Month: July 2007

My full-time Indy MMOG, Galactic Melee is almost over now – both in the bad way, out of money, and in the good way, of being finished. Feature-wise there’s only about a week left to do before calling it feature-complete. It’s all pretty much debugged and working, and even has some usability and gameplay polish. On the other hand, I’m grinding the bone financially. Just giving up for 6-12 months to finish it part-time on my own is a serious option, because even paying the rent is in jeopardy now.

These next two weeks are going to be the litmus test of if the game ships. With the new game mode and settings in, the game is as fun as I can make it and still ship before I am out on the street. If my next wave of alpha testers actually sticks around and plays, then this means I’m onto something and will continue. If they run into the usual install and running problems, and those that can play mostly quit, then I really have no choice. With no money left and a game not polished enough to sell yet I’ll have to take a job and work part-time to fix the more fundamental problems. There’s really about 2 months of work to address all these.

* Replace Physics Engine. Unfortunately, PhysX doesn’t support older versions of Windows than XP. It also doesn’t support Linux. It’s also the cause of about half of my user’s installation problems, such as requiring admin rights. By replacing it, I can increase my potential customer base by over 25%.
* Replace most of the art. Due to never-ending communication problems, that only 3D art that I have that is really right is the art that I did myself, which is about 1/4 of the total art. I really need a working exporter, and a usable pipeline for the artists. By carefully selecting it so users only see the working 1/4, the game looks fine, but there’s really a lot to be fixed and the game could have been a lot better looking.
* Fix the website. The website sucks right now. It needs a serious overhaul to draw in people at the level I am looking for. There were a lot of features, such as stats, mailing list, integrated forums, that I wanted that never got done.
* Add missing graphics effects. I never got a decent graphics programmer. Only about 15% of the effects that I wanted are actually in the game. I wanted to make a game that was packed with cool effects, and the best I accomplished was animated textures.
* Add command screen. Ranks, giving orders, and giving orders through an RTS like interface was one of the major original planned features that got dropped.
* Add voice communications. Also got dropped.
* Add medals. Also got dropped, though it’s a smaller task.

On top of that, I really should run a long beta. People will forgive problems in beta that they won’t when you are charging and beta is the best way to find out what these problems are. Shipping now and skipping a meaningful beta is a risk.

Previously in the game you had to rebuy your ship and all equipment every time you died. This introduced a balance where you had to choose the right loadout for the right situation, and your play style, rather than just picking all possible equipment. It also introduced a gameplay element where if you did pick an expensive ship, you would be more careful with it, which adds an element of risk.

This would have worked, and would have been fun, if only experts played the game.

In reality:

1. There is only a minor difference in effectiveness (say 10%) between the most expensive and the least expensive ship.
2. There is a wide variation in player skill.

So what happened is some newbie would pick the most expensive ship, and since the ship itself only accounted for 10% additional effectiveness at best, he would just die repeatedly the same way he would have in the least expensive ship.

In the end, the good players had virtually unlimited money from killing newbies. The newbies were always stuck with the worst ships. To the good players, the credit system did nothing, since you could always buy whatever you wanted anyway. To the bad players, the credit system was a negative, since you couldn’t use the interesting equipment.

We’re changing it to be more like a traditional system. Items cost a lot, but once you buy them they are yours forever. The only part of the former system we are retaining is you still have to buy ammo. the ammo for the very good items will be tremendously expensive, and the carriers will be tremendously expensive.

I had forgotten this for many years, but back in my Subspace days I came up with the phrase “Sharks and fishes” to describe the problem dwindling player population towards the later days of the game. About 20%-25% of the player population would be sharks – skilled players, who could get on a team without too much trouble. The remainder were fishes – food for the sharks, couldn’t get on a team, never had much fun. I knew at the time this is why the game was dying, but it never really occurred to me I was making the same mistake with my own game until I spoke to Joseph Lieberman today.

In your average FPS the difference in kill ratios between the best and worst players is maybe 2:1 to 1:2. In Subspace it was possible to go 30-0, or more, if you really tried. I think I went 200:0 once, more typically I maintained a ratio of 4:1 and that was just through normal play, without even trying to get a ratio. This was unfun for both sides – the newbies get blown away without a chance. The pros have no challenge and are bored.

