DjArcas's Blog

Blog from the developer of FortressCraft

Blog from the developer of FortressCraft


  • OnLive, PC Version and beyond

    Posted on by DjArcas
    So, it appears I’ve been doing a piss-poor job of disseminating information again; after tweeting out about the fact that the PC version now has working networking (or at least a reasonable impression thereof), I was met with a wall of OMG YOU ARE PORTING TO THE PC!?!
    So, whilst continuing to add in new features (Next patch contains ladders, a personal teleporter, bug fixes AND a surprise), I’ve also been working on the substantial changes that are necessary to get it onto future platforms.

    Networking

    Networking has been an enormous pain in the ass; FortressCraft usually relies on the excellent XNA networking libraries. Sadly,Microsoft don’t allow me to use the XNA networking for PC games (I mean, they don’t allow anyone. I’m not a special case), so I’ve had to look around for a replacement.

    I actually stuck a post up on my facebook, and managed to procure the network coder from Split/Second and Pure to help me here. George has done an amazing job of abstracting out the network layer, meaning that I can continue to work on both versions of FortressCraft simultaneously.

    Avatars

    Again, sadly, Microsoft don’t allow usage of their lovely avatars outside of the Xbox platform, so I’ve had to consider what options are available here. This is still very much in development, so much so that I can’t even really show any good pics. Rest assured tho, it’ll be in keeping with FortressCraft’s complete customisation theme!

    Achievements

    These have been a ton of work; they weren’t planned from the start, so I’ve had to come up with them (with the massive help of the community, thank you!), implement them, test them… and then integrate them with the OnLive achievement middleware,

    Touch Support

    This has yet to be started, and is a slightly scary prospect. OnLive inherently supports iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and Android (Tablets and phones). To do this, I need to support WP7 Touch events; I also need to redesign the entire interface to give a nice slick user experience. Not a small task. But you do get to play FortressCraft on your phone once I’m done – woot!

    Spit and Polish

    There’s quite a lot of polish I want to get into the OnLive/PC version as well. The workshop indicator was the first of these. I’ll be adding in things like signs, spawn blocks, kill blocks, better tutorials, as well as replacement objects for the default machinery. This means no wasting customs for your factories and conveyors (unless you want to customise them, of course!)

    Other!

    Oh, so much other! So FortressCraft will support lots and lots of cool stuff, mostly as I don’t have to persuade my boss that it’s financially viable. Right now there’s definite support for Nvidia 3dVision, and I’m planning on adding EyeFinity-6 support, head tracking… if it’s cool, then I want it in there.Hopefully, this lets a few people understand why this patch has been a little slow; the best part, of course, is that all of the work automatically rolls into the next FC patch: FortressCraft 1.1 Interim.

  • FortressCraft Performance – it’s only an Xbox.

    Posted on by DjArcas
    I get quite a few comments saying “I DON’T LIKE YOUR GAME, IT LAGS”’. I’m going to try my best to write this so it doesn’t come across as ‘passing the buck’, but hopefully people will understand a little more how things work. After all, it’s only running on an Xbox!So, does each patch make the game slower? No. Far from it. I spend several days a month optimising the game, profiling everything, and doing my very best to push squeeze every erg of performance out of the Xbox. Not that you measure performance in ergs.So, why does the game apparently run worse than it did when it shipped?

    A good simile would be a car; so you’ve just bought a brand new sports car, with 200bhp, and it goes really fast! But then, one weekend, you get it upgraded to 300bhp, but you also, for some reason, fill the boot with gold. Why is the car going not going faster? It has more horsepower!

    FortressCraft has gained more and more horsepower with each patch. But people are putting more and more gold in the boot. Sorry, trunk. And by gold, I meant custom objects, doodads, etc.

    When you join a server, and it’s laggy (Don’t even get me started on using that word incorrectly – laggy refers to high latency, NOT low framerate!), it’s not my fault. Not ever. Sure, I can optimise things away, but there are finite limits. It’s the server’s responsibility to ensure their worlds run smoothly.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am doing everything I can do optimise my code, but… well, let’s take custom objects.

    A worst-case custom object can have 8,000 polys in it; the Xbox can transform 500 million triangles per second. Assuming you want the game to run at 60 fps, you only have 8,333,333 polys per frame to deal with. That is also assuming you’re using a very simple vertex shader! Real world performance is likely to be a lot less :-)

    So, 8.3 million polys/frame max, and 8,000 polys per object. That means, if you want 60 fps, you can only draw 1041 objects.

    So when someone says YOU NEED TO OPTIMISE THIS!, what can I do? There’s literally no performance left to wring out of the Xenos GPU in this instance, and this situation is also pretending that we aren’t drawing the sky, water, other players, the landscape, your axe, particles… and reflective water is TWICE as slow; refractive water is THREE times as slow! (sorry, them’s the breaks!)

    “I DON’T LIKE YOUR GAME, IT LAGS”

    Well, I AM sorry; truly. As my twitter feed has seen me say a hundred times – “It’s only an Xbox”. It’s an 8 year old piece of hardware, with a limited ram set, slow I/O performance and really quite pisspoor FPU performance.

    But all is not lost! So here are a few handy hints.

    1) Tell the guy running the server. The Xbox has voice chat, use it. You might even make a friend. Remember, it’s the server’s responsibility to make sure that his world isn’t overloaded.

    2) If you regularly run a server, it’s recommended you run on a high detail; that way, clients who are running on high detail will see the same performance as you. If you, as a server, run on low detail to keep it running fast, then clients who join on high detail are going to complain that the game lags.

    3) Be careful about custom objects. They are awesome, and they ARE fast, but they have distinct limits.

