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Games Scraps: Modular Vehicle Combat - Vehicle combat with buildable vehicles

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by Nition, Dec 8, 2012.

  1. NomadKing

    NomadKing

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    Congrats on passing the goal! Really looking forward to seeing more of this project now :)
     
  2. Nition

    Nition

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    It’s the final two days for the Kickstarter, and I also managed to fit in a little bit of time to fix a few of the obvious bugs and stuff in the builder release. 0.2.8 is up for download now.

    2013-12 – 0.2.8
    - Nicer outline shader for people using 4X or 8X MSAA. Also fixed lighting on the ramp
    - Power/capacitor values now use scientifically correct units. Edutainment!
    - Weapon hover tooltips show power drain
    - By popular request, ramp is a bit wider

    Bug Fixes:
    - Fixed icon image corruption on Mac
    - Fixed two more rotation range calculation bugs. These include a fix for weapons spinning where they shouldn’t at low framerates.
    - Fixed overlay not showing when returning from Test to Build
    - Fixed vehicle not being destroyed correctly when going from test map to main menu
    - Fixed parts staying highlighted when going from build screen to game
     
  3. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Congrats on the funding/Greenlight! Heartwarming to see fellow Kiwi's succeeding, keep it up.
    I really like the outline shader, very subtle but adds a lot to the stylization of your project.
     
  4. primus88

    primus88

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    Hi Nition,

    I sent you some questions on the PM. Did you get them? I guess you must be pretty busy these days.

    Br,
    Primus
     
  5. ludiares

    ludiares

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    Hey Nition,
    You should take a look at the mac build. For some reason, when I open the decompressed folder, Finder crashed, making the computer useless
     
  6. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Wow!! Thats EXACTLY what just happend to me? (forced to type from my workstation now) Did you manage a fix???
     
  7. ludiares

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    Nope. Just force-restarted the computer. Tried it several times, and all of those times the computer crashed.
     
  8. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Yep, that'd be right. After multiple tries all I get is the Finder crash notification.. Cant click, type, command-line anything.
    Moving to trash didn't work either...
    Grim stuff
     
  9. Nition

    Nition

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  10. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Nition mate, you really need to look into this asap. It would seem theres something sketchy leeching off your download link...
    My Airbook is now useless..
     
  11. Nition

    Nition

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    Woah, sorry I missed those messages. I'll revert it to the previous release right now!

    Edit: Reverted the Mac release to 0.2.7.1. Sorry guys!
     
    Last edited: Dec 17, 2013
  12. ludiares

    ludiares

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    No problem. It has not even been one day. I'd say it's a good job coming from you being able to act in one day after the problem has been detected. Good job, as always
     
  13. Nition

    Nition

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    Did you guys manage to un-brick your computers? :-(
     
  14. someunityguy

    someunityguy

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    Congrats on Getting Funded nice to see that its going to make it out.
     
  15. Nition

    Nition

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    The Kickstarter is over. Success! Over $30,000 raised including PayPal pledges.

    Oh, and next time if I put out an update that does something really serious like break your whole computer, send me an email! Of course, hopefully that won't happen!
     
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2013
  16. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    Where would one buy the game, now that kickstarter is over?
     
  17. Nition

    Nition

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    Sorry, the game won't be available to purchase now until the actual alpha release circa mid-2014. I thought about allowing preorders in the meantime but I decided not to. The Kickstarter has raised enough for now, and I'd rather people buy when they really know what they're getting.
     
  18. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    So you stopped the paypal thing too?
     
  19. Nition

    Nition

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    Yep, not more preorders for the time being.

    If you're wanting to pledge now though, since you only just missed out, I could PM you a PayPal link if you like.
     
  20. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    Yes please!
     
  21. Nition

    Nition

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  22. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Hi there,
    Nope unfortunately not, thanks for fixing it though as no one else should experience this issue now :)
    None of this is you fault of course but it might be an idea to put a disclaimer underneath the download from now, cheers.
     
  23. Nition

    Nition

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    Yeah, good idea. That sucks though. I've got no idea how that could happen. It worked on my test Mac but my test Mac has other weird issues.

    You haven't actually lost your data right, your OS is just broken?
     
