flocusgame-blog
Flocus Game
This blog follows along the development of the Flocus Game Project. Follow along as the game goes from concept to finished product.
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Focus
Today I managed to solve a breaking issue with flocus! Development is going to resume as soon as I can untangle my code.
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On the backburner...
Flocus is getting shelved for now :( I know it's sad, but seeing that microsoft dropped support for XNA and will no longer be updating it, I've decided to shift everything to android, a platform that I'm still learning. Flocus may one day live...I learned some great things about Fourier transforms and fluid simulation. I can't seem to get each of the pieces to play nice, and I'm going to have to spend a lot of time tweaking the code to make it work, a lot of time that I simply don't have.
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FFT FTW!
When I started Flocus I had some great ideas to incorporate music into the game. To do get the frequencies in some music quickly enough to be real time requires a fast fourier transform, something that had eluded me but no more! I buckled down last weekend and figured out how to do it, and my gift to the world is this:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/49283213/fft.xlsx
This is an 8 point FFT in an excel spreadsheet, I don't use complex numbers in it, instead splitting each column into a Real/Imaginary combination. If I had been able to find something like this, I wouldn't have spent nearly as much time trying to figure out how to do something so simple -_-. I really need to refine our calculus skills so that isn't an issue.
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Ups and downs!
Well a lot of progress is being made! I learned a while ago that Microsoft was dropping their development team for XNA...MAJOR sad face. And with the bipolar train wreck that is Windows 8 (and Microsoft forcing developers to go through their own filtered marketplace) I'm are seriously considering not using XNA anymore for flocus.
This is why there's been no updates (despite promises of such) the last couple of months.
On the bright side I'm excited to see Ouya coming out into the wild early next year! This is a completely open source android gaming console. I've been developing a version of Flocus for Android alongside the XNA/Xbox version. While not nearly as completely, it represents an awesome starting point if I wanted to move to Android.
Flocus will live! Even if I have to start nearly from scratch.
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Woot!
Still alive, just haven't had ANY time whatsoever to work on flocus now that I'm fully employed. I have been concentrating on finding kickass music for the soundtrack though! All that needs to be done is the last 4-5 enemies, a UI, and Music and the game is done. Thanks everyone who's watched it growing! We'll have some more updates soon :).
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Weekend Update
Despite having to work on Saturday I made the time to work on Flocus this weekend. Updates include:
-Moving the fluid code out of the main file, nice and clean now. It was great success!
-Adding in a few more enemies, as well as experimenting with the fluid and particle effects to balance out the visual effects.
Really the best part is moving the fluid code into its own class, since that means the main file is 200 lines smaller and it's nice because I can't break the fluid code by accident B). Anyways, hopefully I'll be able to post a few screenshots and a video next saturday! Stay tuned!
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A status update
Development is going well! It’s nice to see all the work over the last couple of years culminate into this one project. It’s extraordinarily satisfying. I just wish I could be more focused on this blog that I use to keep in contact with you guys. That said, here is a small update as to the state of Flocus:
- Major refactoring, right now the code is really hard to navigate with lots of hacks to get data passed around that I don’t really like.
- Most enemy logic has been finalized, and there are 14 enemies in total. Right now I’m toying with the idea of adding in boss encounters.
- The glow effect and fluid effect are going to need some work to fit together properly, right now with tons of enemies on the screen it swamps out the screen.
- This game is going to require a seizure warning. And I need to look into what needs done for that.
All in all, flocus has been in earnest development for a year. I still remember when it was under the code name Project Inviscid. And as a project it’s come a long way! It looks so good I’m very apprehensive about releasing screenshots, suffering from the idea that someone will take my idea and run to the bank with it before I get a chance too O_o
But even if that happens…I at least have one major addition to my portfolio. And the skills and knowledge I possess now are quite priceless. The kind of insights gained from a project like this, in the areas of math especially, are amazing. I’m glad I’m an indie developer, I’m glad I took the plunge into the turbulent waters that are Flocus.
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Back to business!
We're back after nearly a year long hiatus. The robot thing went well, and now I'm working full time again! So therefore it should become much easier to finance things like that.
The fluid solver code has been done for a while, and in XNA it performs awesomely...but still not up to par with what I would LIKE to see, so right now I'm trying to port the code to HLSL to see how much of a performance gain I can get out of it.
I may end up having to cheat and just blur the lower resolution grid like most people do, we'll see though.
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BA-Con!
Hello everyone! This is just an update, this project is certainly not dead. I have been asked to talk about a robot I designed called the MINI-Mouse. MINI stands for Machine Intelligence, Navigation, Interaction. Which are all the things I've designed it to do.
So since the last post, I have been hurrying to verify that everything is perfect. I don't have a lot of money, and the Chassis and PCB are the most expensive components, and if they have errors, I can't afford to send for new ones more than once. So I've been checking many many time, but I haven't been able to find anything wrong, I think I really created a solid design back in July 2010.
Mostly I've been tweaking things to reduce power consumption, and keep heat to a minimum. I will be doing the final checks either this week or next week, I need to get paid for my recent contracting job first. The convention takes place in July, so after that I should be able to resume work on Flocus. It sucks that one awesome thing can stall another, but I'm a one man show.
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Missed Screenshot Saturday this week :(
This week I'm not going to have anything to post for Reddits Screenshot Saturday, I'd planned on having the fluid code working with the game by today, but I farted around with too much other stuff this week, and when the time came to work on the solver I just could not get it working appropriately for today, I just could not get the switch to using a boolean grid for boundary conditions done in time.