    4) Optimise your custom objects. Yes, I know the workshop HUD is big and annoying, but that’s so you don’t ignore it. I’m not going to allow you to disable it, as how complicated your object is (it surprises me how many polys objects have sometimes, and I know exactly how it all works!)

    5) Adding blocks to custom objects can make them less complicated. Avoid transparent blocks in custom objects if you can; they are really expensive.

    6) Try and strike a balance between the number of custom objects, and their complexity; a middling amount of middling complex objects is the best bet.

    1,000 objects, 1 type, 2,000 polys = good
    1,000 objects, 5 types, 1,000 polys = good
    10,000 objects, 1 type, 1,000 polys = bad
    1,000 objects, 64 types, 1,000 polys = bad
    1,000 objects, 64 types, 8,000 polys = bad.

    It’s only an Xbox!

    7) Be aware of the view frustum; if you fill an underground cave with custom objects, the game still has to render them, it doesn’t know they can’t be seen (a curse of a fully destructible world); try to spread out your creations a little bit; use Z on a keypad/keyboard to show exactly how much is being drawn of each type. If you want a forest and a factory, try putting them in different directions, rather than where a player will see both of them. It’s only an Xbox!

    8) If your game isn’t rendering water, then it doesn’t matter your water detail. Try and use water creatively, rather than all willy-nilly.

    9) Doodads are fairly cheap, and fairly efficient; lasers, conveyors, jumpads, factories can be used to a fairly large degree. Doodads that come to a complete halt on a normal surface; if you’re done with a chain, get rid of them as soon as possible. The left-click-stick shows you the number of active doodads. Remember, if you’re not drawing anything else, you’re only allowed 1,042 complicated custom objects at 60fps! I’ve joined worlds where people have well over 10,000 active doodads; if they were complicated ones, that means the best framerate you’ll see is only 6fps! Try and keep them simple; it’s only an Xbox!

    10) Rendering the world is incredibly cheap and efficient; if you never use any of the cool shit that FortressCraft as, the game will run at a lovely solid 60fps.

    11) Remember that there are detail settings for a reason. A huge amount of people run at full draw distance, full water detail, and full world rendering, with particles on. You’ll never get a good framerate like that if you also combine it with 10,000 custom objects. Try running the game in Safe Mode once in a while (hold Y when you Join or Enter the world); that puts the game on absolute minimum detail – then notice how nicely the game runs. I‘d love you to be able to run the game at max detail at 60 fps but, hey… it’s only an Xbox.

    I’m sure someone will suggest that the game should be doing the limiting. However, it’s just not that simple. You can have high detail custom objects, if you use it them sparingly. But if you want to place them down in large numbers, it’ll need to be simple. But, if there’s water there as WELL, then it might run slowly… the number of variables involved in ‘framerate’ are far, far too many to be easily summed up and analysed and limited. Sorry.

    Oh, and just for the 20 people who said “Don’t render things you can’t see!”… seriously? You might as well tell me that I should put round wheels on a car; it’s pretty obvious!


  • How can I become a programmer and write games like you?

    Posted on by DjArcas
    I get asked this question a lot, so I felt it was time to finally sit down and write up a proper answer to it. As some of you probably know, it took me 10 weeks and 6 days to write FortressCraft, from the first line of code, to it being available on the Xbox Marketplace- but what is less apparent from that is that it took 12 years of AAA coding to learn how to do that, and it took a further 18-ish years of bedroom coding in order to get there.So, what qualifications do you need to get into the games industry?

    None.

    Don’t get me wrong – good grades, good exam marks, a good degree, they will certainly help you get a job, but they definitely aren’t required, and they aren’t what a games company will look for the most. Of that, I am (sadly) living proof; I failed both Maths and English miserably at school, tho I did get a pass in Art and Woodwork.So how did I initially get into the games industry?Part of that answer is due to determination; dedication; focus – in a word, perseverance.After I finished college (with my reasonably useless BTEC in IT), I spent 2 years unemployed. I spent the vast majority of that doing one of 5 things; learning how to use the internet (it was the mid-90’s!), learning how to program games on the PC, learning how to DJ better,  painting Warhammer figures, and writing music.I guess in retrospect, 2 of those turned out to be useful lifeskills (I did end up DJing at some quite large gigs (I’m pretty bloody good at it) and I wrote a few remixes that are still all over the internet)In those days, I would go on the internet at 6:01pm, when cheap-rate phone calls started, stay on the internet until 7:59am (when the expensive rate phone calls started again), go to sleep, then wake up and paint or DJ until 6:01pm; I spent about 2 years doing this, before I finally got a phone call from a friend of mine to go and work doing Millennium Bug programming, up in Brighton.During those 2 years, I tackled everything. IPX network transmission. Audio sampling. A* optimal path finding. 3d rendering. Fixed-step texture mapping. Mode-X scrolling. Raycast walls (‘Doom’). AI. Physics. Terrain rendering. Particle systems. All this on a 33mhz 486 with 8 megs of RAM.

    This was a continuation of my obsession with coding games, however. I started this some 30 years ago, on the VIC-20, moving onto writing text-based games on the Commodore Plus/4, and then creating literally hundreds of games using STOS on the Atari ST.

    Back then of course, there was no Google – if you wanted to work something out, you had to get books from the library, trawl around obscure bulletin boards, or simply work things out from first principle (I remember working out how to light objects from the realisation that the dot product of the normal vector of the poly against the normal vector of the relative direction of the light would give the light intensity; lighting from first principles, awwww yeah)

    These days, if you want to do a Doom-style raycast engine, you just Google it:

    http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/raycast/

    Let me say that again – you can Google and read about and learn anything related to games coding, apart from some of the most cutting-edge techniques out there. http://www.gamedev.net/ is a pretty good place, for instance.