He pointed out problem after problem with this kind of design, and each time I realized it’s been something I’ve been thinking all along, and knew, but pushed it to the back of my mind. Like how yesterday a couple of newbies came in, and one guy who was moderately good. I was bored in my own game, except for the guy who was moderately good, who was mildly interesting to beat. The newbies quit soon after, even though I was going easy on them, and then the moderately good guy quit too.

Another problem with Subspace was that the community was exclusionary, with private teams, that you could only get in if you were highly talented. This also alienated newbies and led a the slow death for the game.

The result of all of this is that I’m going to try to introduce a greater difference between the ships, weapons, and items. Combat will now depend in large part on how you customize your ship, what ship you picked, with major and noticeable difference between them. Because each ship has weaknesses now, team play becomes more important for complimentary abilities.

This means that even though I’m a better player, I might still die to newbies, just because they had the ship that counterbalanced mine, or I was outnumbered. Essentially squishing down the skill curve so that newbies go from 0 chance to a roughly even chance to win, tilted by skill.

Some people like the challenge that Subspace provided, and I’m going to leave in a few game modes that play to those settings. But I think my main focus and where most of the players are going to be is on the more newbie friendly servers.

The install problems continue. The DirectX web installer Microsoft provides doesn’t connect. Nobody who has used it has ever been able to get it to connect, including myself.

So I was including the 50MB offline installer but as it turns out that didn’t work either. Rather than the installer just running, as is the normal and sensible thing to do, it actually just extracts a bunch of files to a user-specified directory. So the offline installer isn’t an installer at all, it’s just a zip file. You then have to go to the extraction directory and run the exe there. I assumed Microsoft did the sensible thing at first, without checking, so I have myself to blame.

I came across DirectX Installation for Game Developers which goes over which files you need and which you don’t. So I managed to delete most of the files and get it running in silent mode. It’s quite fast too.

Except for PhysX I think my installer should work for most people now.

Arrrggg!!! Someone made a forum post PhysX wouldn’t install because they are using Windows 98. So looking at their site they only support Windows XP and Windows Vista. That means I’m going to lose about 25% of my business because I made the mistake of not originally checking that PhysX supports older versions of Windows. Damn damn damn! I’d switch to something else or write my own system but the game is already so late that week to change libraries would kill me.

I’m going to just have to suck it up, say “Linux and non-XP support coming soon” and after shipping focus on fixing this.

Another couple of launch disasters forestalled today.

First, I was wondering why I have so few players with so many signups. It turns out a significant number of users can’t run the game due to “d3dx9_31.dll” missing when they try to run. So they just gave up, rather than emailed me. I kept telling people to reinstall DirectX but that wasn’t it. I finally tracked down one guy, asked him to download that file and drop it in, and the game worked. Good grief.

I had another guy tell me in the game he had a PhysX card, and after installing my game his computer kept messing up and the game kept crashing. He said he finally figured it out by downloading and installing the latest PhysX drivers. So I check the installer and I AM providing the latest already. After some testing I found that the same installer will uninstall if you run it twice. What happens is people install the game with all the defaults, they already had PhysX installed, and it got uninstalled. Or they install the game twice, with the same effect. Do they honestly expect developers to have a post-install message “Before you can play go download and install PhysX”?

I found a solution via Inno Setup, which is quite a good (and free) installer. With this change it won’t show PhysX in the list if it is already installed.

In the [Files] section:
Source: C:\RakEngine\GMInstaller\Dependencies\PhysX_7.05.06_SystemSoftware.exe; DestDir: {tmp}\PhysX; Flags: deleteafterinstall

In the [Run] section
Filename: {tmp}\PhysX\PhysX_7.05.06_SystemSoftware.exe; Description: “Install PhysX 7.05.06”; Flags: postinstall skipifsilent; Check: PhysXNotInstalled

Add a [Code] section as follows:

[Code]
var
PhysXNotInstalledCalled: Boolean;
PhysXNotInstalledResult: Boolean;

function PhysXNotInstalled(): Boolean;
begin
if not PhysXNotInstalledCalled then begin
PhysXNotInstalledResult := RegValueExists(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, ‘SOFTWARE\Ageia Technologies\PhysX_A32_Engines’, ‘2.7.0’) = False;
PhysXNotInstalledCalled := True;
end;
Result := PhysXNotInstalledResult;
end;