I'm commiting next week to working on it exclusively to have it done by next saturday!
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Fluidity!
The fluid solver that will be implemented in my game can be found all over the internet. It is basically a port to xna of Mick Wests, Gamesutra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1549/practical_fluid_dynamics_part_1.php). I ripped out reverse advection, and combined/removed a bunch of loops through the fluid grid. I am very nearly done with it, and hopefully my next post will highlight it, i hate to make a teaser post like this, but I’m so excited for it!
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Screenshot Saturday 6 at Reddit.com
Being the savvy person that I am, I browse Reddit in my downtime (Read that as: A LOT). I've started following the Gamedev subreddit, and they've been having events where every Saturday, you post a screenshot of your game. This is flocus as of 3-19-2011:
-In the first two frames you can see me playing against the first enemy type.
-The 3rd frame you can see the particle effect I use for the trails (Eventually all the ships will have their own unique trail effects).
-The final frame is a shot of the explosion particle effect as I shoot at the topmost level border.
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We're not dead!
No! The game development continues :). But a lot of background research and work is being done. Currently the biggest chunk of work is finding music for my game, I have many candidates and I'm slowly culling those down to about 12-15 songs for the main tracklist. I'm going for a real aggressive and driven drum and bass tracklist. I'll post the links to some sample tracks in a future post.
In keeping with of trying to include a bit of a teaser in each post, Here's a screen shot of the current development build:
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Happy Trails
Well I've been out of the loop for a while. Mostly because back in October my Father died, and it has been very hard on my family. But luckily I've had my beautiful girl there by my side through all of it.
I've picked back up with Flocus, I'm doing the particles differently then before, mostly because before I was drawing the line pixel by pixel, because I wanted it to fade out towards the back. I've ditched that, although I've lost the fade out, I'd like to get it back. But with the old method performance issues would have insued.
One enemy type is going to have little tentacle trails, and with the old method with the maximum enemies on the screen, it would top out at nearly a 1.5 million draw calls! I have reduced that by several orders of a magnitude, now the draw calls are NumParticles * 3. With the old method it was (NumParticles * 2) + (NumParticles * (LengthOfTrail * 2)). It's easy to see how ugly it was. Lets do an exercise:
Old Method: (200 * 2) + (200 * (10 * 2)) = (400) + (200 * (20)) = (200 + (4000)) = 4200 calls per enemy!
New Method: (200 * 3) = 600 calls per enemy!
If there's one thing I've learned, it's XNA needs a native way to draw lines, with variable width. I could have used a LineList sure, but I can't adjust the width with that. By going the other way, I have reduced the cpu usage of the particle effects by 85%.
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AWOL
So development of Flocus has finally resumed. I had a pretty bad October, which pretty much halted any motivation I had at the time. Now I'm getting it back, which is a good thing. I've upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 and XNA Game Studio 4.0. GS4 brings all sorts of new goodies, and some breaking changes. Previously the Gaussian Blur shader, for simplicity used the GraphicsDevice.ResolveBackBuffer method. Now that has been removed in favor of RenderTargets. That doesn't kill me at all, but it does force me to pass a render target into the function that does the blurring.... On the other side of the spectrum, RenderTargets now inherit from Textures, yay!
A full list of changes can be found here: Breaking Changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0
The code has basically be completely rewritten in the favor of cleanly switching to VS2010 and XNAGS4.0, so visually it has taken several steps back. But code wise, I've discovered slight bugs, and easy to miss optimizations that should give me a stronger code base overall.
I still haven't settled on a DRM solution, I'm definitely going to be rolling my own probably, just because I want to have control over it. Enemies are getting worked out, and are probably going to be similar in behavior to the geometry wars ones. But the progression between each enemy is logical, and therefor I'm not sure I can come up with enemies that behave in simple and engaging ways, without at least following the same mental progression their developers did:
Wandering Enemy > Tracking Enemy > Tracking & Avoiding Enemy > Tracking & Splitting Enemy > Tracking & Shielded Enemy
That progression is logical, and honestly I don't think it could be any simpler, Therefor I will be using the Geometry Wars enemies as my model. The simplicity of it makes it hard to avoid anyways.
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The name is chosen
I have finally decided on what to call Project Inviscid, it will now be known as Flocus. Inviscid just felt unwieldy for a game name, Flocus is much more fitting, for reasons that are to be revealed in the future.
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Life in the background
I've been very busy, I've decided I have two options regarding DRM:
1) I can go with a full DRM solution, locking the game between full and demo versions. This is tricky, and even my best attempt will always be cracked eventually. But it does stop casual piracy effectively.
2) I can offer premium features, and I'll probably require and active internet connection to use them, but it will allow me to have a lot more control over the whole process. I could have something much more complex than a license file and a boolean...
I guess big boy Notch over at Minecraft has been dealing with the same dilemma. In his most recent post, his conclusion seems to be to go with number 2. I think that solution is a very good one, but it may be more applicable to select cases. I don't think my game will have a lot to offer in terms of premium features, and that may resort me to going with solution #1. Of course a combination of the two is also possible.
When the game isn't distracting me with its pretty colours, I've slowly been implementing the fluid effect, I need to do this early because it is quite complex, will require tweaking, and it's performance and my games performance are tied together.
I've been messing with servers, and mysql to get some sort of basic system I can work with up and running. If you'd like to visit my webserver, you can by clicking here. It's very fun to be messing with this stuff again after nearly a year, I miss my job at Unicon as a result :(.
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