    After the Millennium Bug job, I spent a short period of time doing QA work for a voice recording solutions company (You know ‘These calls may be recorded for training purposes’ ? Yeah, that was us doing the recording). Whilst I did this, I continued to write games, graphics tech, and just learn everything I could about games. I couldn’t play a game without asking myself ‘How did they do that?’ – I remember dying in Captain Blood many times, as I wanted to know HOW they did the planets and landscapes (2d perlin and fault-line fractals is the answer)

    I ended up working on my own landscape renderer; a 25km square piece of world, with height, colouring, and direct raycast lighting and shadows. It was awesome, and ran at over 100fps on my 12mb Voodoo2 card. I sent that demo to a place called Climax Brighton (now renamed to Blackrock Studios, who did Pure and Split/Second), who were impressed, and got me in to do their audio coding.

    The first 6 weeks were terrible for me; I wasn’t anywhere near as good at C++ as I might have possibly made out in the interview and on my CV (Sorry guys!), and I spent those 6 weeks either working how to do things from other people’s code in the sourcebase, or learning C++ at home.

    I passed my probation, and from then on, things were (reasonably) plain sailing; I went to Criterion Games (Burnout, Black), then CodeMasters (Grid, Colin McRae), FreeStyle Games (Dj Hero) and finally Sumo Digital (Doctor Who, Sega Racing, F1 2011)

    So, to sum up, how do you become a good games programmer?

    • Be dedicated. Don’t waste your time doing other things. Don’t make a level 85 WoW character.
    • Spend your time reading, researching and practising.
    • Don’t bite off more than you can chew – write a pacman clone, not a 3d mmo skateboard game. Games companies like demos, but they like demos of full games; starting a game is easy (GGJ/Ludlum Dare prove this), but finishing a game is HARD.
    • Collaborate – find other people who want to write games, and work with them. FortressCraft was created with people I’ve never met, except in the online sense.
    • Show off your stuff onlive – investigate things like the IndieCity Underground – you can let the world see your early work in progress games.
    • Don’t be discouraged by negative feedback. Burnout3 is the 7th highest rated Xbox game of ALL TIME, and I’ve still seen people slag it off. People love to say nasty things about things that other people love; the ‘hipster’ effect, if you will.
    • Stop wasting your time reading this damned blog post, and go to create.msdn.com and download C# express edition
    • Remember that things have changed; when I started the ONLY important thing was ‘making shit that looked, sounded and played great!’. Now a lot of University-taught ex-students are obsessed with design patterns, code reviews and reusable code. Investigate these things, but remember that the user experience is king; no-one cares if Terraria has good or crap code, just how fun it is to play.
    • Love games. Breathe games. Play games you hate, that are popular, ask yourself ‘Why do people love this game?’
    • Be enthusiastic. At Criterion, we rated enthusiasm and the ability to learn above all else, and we ended up with perhaps the best development team on the planet, at the time.
    • Use lots of paragraph breaks when writing blog posts. Just sayin’

     

    Hmm. That was quite a good post. And I failed English. Remind me again why we have our backwards-ass education system? ;)

    I guess now I should just ask – any questions?

    Appendix A : Useful skills

    • C++
    Appendix B: Slightly-useful skills
    • C#
    • MIPS assembly
    • x86 assembly
    Appendix C: Not-very useful skills
    • Java
    • Basic
    • UnrealEd

     

    Oh, and if you don’t understand any of the terms in this post (A*, raycast, perlin, fractals) then go Google them! Start your edumacation today!)


  • FPS; a few notes on game design and progress

    Posted on by DjArcas
    So, fairly surprisingly, given that it was a whole 3 days work, FPS (Fight; Protect; Survive) mode has garnered almost entirely positive feedback, and even more surprisingly only one real bug. (When you leave FPS mode, the mobs continue to render… oops)

    My current goal and focus is the PC/Onlive version of FortressCraft. As I’ve indicated, this requires a certain level of quality before I’ll be shipping it; whilst FPS mode will be in there, the mode won’t be getting a lot of love before release. Signs, ladders and better doors are sadly on the to-do list first.

    However, it’s good for me to have a bunch of things to do, so if I get bored of trying to make the PC version, I can go back and have a fiddle.

    So, part of the idea of FPS mode is to utilise the day/night cycle for a risk/reward system; fighting at night should be riskier. In part, this is accomplished by not having the solar collectors collect at night (they do currently – I can’t believe no-one’s listed that as a bug!). The other half from the game comes from managing your Threat. Now, this is something people are doing badly at – I’ve had a few people go ‘After killing Harvesters, there’s lots of Wasps, and if I keep killing them, there’s tons and I can’t do anything!’ – I need to work a little harder on making people treat the Threat like the 6-star rating in GTA. (Right now at a threat of <5,  Harvesters spawn, above 5, and Wasps spawn, each spawning Wasp reducing threat) – when you get your Threat to 6 stars in GTA, you damned well run for it ;-)

    Your goal, as a player, is to balance the risk of the Threat against the higher rewards (Todo : implement better rewards). One definite thing I will be adding in is for Wasps to attack your Solar Collectors, if you’re underground. The counter for this will be short range electric towers (which in turn will add a drain onto your collection ability, leading to players having to work at their bases a little better than now)

    But the tricky part comes from the ‘nighttime’, when venturing outside should be done only under extreme circumstances. I need to

    a) Give the player plenty to do underground; some sort of fun, productive time sink
    b) Punish the player for venturing outside *and* offer a high reward in exchange for this risk.