  24. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    What system are you using to host the download? A hosting site?

    Anyway, i managed to un-paperweight my airbook like this:

    1) Crash it.
    2) Turn it on.
    3) The instant your hear the startup tune hold the left shift key.
    4) Release it when you see the little spinning gear icon.
    5) Wait bloody ages.
    6) Log in. Then connect your AC adapter if you haven't already.
    7) Update your OSX with the app store updater thingy or go: Apple icon -> About this Mac -> Check for Updates and update it. (quick before it tries to crash)
    8 ) Restart (should do this automatically)
    9) Wait bloody ages
    10) When install is complete log in.
    11) Fixed (hopefully)... Worked for me.
     
  25. ludiares

    ludiares

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    I didn't really lose anything. I just had to force shutdown the computer, restart it and delete the scraps folder, but nothing worse than that.
     
  26. Nition

    Nition

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    Just Amazon S3 (when it's busy) or my own web host (when it's not). I don't think anything external could have got in and added malware or whatever, I think that build of the game must have just been doing something crazy to some Macs. Especially since I've managed to reproduce something similar on my test Mac: Doesn't happen every time but I got a crash in Finder, restarting fixed it.

    Why does 0.2.8 do that and 0.2.7 doesn't? Well, the only significant thing I changed was I now set some shaders on materials at runtime. I imagine most Unity apps don't do that so maybe there's a bug with it on Mac.
     
  27. ludiares

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    I don't think that's the problem. It does not crash in-game, but in Finder. You can't start the app, so it's something with the folder, not the app itself. At least for me.
     
  28. Nition

    Nition

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    Actually, I bet it's the icon format. I changed the icon format in the latest release because the old icon format didn't work properly either (it didn't crash, but the look of the icon was messed up).

    So er, don't use a 16 bit png as your icon maybe?
     
  29. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    I'm really not sure. Oh well, thanks a lot for getting onto it :) In any case, no harm done in the long run. Could be something only experienced with a specific version of OS X. I suggest you do a bit of testing before you release it on Steam though.
     
  30. Nition

    Nition

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    It's the icon format triggering a bug in OS X. I found some more information on it here and here.

    So should be easy to fix, just an unfortunate bug. I only have Lion which would explain why I didn't quite see the same issue - I assume you guys have Mountain Lion?

    And for future reference if you want to totally break someone's Mountain Lion machine, just encode an icon in a certain way apparently. Great work Apple.
     
  31. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Thats interesting, oh well at least you know your website hasn't been compromised. Thank you so much for looking into this by the way, so many people would just be like "meh, not my issue, its a bug so what."
    Thanks again :)

    Edit: Yes I have Mountain Lion.
     
  32. Nition

    Nition

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  33. NomadKing

    NomadKing

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    An interesting read, it's always nice when people share their experiences with these things :)

    Hopefully now you can get back to spending more time on the fun part (actually making the game!)
     
  34. primus88

    primus88

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    Thank you Nition.
    Your article brings a lot of valuable insight!

    Also, you were asking about an example of a bigger project on Kickstarter that has a postmortem.
    I find this one, very interesting: DwarfCorp Postmortem

    BR
     
  35. Nition

    Nition

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    Yeah, their writeup is great, really through. I'd still like to see those sort of stats from a really big project. $45,000 is pretty big, but the super-successful Kickstarters are in a league of their own.
     
  36. Nition

    Nition

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    Sometimes with games (or any software really) it’ll seem like there’s a logical feature that the developers should add which would clearly make the game better, yet they never do. Sometimes a whole community gets frustrated over this stuff.

    In reality, sometimes features that seem like simple changes aren’t actually so simple.

    Someone on the Scraps forum made a reasonable feature suggestion yesterday which made me think about this sort of user/programmer dichotomy, so I thought I’d repeat some stuff as a proper post.

    Currently, if your vehicle runs out of power for your weapons, their firing will in most cases become staggered, where they’ll fire one at a time. The reason this happens isn’t anything fancy:

    1. Guns are ready to fire but don’t have enough power available. Power is free to charge up because guns aren’t firing.
    2. Power charges up enough that at least one gun can fire.
    3. That gun fires, draining some power.
    4. The next time power charges up enough, that gun isn’t ready to fire again yet. So another gun fires instead.

