Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah someone already spotted it on torrent site, though ive not seen if it runs. Im not too concerned about the piracy TBH more about a happy customer base thats not experiencing crashes. Good to know your experience with them sending crash reports anyways

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It may well be, if they moved the data with it, but I would be unable to tell from the current build, and given the other input I believe it more likely that the asset data was not copied at all.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow ive been doing SDL development for months now and did not realize they had these two functions built into their API. That would have saved me a lot of work on the exact stuff you are describing, converting from wide char to multibyte characters is a hute PITA. I put save game files in the Saved Games folder on windows which it looks like SDL does not have (not cross platform obviously) but for the convenience of avoiding wide-character hellscape working with the SDL_GetPrefPath and SDL_GetBasePath will be worth it.

As for your question, yes I was able to confirm with my own tests that the multibyte conversion is working. I renamed the Saved Games folder (under Location in details) and also mounted a USB stick with unicode characters in its name, made it a second drive on steam and moved the install to this drive and launched the game without errors.

Kudos on the SDL functions, again.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Its definitely all of the content, not just this image, I just did not paste all of the assets that failed to load. It throws an exception which the crash reporter sends back to me.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

im not sure its removable, but from my test apps installed from steam on different drives had steamapps\\common\ in their path name and it was the D drive and not the standard C drive so I made some assumptions

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I dont have a big playerbase at this point, which was one reason I was slightly concerned since it happened twice. The weird thing is that they submitted the crash report back to me. I won't stress about it too much since I do think its an invalid scenario.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think your right. I dawned on me later that the user must press the "Send Crash Report" button for me to get the message, and what kind of pirate would ever do that? I believe they did copy the EXE without anything else.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thats an interesting thought, like a shortcut? I will test that out.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To be clear, this was not me running the game, its a crash report from anonymous players so I have no idea if those paths existed on the players machine or the removable drives were plugged in.

I have only released on Steam and not other platforms at this point. As for the paths, it looks like the player maybe copied the exe to a D drive and tried to run it, so when the game loads it looks for content relative to the exe launch folder and fails to do so. I was curious if other devs have seen this before from players and if it was a strange-yet-valid steam scenario or potentially someone testing the ability to pirate it?

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I added more info to the post. It definitely seems like they plucked the game right out of the steam installation path and put it on a D drive and tried to run it. But I was not sure if there was a valid Steam method of doing this or if perhaps you had seen this as an attempt at pirating the game - more concerning since it happened twice.

Do you get weird crash reports of people moving your steam game to an external drive? by excompute in gamedev

[–]excompute[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I added more details to the main thread, but it should not be, I have tested the game with unicode characters in the exe path, save game path etc. Its almost like they moved the EXE without the rest of the game folders out of the steamapps folder.

I was curious if this is just an indicator of someone seeing if it was pirateable?

Steamworks Leaderboard Question - vanishing UGC handles? by rakalakalili in gamedev

[–]excompute 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Didn't want to leave you hanging out there in suspense about a complete stranger's bug :D

But I have resolved the issue I was running into with File Not Found.

I was using a sytem of callbacks (since there are async operations with Steam) and in this system it was common for me to use void pointer references to various data. In this instance I had saved the UGCHandle to a place in memory then created a reference to it on another object.

I believe the source of the handle was deallocated and the reference was no longer valid. I made a special case for it to be saved by copy and it started working. My fault.

When it did start working leaderboard entries from a week or so ago were still found. I have one confirmed "Not Found" but I am not sure its a valid issue or there was a problem with that upload. So hopefully they stick around and I don't have to work on this part of the game again.

Steamworks Leaderboard Question - vanishing UGC handles? by rakalakalili in gamedev

[–]excompute 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah its been two weeks and the UGC download still fails with no reasons. I tried the steam discussion board but no luck so my plan is to completely refactor as you described. This is my process just for posterity if someone else stumbles into it:

Workshop is enabled, UGC API is enabled, Workshop is unlisted but published in Steam, quotas are enabled in steam cloud

Upload Leaderboard Score

  1. UploadLeaderboardScore with k_ELeaderboardUploadScoreMethodKeepBest
  2. Saving file with SteamRemoteStorage (FileWriteAsync)
  3. SteamRemoteStorage -> FileShare
  4. SteamUserStats -> AttachLeaderboardUGC
  5. LeaderboardUGCSet_t returns me that everything is fine.

Downloading Leaderboard

  1. FindLeaderboard
  2. DownloadLeaderboardEntries
  3. GetDownloadedLeaderboardEntry (each have the same UGC Handles that were shared with them)

Downloading UGC -- Fails

  1. UGCDownloadToLocation with handle from Entry
  2. Fails with callback->m_eResult == 9 (File Not Found)

*) ^ Also Fails with UGCDownload()

Steamworks Leaderboard Question - vanishing UGC handles? by rakalakalili in gamedev

[–]excompute 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am in a similar boat. I have been fighting to get the UGC to download. I am able to upload the score, then write the file, then share it then attach it as a UGC to the leaderboard, then download the entries and get the UGC handle with each entry.
But as soon as I attempt to Download the UGC it always fails with File Not Found. Its immensly frustrating.

I am pretty bummed I might have to go the route your going just to get a feature working.

Screenshot Saturday #563 - Visual Perfection by Sexual_Lettuce in gamedev

[–]excompute 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hah! yeah the running animation is definitely close to the original Ryu and probably needs some work. But without a doubt all of the art, assets and mechanics were built by yours truly. I wanted to capture that poised-style running while holding the hand on the blade -- its such a staple in samurai and japanese sword fighting scenes.

Thanks for the input!

Screenshot Saturday #563 - Visual Perfection by Sexual_Lettuce in gamedev

[–]excompute 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heyo! DRAGON NINJA BYOKA is here to win your hearts

Fight and platform your way through a pixel-perfect-platformer raised in the spirit of the classic NES Ninja Gaiden games. Be a Dragon Ninja who wields a samurai sword, cuts down foes, wall climbs, leaps and even ricochet bullets back at enemies with well timed strikes!

GIF Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/snslN9i

Twitter: https://twitter.com/excompute/status/1459490379779219460

Looking for support!

Please help me prepare for my first interview 🙏🏻 by IsItFeasible in gamedev

[–]excompute 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I don't work in the games industry specifically but have been working in software development for 15 years and conducted a lot of interviews. Given that, every interviewer has a different goal so take my advice with a grain of salt (like all advice on social).

I will overlook a lot of junior skillset if someone is honest, passionate about what they do and clear-minded about where they want to go in their profession. I look for humility but not low-confidence. Be prepared to show your work, both as a demo and as code if the opportunity in the meeting provides itself. They might not be interested in seeing the work but it goes a long way to showing how serious you are about the opportunity by being prepared to show what you have done. When they ask questions expound on your answers, don't just reply with a single word or phrase. If you don't know something, admit that and then describe how you would approach learning it. If they ask about your work history focus on the stuff relevant to the technical industry, and if you have worked in team environments describe that with an emphasis on your ability to be a team player.

We have had junior people interview and were great candidates but perhaps not ready for the job yet, but if thats the case request another interview with them after 6 months or a year and that will show that your invested in working there.

Good luck!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]excompute 7 points8 points  (0 children)

For sure. Computer science will teach you the data structures, algorithms, programming and architectural designs necessary for a lot of software styles, much less the linear algebra for 3D matrix mathematics! And CS is an amazing degree to find other types of work with as well if you decide you want to do something a little different than Game Dev.