    Part of a) is quite simple; the ground will be laced with ores before long. There will be a cheat in the new cheats menu marked ‘Infinite Resources’; turning this on will permanently mark your world as a ‘cheat’ world, but won’t stop you doing anything. We might add in the ability to update your current world with Ores, but I’m not promising this. (as an aside, the Cheats menu will grow with options, basically allowing you to continue a Creative world, without having to worry about things like resources, crafting, whilst still looking at the FPS stuff) Perhaps calling your world a ‘Creative world’ as opposed to ‘Cheat world’ would be nicer ;-)

    b) is currently still milling around in my head; perhaps large, flying carriers that seek out trees/other resources during the night, maybe collecting left over gears; these carriers would attack the player heavily, either via lasers, spawning wasps/other, or dropping bombs. The bombs could even damage the landscape. Think of the flying carriers as the ‘clean up’ crew of the night.

    I’m also considering ensuring that a portion of your base is destroyed each night; one of the requests I’ve had is to ensure that after a few hours of playing, you aren’t completely invincible. Perhaps crawling bombs. :-)

    Another important factor is to ensure that the player is a tipping factor, not a deciding one; rather like Dungeon Defenders, the player has lots to do, but most of what they do is to ensure that the base runs correctly. It’s not Tower Defense tho; it’s one step back from that (rather like South Park TD), so the player has to run to the weak parts of the base and lend their gun, but they mustn’t be able to just ignore the base entirely, and go Rambo! It’ll be a tricky balance to maintain; hopefully the Threat system will automagic this (adding in more players just means your Threat rockets up!)

    Well, that’s my braindump complete; I reserve the right not to implement everything I listed above (with MAGFest coming up, my time is very limited!), but, as ever, I’m very keen to hear from YOU, dear reader. What do you think of FPS mode? What should be in it?


  • Where are we?

    Posted on by DjArcas
    As I sit and type this, the 7th patch is rolling right towards completion, I realise that my life has rather been turned upside down… I also realise that Twitter is a pisspoor way of disseminating information and people never find the ‘right’ post on the forums; so I thought I’d take a brief moment to give a sort of status report on where things are!

    Right now, my main focus is on FortressCraft; I’ve pledged to keep working on it, so long as the sales go over 1,000/day at least 1 day in every 7. Not that I know if that’s true… the sales figures haven’t been updated since the 22nd of November! The patch will go into peer review, latest, on the 12th of December, meaning that, if all goes well, you should all be playing with doors and minecarts, by the end of next week.

    I’d love to sit down and write a big post about the future direction of FortressCraft, but every time I do so, I turn out to be wrong. I follow what the community want so much that it massively derails me from my own plans. I think I’m pretty much reaching the end of where Creative can take me; I’d like to consider scripting, allowing some truly innovative creations in the game, but the main thrust is pretty much there now. Copy and paste is *amazing*.

    So what next for FortressCraft? Well, for those of you on the Xbox, you’ll (hopefully) be interested in the Fight, Protect, Survive mode (aka FPS). This should introduce the concept of your character existing on a hostile, alien, robotic world. The first steps towards this have been taken now – there’s a pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha of FPS mode in the 1.1 Alpha (the 7th patch I’m taking a quick break from right now) – feedback is massively welcome!

    Future plans there include non-infinite resources, cooperative combat, levelling, gear, stats, and the concept of not being able to be ‘safe’; if you have a long term server, you shouldn’t be able to hole up and be safe forever. That’s no fun ;-)

    And yes. Multiple worlds. Ladders. Slopes. Auto rebuilding Spleef arenas. I know!

    Outside of the Xbox arena, there’s been quite a lot of (silent) movement towards the PC version. OnLive have been massively helpful here, and I (roughly!!!) predict that the OnLive/PC version of FortressCraft should be available early next year. I’ve literally just bought a touchscreen monitor, in order to add touch/multitouch support to FortressCraft. (TL;DR: FortressCraft will run over OnLive, on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android Tablet… hell yeah!)

    After that’s been done, hopefully the normal PC version should also come out. Because I’m a massive nerd, I want to support some of the weird and wonderful setups you can get on the PC; this includes EyeFinity support, stereoscopic 3d, head tracking… ooo yeah. :>

    So far, the PC version is working, and I’ve happily got the Pure and Split/Second network coder from BlackRock Studios working on the network code for me.

    Outside of FortressCraft (I’d hate to be thought of as a one trick pony!), there’s been lots of work on the OnLive version of Steam Heroes. I’ve been using that as a ‘learning platform’ for the OnLive version of FortressCraft, in order to learn about leaderboards, account profiles, achievements, and all the other stuff we don’t get access to on XBLIG.
    I’ve also been working on updating one of my older games, known as SkyKids; I’m aiming for a 128 player online, 2d dogfighting game, with 4 players per Xbox. Again, I want to port this to OnLive, once it’s done.

    There’s also been some early talkings about using other games within FortressCraft engine; the engine itself is nearly to the point where this is becoming a reality.

    One other thing I’ve not done much talking about, outside of the tester’s chat, is the game with the tentative working title of ‘FortressCraft 2d’. This has been a test bed for some far-future features of FortressCraft. I also need to have a game that supports 350 players on a single screen, by the middle of next year; this should be very slow paced, and thus ideal.

    I’ve not talked too much about it, partly as it’s so early in development, partly as I don’t even slightly want to have to fight off and defend OMFG RIPPED OFF TERRARIA comments, but also because I don’t have an artist for this game yet. (Are you a good pixel artist? Capable of working on small animated sprites? Dedicated, hardworking, efficient, talented and experience? Pop me an email or a link with your work, maybe I can use you!) But right now the game has a working pipe and flow system, you can move around and mine things

    So there we go, a short update as to where we are. I guess I should read this outloud, for the Youtube part of my community (damn I wish everyone was on a single, central system!). Right now, I have a couple of gnarly bugs to fix before this patch can go to review. (Next post : Peer review, XBLA and AAA submissions)

    And the entire post without a single mention of Notch *or* Minecraft!