    I kinda like the result of this system and other people seem to as well. It’s a sort of a Graceful Degradation.

    The gun which needs the least amount of power to fire will always fire first, but sometimes there’s more than one weapon that fits that description (because you can have multiple weapons of the same type).

    So the suggestion was, instead of firing whatever lowest-power gun was next on the list, why not automatically choose the one which is aiming closest to the enemy?

    I do like it when a game automates things for you to get the “best” outcome from your resources, instead of forcing you into micromanagement. It’s a suggestion that makes sense. But a few extra steps would need to be added each time a weapon fired:

    • Keep a list of weapons which need the least power to fire
    • If weapons are linked, but they don’t all have enough power to fire:
    • Project a line out from the direction that each of those weapons is currently aiming
    • Check the position of all enemy objects and find which is closest to that line
    • Compare the minimum enemy distance recorded for each line
    • Select the weapon with the smallest distance to fire

    Then there are edge-cases to consider, like what happens if there are two weapons aiming at two different enemies and they’re equally close? Probably just take the first one, but maybe it’d be better to auto-target the enemy with the least health. Now we need to check their health as well.

    Or how about weapons that fire in an arc? A straight line won’t indicate well what they’ll actually hit, but to do it right we’ll need calculate the actual trajectory the bullet will take. In the end the performance cost might be more than it’s worth for the benefit.

    Maybe we can improve performance. Checking the position of every enemy would be slow with many enemies on the map. We could put them into a tree structure to find the relevant ones more quickly, but we’ve probably spent a long time implementing this stuff by now. In reality, sometimes it’s just not worth the time when there are other things to get done.

    As a one-man dev team, I see a lot of good suggestions, but I don’t have a lot of time overall. I have a big list of part ideas and lots of feature notes, but there’s a lot of more fundamental stuff to get working first. I still read just about everything on the forum, and if I ignore ideas it’s often because they’d take too much work rather than because they’re bad. Sometimes I add them to my list.

    * * * *​

    A note on a slightly different issue. Sometimes when the community all really want a feature, and the devs just seem to ignore it forever, it because they’ve written themselves into a corner. Sometimes a feature idea comes along that was just never considered, and would require a huge rewrite to make some seemingly small thing work.

    The best programmers can write things in ways which are easily adapted to change. The worst programmers write code that no-one wants to touch lest everything fall apart. Like everyone else, I’m slowly moving somewhere along the long line from worst towards best.

    P.S. And sometimes devs keep the game sub-par on purpose so you’ll be more inclined to buy stuff that makes it better. Friends don’t let friends F2P.
     
    Last edited: Jan 9, 2014
  37. Nition

    Nition

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    I played a little bit of Robocraft today because I hadn't played it since they added multiplayer. I vaguely keep an eye on it because I always worry that their game will end up very similar to mine.

    Instead of having a list of servers they automatically start a battle every x amount of seconds for the people waiting, and auto-match you with people driving similar-level vehicles. That could totally backfire if there weren't many people online at a time but there actually seems to be a good amount.

    I think the intended scavenge-and-get-to-a-repair-pad system in Scraps is going to be a good idea though. Once you get damaged in Robocraft there's no way to repair, so often you just have to helplessly flop around for a bit until you're put out of your misery.
     
  38. Nition

    Nition

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    I've fixed the icon issue with the OS X version so the Mac builder release is now at 2.8 like the Win and Linux versions.

    At least I'm pretty certain I've fixed it. Let me know if I haven't fixed it by email so I can deal with it right away - I don't want to be crashing people's computers again!

    While doing that I also fixed the km/h vs. mph setting not working since it was a one-line fix, so everything is at 0.2.8.1 now with that fix implemented.

    Download from the usual place: www.scrapsgame.com/download

    At the moment I'm mostly working on cleaning up and refactoring some code that needs it, so there won't be much visible change to show for a while, but work is being done.
     
  39. stk2008

    stk2008

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    Wow just tested the demo and all I can say is I love it.

    Cant wait for more stuff to be added.

