A new build is up, these are the release notes.
IMPORTANT: Neither the client nor old versions of miranda_setup.exe will work with the new patching data. Testers must download and run the new version of miranda_setup.exe to update the game to the current version. Eventually this will be automated for you, but not today.The first bug testers encountered this week was me relearning the golden rule: don't mess with the distribution files manually. I deleted a file from the server that I thought wasn't needed, but the installer still expected it to be there so the install failed. Lesson learned.
The first Pre-Alpha invites have been sent and the live server is up and running! If you're on the
very short friends and family list, you should have received an email with the install link and a Secret Lair Code to create an account.
[Doesn't look like much, but this is the first base on the Live Server.]
There is nothing more satisfying than seeing something you've put so much effort into actually working in a live environment.
So if you're one of the lucky few, give the game a try, and most importantly: let me know how things go.
If you didn't get an invite, be patient, these are the early days. This first test is mainly about finding out if the game even runs on other people's computers.
I was fortunate to receive an SSD as a gift last week. I had long heard that using an SSD made no difference to build times with Visual Studio. But, everyone raves about them so I decided to use the SSD to replace the main drive in my dev laptop. Better boot times are always appreciated. I was able to install the new drive, image it with the standard Dell factory image, reinstall all my software and then wait through 200+ Windows updates. That took about 14 hours. The result though, was well worth the effort. Boot times are under 20 seconds and I got an amazing
44% reduction in build time from 10:06 to 5:41.
Vendors are finally done! If you signed up for the Newsletter (at the little envelope icon above) you just learned all about it.
Next on the list is setting up the server for friends and family testing.
[Selling components to a Vendor.]
The server software I wrote at EA had a really nice feature: it would display an XML file of its status if you made an HTTP GET request to a specific port on the server. This is handy because it can be used by server-farm monitoring tools or for things as simple as a server up/down indicator. I wanted a server up/down indicator for the
theimperialrealm.com site as well as on the game's login screen.
Adding an HTTP server to the game server's front door was easy, a few lines to parse a new command line parameter for the port number, four lines to add the HTTP server and about 20 lines to output the game status as XML. Easy peasy.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><server><status>up</status></server>
Now I needed to get that status to display in the HTML5 news page that displays on the game's login screen. My whole game UI is built on AJAX and XML, so I figured it would be pretty easy to use the same tools to add a simple up/down indicator. Wrong!
I've been using this for a while, but especially this week so I thought I'd share: it's a class-based state machine. State machines are usually big and messy and awful spaghetti code. Making states class-based makes a state machine cleaner and much easier to follow.
Here's the base classes for the state machine.
When I started developing
The Imperial Realm :: Miranda, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were big and fancy and expensive and only used by giant multinationals so I never imagined I'd be able to afford to use one.
With me posting more and more big screenshots on my websites like this one:
[Random screenshot of the week.]
Last weekend I decided it was time to research solutions to improve my websites' performance.
I've been working this week to get combat up and running reliably. It is starting to come together now, at least well enough for a screenshot.
[Things are going badly for Red. Blue is getting a lot of loot!]
I showed
The Imperial Realm::Miranda at
Full Indie again tonight. Just like
last time it was great fun.
I got to
The Pint at about ten after six to set up, found myself a table (actually the same table as last time) and started up the server. As always happens when you want to show someone what you're working on, something immediately went wrong -- the server wouldn't start. I knew it had to do with setting up the game to run standalone with no internet. Firing the game up under the debugger I was able to figure it out just in time for the 6:30 start. It looked kind of funny having 9 instances of Visual Studio running while I was demoing the game. The good news was that once I worked through that little problem, the game ran flawlessly all night.
[During one of my breaks, I took a quick snap of my table.]
Like last time, I talked pretty much continuously from 6:30 until 9:45 (I got just two five minute breaks.) Most people stayed 10 minutes or more and I was often speaking to several people at a time. There are some real serious strategy game fans out there.
If you aren't a programmer, here's a little sample of what we do to make games for you.Today, at long last, I fixed a bug that goes back to Christmas 2014. The bug first appeared right after I
updated the renderer for better performance. One of the things that that change added was a hard limit to the number of shader programs the Lair engine could support: 4096. I figured that should be lots since I only had a few hundred shaders even with permutations. One afternoon while cruising over Miranda, the game halted because it had hit the limit of shader programs. I was shocked. But when I looked into it the reason became readily apparent: I never released shader programs from materials when they were unloaded. It was a simple oversight, quickly rectified with this little bit of code:
void Pass::ShutdownProgram( void )
{
if ( mProgramId == 0 )
{
return;
}
if ( mGeometryShaderId != 0 )
{
mGlShaders->DetachShader( mProgramId, mGeometryShaderId );
mGlShaders->DestroyShader( mGeometryShaderId );
mGeometryShaderId = 0;
}
if ( mVertexShaderId != 0 )
{
mGlShaders->DetachShader( mProgramId, mVertexShaderId );
mGlShaders->DestroyShader( mVertexShaderId );
mVertexShaderId = 0;
}
if ( mPixelShaderId != 0 )
{
mGlShaders->DetachShader( mProgramId, mPixelShaderId );
mGlShaders->DestroyShader( mPixelShaderId );
mPixelShaderId = 0;
}
mGlShaders->DestroyProgram( mProgramId );
mProgramId = 0;
}
Now I was destroying the shaders and programs when they were no longer needed. Problem solved.
Then the
Bad Bug showed up.
Recent Comments
You'll also need this:
typedef WINUSERAPI PVOID (WINAPI *REGISTERSUSPENDRESUMENOTIFICATION)(HANDLE hRecipient, DWORD Flags);
Stay strong my friend!
Are you still developing this game ?
Thanks! Much of the work in this update was polish and there are indeed more NPC's.
Looking good m8, just coming back to this after i bought t some time ago, looks more polished and interesting, are there more enemy mobs now ? do you have a constant onlineplayerbase now so world is more active ?