    Ah.

    Bugger.


  • Has Everyone Gone Mad?

    Posted on by DjArcas

    So, Minecraft’s finally out, hurray! My main experience with playing it on launch day was full of crashes and very low framerates, but I’m sure that’s not been everyone’s experience!

    So, right now Minecraft is running a MetaCritic score of 96; by comparison, Skyrim has 94, Batman 94, Uncharted 3 92 and Zelda 95. I’m sorry, did the world just go mad? Minecraft is better than Skyrim?

    As a completed game, competing directly against the world’s best games for your hard-earned dollar, I have to wonder why all the reviewers are skipping over so many of its shortcomings. Did the mainstream reviewing media just go all hipster on us?Let’s have a look at a few of those review snippets:

    [Minecraft] has already joined Super Mario Brothers, Wolfenstein 3D, and Tetris in the pantheon of games that prototyped an entire genre.

    Wolfenstein wasn’t even ID’s first FPS game, let alone the first in the genre. Tetris was based on a classic Russian wooden block game. To try to claim Super Mario Bros. as the first platform game is just ludicrous. In the same vein; I suspect the Infiniminer guys are seething at comments like that; let alone the *first* proto-voxel game by Ken Silverman, VoxLap. May, 2000, by the way. That’s 11 years ago. Why is gaming history not one of journalist’s strong points? Wolfenstein 3D and Super Mario Bros *were* important, seminal games in those genres; the first blockbuster in that genre, sure, but to credit them; or Minecraft; with having created a genre? That’s like claiming that Star Wars invented the sci-fi genre – instead, it simply popularised it, and gave it credibility.

    …critiquing Minecraft’s ready-made dungeons and NPC villages is a bit like complaining about the beans served alongside an immaculate five-star steak. Sure, the side-servings might be mediocre…

    Ok, so if the game has a bunch of mediocre things, why the hell did you just award it 100/100? That insinuates that it’s a perfect game! The only game to get a perfect score on the C64 was Mayhem in Monsterland; the magazines simply said ‘There will never be a game better than this on the C64, so we feel correct in awarding it a perfect score.’

    While the toybox/platform side of Minecraft is incredible, the “game” side of it is lacking.

    The game side is lacking, yet you award it 93%? (I’d love to see these guys get ahold of FortressCraft, if they think the creative options in Minecraft are ‘incredible’) The idea that a game that lacks… gameplay… can get 93% scares me for the future of gaming.

    As one of the comments put it on the EG review – “Would you have given it 10/10 if it didn’t have such a massive fanbase?’

    Now, the user score is 78% – a much more sensible rating. Whilst Minecraft is a great game, it’s not perfect, it’s not polished, and it’s not finished – despite being out of ‘beta’

    Here’s my personal list of things that really should have knocked a few points off that 100. (just to repeat there – lots of places are awarding this 100% – they are saying it is not only the best game ever made, they are saying that nothing can be better. Even Ocarina of Time, that darling of gamers everywhere, only has a MetaCritic rating of 99!)

    • The doors don’t animate
    • The experience points don’t do anything
    • There’s no manual or instructions
    • It’s impossible to craft without referring to websites (unless you have thousands of hours to guess possible crafting options of course)
    • The minecarts are buggy and broken. They also have no point at all (barring acting as some sort of tour guide – what does that have to do with survival?)
    • The combat is simplistic, outdated and quite poor. Ultima Underworld had better melee combat. In 1992.
    • The AI is very poor with mobs bouncing up and down and getting stuck on things repeatedly. (A popular target for many reviews of FPS games, yet Minecraft gets away with it)
    • The achievements aren’t stored per account.
    • No mod support.
    • Only one game mode (Creative adds flying and no limits on blocks – it’s more of a cheat mode than a game mode!)
    • No PVP (or, if you include griefing, ‘Shit PVP’)
    • The sound effects are poor quality, repetitive and decidedly amateurish.
    • End to end, from start to end sequence, Adventure mode takes about 3 hours.
    • There’s. No. Fucking. Server. Browser.

    Let’s just focus on that last one for a second; Minecraft is a game about surviving things in a multiplayer world. Yet there’s no way to join anyone’s server. You can’t show your stuff off. Can you imagine if Gears of War 3 had come out, and you had to write down a 12 digit number and send it to your friends?

    Yet, apparently, Minecraft is the best game ever written.

    Sure, I might be nitpicking a little; but to be the highest metacritic scored game on the PC, it needs to be better than everything on the PC – it needs to have almost no flaws, it needs to execute everything perfectly, it needs an incredible variety of gameplay; it needs to look, sound and play better than anything on the market.

    Don’t even get me started on the graphics; apparently Nvidia and ATi have wasted billions of dollars with this new fangled shader technology, and pointless advances like anisotropic filtering; the best game in the world doesn’t bother with any of these pointless foibles, and instead settles for something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1994.

    • Is Minecraft great? Yes!
    • Has it helped to redefine how people think about Indie Games? Yes!
    • Is it the best PC game ever written? Uhhh…

    …I’ll let you guys answer that last one. Try and keep it on topic; as I’ve said, many a time, I’m ecstatic that FortressCraft is second only to Minecraft – that’s an incredible honour. Any comments along the lines of ‘BUT UR GAME IS SHIT COMPARED 2 MIENCRAFT!!!’ aren’t going to get approved.

    Next article: Why I love Serious Sam 3 so much! (74% metacritic rating…)

     


  • When is a Clone No Longer a Clone?