    OP will you be making this game mod able as in

    1. chassis designer
    2. weapon designer

    etc etc

    Cant wait for more updates
     
  40. iKonrad

    iKonrad

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    Looks pretty well. I like how the car bumps once it lands on the terrain.
    Keep up the good work.
     
  41. Nition

    Nition

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    I haven't looked into modding enough yet to say anything for sure, but I'd definitely like to allow user-created parts and maps. Anything further is probably out of scope, but you never know. It'll need an option to disallow modded parts in multiplayer though so the guy with a $1 superlaser can't join and obliterate everyone.
     
  42. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    What?
     
  43. virror

    virror

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    One idea for custom weapons could be to have a point pool, adding damage will reduce the pool, but adding heat will increase it as two examples, maybe that can be a way to keep it a bit more balanced?
     
  44. Nition

    Nition

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    As in, someone could make a modded part that costs any amount in-game and make it way better than the value should imply. Remember that parts in-game have a price value, so you can set your multiplayer match to allow e.g. vehicles worth up to $10,000.

    I don't mean I'm going to be setting pay-to-win parts for $1. ;)

    Edit: I was also thinking about the above - making modded parts automatically set their value. But I think in practice there are probably too many factors involved for that to work well.
     
  45. Zeblote

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    Well. Everyone can host a server, and others can join it.

    You could do it like this:
    A 'custom weapon' is now called an add-on. An add-on can be everything, from a new weapon to a new map to a completely new game mechanic. Add-ons are installed on the server-side. When the server is started, all add-ons are executed and resource files required for them uploaded to the CDN (if they aren't already on there - multiple server will probably use the same add-ons). When a client joins a server, he will download the add-on manifest from the server and then download the resources for the add-ons from the CDN.

    The catch is that everyone can create add-ons and upload them or whatever. Or create a new game-mode and host a server with it, then others can join that server and have a lot of fun :D

    The result is a fantastic multiplayer sandbox game.
     
  46. NomadKing

    NomadKing

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    I think the real issue with user created weapons is having enough variables for the players to alter to make them worth while. If your simply upping the damage on a laser or a missile, is that really a worthwhile system? Balancing the costs and gains is probably the easy part compared to this.
     
  47. LightSource

    LightSource

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    I think that you should make the game first, and worry about modding when you have an accurate gauge about what will work and what wont. Either way I know it will be successful, and I'm sure the community will back the majority of decisions you make.
     
  48. Nition

    Nition

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    Thanks LightSource. The plan is definitely to get the game working well first.
     
  49. Nition

    Nition

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    I got a report that the Mac version of the builder demo wasn't working on OS 10.9 (Mavericks). Sure enough, after an OS upgrade I could reproduce the issue.

    For version 2.8 I switched from a 32-bit build to a universal build that should auto-select 32- or 64-bit. Unfortunately for whatever reason this causes the screen to flash and then display blank on newer OS X versions (the game is audibly working in the background, but you can't see it).

    I've reverted it back to 32-bit only and everything seems to be fine. Any performance difference is negligible anyway.

    Also for Mac users: On OS 10.8 and onward, Gatekeeper may give you an "unknown developer" message when you try to run Scraps. To get around it, you can right-click Scraps instead and choose Open, then Open again. It shouldn't ask you again after that. It's true that I am an "unknown developer" to Apple, but to make the message go away they want me to pay them $99USD/year. While that's not an unaffordable amount, it feels a little bit too much like extortion.

    Internally I've been mostly fixing bugs this week. I re-wrote the system that works out the available range on weapons to use a whole different method, and that's fixed all the known bugs in the existing system. It also generally runs faster and sometimes gives slightly more optimal results - sometimes there isn't only one option for how to reduce the range as necessary, so it tries to decide intelligently in a way that'll leave you the most range available.
     
  50. Nition

    Nition

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    So I wrote like the best octree implementation ever. Grows or shrinks dynamically as needed so there's no size limit. Splits and merges as necessary when items are added or removed so there's no content limit. Can adjust node size to become a "loose" octree so there are no boundary issues. Doesn't need to recalculate everything when the base position or rotation of all the content moves - just input the new offsets.

    But for small groups, the collision tests that I actually want it for can actually be slower than a brute force approach because of the overhead in calling the methods to check the nodes. :|

    But hey, it's fast for big groups.