wild – it pretends to have a conversation with you, although it doesn’t care what you say at all.

Observe a sample conversation (but don’t follow the link, it’s a landing page for a $10/wk SMS scam). After you spot it the first time, the “I was better than I am! I scored X” line is an easy signature for detecting this one:

Btw, Katie Cookson and Rob Noldus: Your MSN accounts and/or machines have been owned by this thing. Please fix that soon.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-17  ::  admin

OpenRA: Custom player colors

Monday 19 July 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

A lot more work has been done on OpenRA, including a revamp of the pregame UI. The server browser is no longer a complete hack; the lobby has been rewritten as widgets; we have real textboxes, etc;

As part of that, we’ve also thrown out the preset color palettes in favour of a custom player color system, similar to how Homeworld and Dawn of War work. Actually, it’s nowhere near as complex as DoW, but it’s still pretty awesome:

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-07-19  ::  admin

First of many public balancing aids for OpenRA: dpstool

Sunday 23 May 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

There are various bits I’ve written for OpenRA which analyze the game rules to aid in balancing – among them, dpstool, which determines the damage per second dealt by each unit, in ideal circumstances. Enjoy:

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 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-05-23  ::  admin

OpenRA Code From Orbit

Thursday 20 May 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

A while ago, I wrote a quick & dirty tool to render code as a black & white bitmap, one pixel per character. Here’s the results of it, applied to the current OpenRA code base:

2 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-05-20  ::  admin