    Posted on by DjArcas

    About a 10 months ago I got into an argument on the Minecraft forum with someone who was  basically stating that Minecraft was far too advanced, big and complicated to be able to run on an Xbox. As I’m basically an idiot, I set out to prove them wrong. Along the way I got sidetracked into writing and releasing a game; a game now known as FortressCraft: Chapter 1.I did make a mistake back then, and that’s the mistake of saving a few seconds.

    “What’s this game you’re writing?”, people would ask.
    “It’s basically Minecraft for the Xbox”, I would reply.

    Oh boy. Little did I know what a huge pile of hatred, blind fanboyism and idiocy I would encounter after uttering those fateful words, words I’ve most certainly come to regret; even more so when Notch, Mr half-million tweeps himself, wrote off FortressCraft as ” an obvious attempt to just take something popular and clone it as closely as possible”.

    The proof, they say, is in the pudding – is FortressCraft just another Minecraft-wannabe, or has it grown into its own, unique, wonderful game? It’s been nearly 7 months since the game was released, and I’ve worked on it as much as possible in that time.

    I think the power of the engine was hammered home when I started up my World Surgery (With DrArcas!).  I was looking at a world sent in by a fan who had essentially managed to entirely break FortressCraft. Several days of hard investigating and optimisation later, I’m presented with a world that blew me away.

    Now, I will try to be fair, and I will pretend that Minecraft is actually a game about being creative (as opposed to what I believe it is, a game about mining, crafting, and hitting mobs with blocky swords). Take a look at this. Is one game a clone of the other? Or is it fair to say that one of these games was inspired by the other, is now forging it’s own path, and isn’t merely following in the original footsteps?

    (Click images for larger versions.)

    On the left we have a village in Minecraft. I shall assume the reader is familiar with Minecraft. As this was created by the Mojang team themselves, I think it’s also safe to say that this is pretty much as good as Minecraft can do.On the right we have a building in FortressCraft. This is using the custom block renderer extensively (leading to the game having a 12.5cm granularity, as opposed to Minecraft’s 1 metre!)

    Does this look like a clone? Or is this an evolution? I’m hard pressed to not argue that it’s a revolution, but I’ll leave that particular choice down to the reader.

    First person to mention ‘mods’ in the comments gets a special prize. I’m tired of hearing about how ‘mods could do this’, and mostly for one reason: where *are* these alleged mods? Is someone in the process of writing a full animated custom block renderer for Minecraft? And even if they did, what does that mean? That a few thousand people might use the mod, until it gets out of date (usually shortly after a new major patch comes out for MineCraft)? IF you must mention mods, then please, do, link me the mod capable of doing this – or better yet, a world that looks as good as this.

    For the rest of you: what do you think? Has FortressCraft finally outgrown the ‘Minecraft Clone’ tag? (Anyone attempting to argue that no matter what I do, leaves it as ‘A Minecraft clone with stuff added’ will be reminded that no-one ever calls Minecraft ‘An Infiniminer clone with stuff added’ – by any yardstick by which this is true of FortressCraft, it’s also true of Minecraft!)

    I’m not going to get into an argument about ‘beta’, original ideas, released or unreleased – I just want to know – Is FortressCraft a clone of Minecraft, or an evolution (or revolution!), inspired by Minecraft?

    The reason I keep on asking things like this, is articles such as this. When industry/professional articles start referring to FortressCraft as “blatant copies” (and even going so far as to invent other games that’ve made more than $1,000,000 – c’mon guys, do a LITTLE fact checking). Even more amusingly, in that article, Gamasutra bangs the drum for the “release early, release often” methodology, and even goes so far as to say “you can be honest, transparent, and responsive to your fans, and still make a massive profit.”.

    Perhaps they should have written : “you can be honest, transparent, and responsive to your fans, and still be accused of ripping off the current favourite”.


  • Minecraft, FortressCraft, and Infiniminer

    Whilst people tell me ‘stop comparing your game to Minecraft’, it seems that it’s not really ME that needs to do this, but in fact the rest of the internet. After being told by Evil_Notch that ‘Fortresscraft is an exact copy of Minecraft’s survival and resources based gameplay’; I feel that, perhaps, a little truth table is in order. I’ll be simply linking people to this, next time they appear to be… misinformed.

    I shall attempt to keep this impartial; and for those of you still a little upset about my ‘Xbox Minecraft sales’ comment, I have included a special MC-Xbox column, which includes all the publicly-available knowledge about the game. Please note I am only listing the CURRENT state of affairs – telling me that Minecraft will ‘one day’ have mod support isn’t constructive in the slightest.

    FortressCraftMinecraftInfiniminerMinecraft-XboxFound Elsewhere?
    Procedural worldsYesYesYes?Diablo 2, CreeperWorld
    Infinite worldsNoNo(1)NoNo(2)Rarely
    Mod supportNoNo(3)NoNo(4)Extensively
    Crafting items from recipesNoYesNo?Warcraft, Diablo 2
    User-defined modelsYesNoNo?Most RPGs
    Old-skool lookOptionalYesYes?Extensively
    Infinitely mutable landscapeYesYesYes?Only in voxel games!
    Voxel renderingYesYesYes?Comanche, Voxlap, Red Alert
    SurvivalNoYesNo?Loosely defined
    ResourcesNoYesYes?Extensively
    A pickaxeYesYesYes?Warcraft, Terraria
    FarmingNoYesNo?Farmville, Harvest Moon
    Kinect SupportNoNoNoYesSadly, everywhere :(

     

    Hopefully this clears things up a little; FortressCraft has no similarities with Minecraft that it does not ALSO share with Infiminer OR  it could be argued that these things are fundamental to this genre (which I tentatively call VoxGames – try and follow the green lines left to right!).

