DjArcas's Blog

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!

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++

• C#
• MIPS assembly
• x86 assembly

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!)

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?

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.

[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.

…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…)

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.)

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.

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.