Developer Diary..

Downtime..

Another server maintenance is due - our site may be down for a little within the next few days.. Don't panic - we'll be back! =P

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do..

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Since you don't really have a choice I'll start with the bad news. It's no secret that we have a small team (effectively only a programmer and an artist) and we're totally independent - which is great in many ways, but sadly it also means we have no funding. I've worked full-time for years to pay the rent etc., and now Fivemagics have had to take a full-time job also, and naturally, will have less time to work on the project. The good news is that we are not canceling development of WOF. We are not even thinking about canceling it. We will have to cut some corners and probably lower our ambitions in some areas, and while we have worked on it for a long time already, we wil have to work on it a little longer than we hoped for still. Sometimes its good to be reminded of why we started to work on the project in the first place. We wanted full ownership which we could only get by being fully independent and carry all the expenses ourselves. Sadly we're not even remotely wealthy, so - while we're sad to not be able to work full-time on the game - we're happy that we still have a lot of inspiration and desire to finish the job. We can only hope that you will have continued patience with us and that you will like the game once its ready. Que Sera, Sera.

Illness..

I haven't been around much lately. I'm suffering from strep throat and have been very sick for two weeks now. Fever, Pain in my throat and neck (swallowing and swollen glands) - penicillin destroyed my stomach - and 'finally' I got back and neck pain from lying down too much.. Headaches almost gone now and I'm back at work.. These last weeks have been pure hell for me.. Naturally - sadly - this means no work have been done, but like we say here in our team: 'real life wins' for better or for worse.

WOF nice old refernce gfx card passed away ...

my nice old nVidia Fx5200, that much of WOF was developed on / for, decided its time to go...

Materialization of a Mine Field

Source code, basically, is the materialization of an idea, and the more complex the idea is the more you see an explosion of possible ways to materialize it.

When in the process of materializing an idea (coding), multiple competing constraints emerge and try to influence the final materialized form.
Examples of constraints are performance, readability, maintainability, extensibility, time, elegance, typing economization and probably others as well.

This happens even when writing something as simple as the declaration of the function.
inline? virtual? pass arguments by reference? which arguments to pass? how to name the function, how to name the arguments, implement inside the header file?
each of those decisions can satisfy or break constraints and there is most often no way to satisfy all of them, and all we wanted is to declare a simple function.
One might thank that choosing which arguments to pass is obvious, but many times it is not, there are many variations and optional arguments that are handled and the decision has to be made to code many 'interfaces' to the function accepting slightly different arguments, this might satisfy readability constraints, but violate maintainability ones as I will in some examples at the end.

Moreover, the more the idea materializes, the more important 'piping' becomes, and the exact declarations start to become a big role, since nice 'piping' is also a very valid constraint. This means that it is not even possible to design beforehand a 'perfect' materialization, because the constraints we mention operate on the most microscopic level, and this would mean that the perfect design would need to go down to the lowest level, but then the design is the same as the ..

'Experienced' AI

Since some time, and you would know it if you have been following our blog, we are at the stage of working on WOF's AI since the basic gameplay mechanics are finally in place. We had a first 'flirt with AI' iteration and posted videos of the results. We are now at the second iteration which should already produce some useful fun-playable behavior. I decided to start with the goalie. after some coding and much thinking I came to the conclusion that I will probably have to include some AI 'experience' that the AI footballers' brains will be able to use. The reasons for this are simple: without this, a goalie's brain would be running full steam the whole time trying to estimate and reestimate the same things. things that real life goalies know by 'experience' because when a footballer steps in the pitch ... he has years of playing experience and training behind him ... can this be simply discarded? well yes and no. If we choose to give the footballers no experience, they will need much more processing power to compute potential ball positions after shots, potential shots to make, how dangerous a shot could be given the situation..... it's possible but both expensive in terms of processing power and therefore hurting game performance, too 'machinistic' in terms of precision ... the footballer would be able to estimate to with exact precision if per example the goalie can catch a ball if it was shot in some way, but also and on a finer level probably too predictable for the human player who would then find a situation where he could score once and repeat it forever because the AI would never try to fix whatever went wrong with their estimation. Now how on earth do we give our AI experience? A neural network brain comes to mind ... a brain that knows nothing at first and is trained through a huge number of iterations until it has learned something... but nahhhh its too unpredictable, fragile, uncontrollable, unmoddable and is better left as an exercise ..

Kimera Studios site updated..

The Kimera Studios site has been updated with a new look and logo.. Click the preview image below to go to the main site..

Downtime..

I've managed to get a shoulder injury.. Very painful, and my entire arm is numb like it's sleeping. Because of Easter I can't see a doctor before tuesday. So I'm hoping that it will get better with a few days rest. Fivemagics is on - much deserved - short vacation, so I guess this is one week we can take out of the calendar..

AI babysteps..

AI development is going very well. Footballers can now be told to 'protect' an area - blocking the way into it, and the keeper can jump to get to the ball. The next step is telling the AI to tackle, run with the ball and pass etc.

The movie below show the described actions - it was put together rather quickly as I only finished some stuff late tonight - there's no edits either, except for when one recording ends and another begins. As you can see the 'Barca' defender gave me a hard time, and when I finally got a shot on target the keeper made the save - bastards! =P

You can also catch a glimpse of the HUD - as mentioned earlier all names and logos are placeholders only, as we do not have the official licenses. We hope you will enjoy the movie!

Uploading to youtube really destroys the quality, making the ball hard to see sometimes - so you can also download the movie in a slightly better quality in wmv format here.. (We also have a 227MB quicktime version - but I didn't think anybody would care to download a file that big - send us an email if you want it..).

The world is catching up ...

(WARNING: yes you guessed it! this is a rant)

Again and again,

I have to justify the in-existence of a release schedule for WOF to almost everybody I know, from friends who just care about me to friends who are software engineers themselves and who keep on wisely preaching me on how the mere existence of a schedule would auto-magically accelerate the development process.

I usually reply to those with proofs of the too many to mention 'professional' and super planned projects which end up being discarded with millions of $'s of losses because in the end, the schedule was not met anyway ...

Of course, if I had employees who's primary goal was to produce as few sweat drops as possible while still getting their salary at the end of the month then yes, schedules and deadlines and manages on top of managers hunting each other with dates would have been the way to go. And that is probably why this is needed in dinosaur sized companies where passion has no place, and people do the work with the salary as the ultimate goal, except maybe for the arrogant narcistic managers, sitting at the top, getting their fat salaries and bonuses, having a good life, and then just for the fun of it trying to push their company forward to show off in front of their friend managers, then preaching their employees about passion, with their own passion coming from the wrong place.

BUT we are an INDEPENDENT studio, we sweat and torment our brains every day and we do it because we want to, we need to and we want to make our dream game, and try to make it financially successful just to be able to repeat and re-repeat that. That is why for us, a schedule is just a hurdle in the way of a perfect game. It's existence will not make us work faster or better, because we already do that and only that!

In any case, it seems the world of dinosaurs is catching up and realizing that actually, its us who have been doing it righ ..