    (I am not going to sit here and list the enormous swathe of things that FortressCraft has that Minecraft does not; partly as I’m tired of being told ‘you can do that in a mod’, but mostly because this is to show that the FortressCraft/Minecraft similarities are not exclusive. I have also left out many things that are too common to attribute to Minecraft. I have been accused of stealing the sky, grass, ‘setting’, camera and gravity settings from Minecraft in the past. Anyone mentioning mods will be reminded A) about the Xbox, B) that Minecraft’s mod support is totally non-existent, C) running multiple mods is, at best, a difficult proposition, and D) the vast majority of players don’t go hacking their game to alter it!)

    Feel free to leave comments, but if you do so, please try and keep them related to the facts; corrections are welcome. If you *do* want to leave snide, hateful comments, then, please, don’t. They won’t get approved.

    Footnotes!
    (1) Minecraft does not in fact feature infinite worlds, just ones ‘8 times the size of the earth’
    (2) The Xbox has finite size limits; an infinite world would require infinite space, and there is a hard 2048mb cap on Xbox files
    (3) Minecraft has no Mod support; moreover, Notch obfuscates the code, expressly to make hacking, cracking and changing (‘modding’) the game more difficult
    (4) User/public modification of games is not permitted by the Microsoft T&Cs


  • Rolling Development

    So at the weekend, I wanted to play Dungeon Siege. If you aren’t aware of it, it’s an excellent RPG by Gas Powered Games, released in 2002. Not all that long ago! It’s got some great features (hitting monsters makes you better at hitting monsters, not at casting spells), and I go back to it every few years for a quick blast. After digging through boxes for an hour, I finally found the game box; 3 discs, sweet. Now, my main PC doesn’t have a DVD drive – the last game I had to INSTALL was Spore, and I did that from a laptop drive, shared over the network – so I went to install it on my laptop instead.

    Problem – I had 3 discs, 2 from Dungeon Siege, 1 from the expansion. Bugger. Well, it’s old, maybe it’s cheap on Steam. A quick search shows that it’s 30 quid, and only available if you buy the quite dire Dungeon Siege III (a game that is Dungeon Siege in name only – tho that’s a story for another time). I balk at paying that much, and end up downloading a torrent instead.

    Hurray for cracked games, by the way. The very concept of having to have a ‘key’ disc in the drive is mental. If you need to protect a game, please, just require me to have internet connection once in a while. Every time someone comes out with an always-on DRM, by the way, I’m amazed at how many people post comments on an INTERNET WEBPAGE, saying how their internet connection is flaky/unstable/missing.

    Excellent, my torrent is finished. A quick install later, and I’m faced with a dialogue telling me that the game is not compatible with Windows 7. Oh boy. A further hour with the troubleshooter, internet forums and all the experience I can muster, and I’m left with a game with a flickering black screen, random lockups, and the most incredible lag over a 100mbit lan. Epic fail. I give up.

    (unrelated, but Dungeon Siege 2 seemed to run fine)

    I’m sure you’ve all read articles about DRM, Steam, the Origin store; the usual ‘What happens if, in 5 or 10 years time, I want to play this game again? The DRM won’t let me!’ Well, it appears that DRM isn’t really the issue, but simply the passage of time. Sure, I could have installed XP on an older machine, or dug up an older laptop, but that’s beginning to get outside of the realms of the sensible. The game simply never had a patch to allow it to run on new hardware – it wouldn’t have been profitable to do so.

    I have a great racing game on my iPad. It was one of the first games I bought, and even includes network play. It came out before the GameCentre integration with the iPad, so it lacks the in-built networking that Apple offers. Sadly, the company has been busy working on sequels, so I’m never going to get to play it online. Adding that functionality wouldn’t have been profitable.

    Looking back at both of these, I feel a new development model is required. It’s available on rare occasions; Team Fortress 2 and Minecraft being the most famous examples (and in those cases, only being differentiated with the word ‘alpha’ stuck incorrectly somewhere.) In this development model, a game is shipped, not necessarily in a complete state, but the game changes, grows, and morphs over time.

    This sort of development model has been technically around for MMOs for the longest time. Sadly, if you take Warcraft out of the equation, most MMOs quietly pocket your money, and charge you for the privilege of new content via expansions. I played Star Wars Galaxies on release; a quite frankly dire game full of issues and bugs. It went free-to-play quite recently, so I went and had another look. 4 years of development, subscriptions, and there was nothing to show for it. The graphics were dire, the gameplay hadn’t changed, and it had barely progressed from its initial release.

    Terraria was released to great promise of updates and patches, and that’s gone very quiet now. Not to put the game down, but it’s a simple game; adding in new bosses is a trivial amount of code and graphics, and we all know they did excellently at launch – what happened?

    Worst of all is Magicka – again, released in a fairly.. how to phrase it nicely… unstable state, two patches released and they started work on DLC. Several DLC packs have come out now, yet I’ve still not managed to complete the game in one sitting, with 3 other players, due to crashes and lockups.

    With FortressCraft – and indeed, all my future games – I’d like to embrace this development model as much as possible. Releasing a game and leaving it to stagnate is not what I want as a developer, nor as a games player. Nothing makes an iOS owner happier than their favourite game (or the game they haven’t touched in a month) appearing in the list of updates. And nothing is sadder than a game you love having a crippling bug, but not being fixed by the development team, as it’s no longer profitable to do so.

    FortressCraft has had 4 major patches already, and is about to get its 5th, adding in a ton of new object behaviours, physics objects, and the initial groundwork for a new game.

    Is this the most sensible and valid use of my time? Probably not. Leaving Chapter 1 to rot and working on Chapter 2 would probably be the most efficient way of making money. As a gameplayer, I would rather have Chapter 1 patched forever, taking advantage of the rolling development model, until it’s as good as a game that took 3 years to develop; of course with one major advantage. Doing it this way means that I get incredible feedback from an amazing community – ideas roll in, roll out, get shaped and formed by hundreds of thousands of users; going beyond mere fixing of new exploits, and trying to be a game that makes the majority of its users happy.

    And I do hope you all love the new physics objects. My only current regret is that I need to stop putting new things in in order to get this patch out. So many ideas, so little time …


  • Open Letter to Notch

    Posted on by DjArcas

    Dear Notch,

    I just came across the interview Ars Technica did with Re-Logic and with me on our games Terraria and FortressCraft, respectively. They invited you to say a few words about the games. Normally you’re quite recalcitrant to comment on FortressCraft, so I was pleased to see that that you’d written about it. I was quite a lot less pleased when I read the content, though :

    Notch : “I strongly believe that true greatness comes from being influenced by other people’s work and improving it, making your own version of it, by mixing and matching your best influences and a few original ideas of your own,” Persson told Ars.

    “Both FortressCraft and Terraria appear to be inspired by Minecraft, which in turn was inspired by many other games, including Infiniminer, Dwarf Fortress, and Dungeon Keeper. However, I do not believe you can achieve something great or interesting by merely attempting to emulate something successful. It becomes especially embarrassing if you publicly deny any inspiration when it’s painfully clear how much of a copy it is.

    “Terraria is an amazing game, and if Minecraft is any inspiration for it, I feel proud to be part of its lineage. I play it frequently, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for it. FortressCraft is an obvious attempt to just take something popular and clone it as closely as possible. I still think it’s important that people are allowed and able to do things like that, but it’s hardly graceful.”

    Where to start? I think the best place to start is the phrase ‘as closely as possible’. Whereas the vast majority of Minecraft clones out there begin by emulating Minecraft’s blocky, retro style, I tried as hard as possible to bring the Voxgame kicking and screaming into the modern, shader-driven era. With parallax mapping, thick vegetation, multiple coloured light sources, refraction and reflection, as well as beautiful, highly-detailed tools; I find the phrase ‘as closely as possible’ extremely hard to swallow. And all of this crammed into a machine with a total of 512 megs of RAM!

    As I’ve been seen to rant on YouTube occasionally – ‘If I wanted to make a Minecraft clone, the second video I uploaded would have had a Creeper in it’

    I don’t think it’s particularly fair to dig at your erroneous comments, Notch, but one in particular warrants examination: ‘a few original ideas of your own’.  Last time I played Minecraft, it lacked these, instead cobbling together many ideas from other games into the Minecraft we now all know and love. But original ideas? Zero, as far as I’m aware! (Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong there!)

    But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you simply meant ‘Ideas not in the games that inspired the new game’ – in Minecraft’s case, Infinimer, et al.

    Bear in mind that – as far as I know – you’ve not played FortressCraft, you simply admit to ‘having watched a few videos about it’’ – http://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/i2wzw/fortresscraft_creators_thoughts_on_minecraft360/c20g4n9 ). – xNotch is you, I believe!

    Let’s have a quick look at all the things that FortressCraft 1.09 has, that Minecraft does not have.  You know, those original ideas mooted above?

    • Rayguns
    • Trampolines
    • Rewards for creating highly-rated servers
    • Multiple game modes (including FreezeTag, Hunt and Spleef Arena)
    • Highly-configurable world creation
    • Highly-configurable detail options, including lots of fun postpro shaders
    • Automated machines to dig for you
    • Tectonic Rise
    • Teleporters
    • A crafting workshop that lets you craft your own unique blocks
    • Varied blocks – kiddie, futuristic, pixel creation

    I could go on, but I feel my point there is made: whatever criticism could have been laid at FortressCraft’s feet back when I described it as ‘Basically Minecraft creative’ really doesn’t hold true now. Incidentally, that was around Feburary 2011.  FortressCraft is ‘basically Minecraft’ in the same way that Minecraft is ‘basically Infiniminer’. It’s just that Minecraft has been out a hell of a lot longer, and I have an enormous list of plans and ideas I want to put into FortressCraft as time goes on.

    And finally, the suggestion that FortressCraft denies its inspiration: again, it’s quite obvious that you’ve never played FortressCraft, Notch – so I’ll leave you with a few lines from the in-game credits:

    Inspiration : Notch’s Minecraft

    Inspiration : Tarn Adams’s Dwarf Fortress

    Inspiration : Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon

    Inspiration : Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper

    Inspiration : Puck’s Minecraft HD Update

    “If I have seen further, then it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” – Sir Isaac Newton, inventor of gravity.

    If you’d like a copy of the game to try out, Notch, just drop me a tweet, @fortress_craft, and I’ll get one over to you to have a play with – maybe you could teach me a thing or two about fast Perlin!

    Yours sincerely,

    DjArcas, creator of FortressCraft

    Postscript:

    I think it’s important to make clear the tone of this: I don’t hate Notch, as I’ve said before, I have an enormous amount of respect for him. I’m not jealous of Minecraft’s success, I’m inspired by it.  Minecraft made Voxgames popular, that has helped FortressCraft enormously – I’ve never denied this, and I’m very happy to be a part of this new and popular genre!

    I love FortressCraft. I have created the best thing of my life this year, and I am very protective of it. I don’t want anyone to simply glance at it and go ‘Oh, it’s a copy of Minecraft’, and not play it, instead choosing to watch videos of it. I want people to look at it and see it for what it is: a great game in its own right.



  • dinamic_sidebar 4 none

©2012 DjArcas's Blog Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)  Raindrops Theme