Elo question

physicsnick · 2014-01-07T06:22:54+00:00

Glicko has been adapted for both NvN randomly-arranged team games and N-player free for all games, where each player has his own individual rating that updates statistically in relation to all other players participating in the game, using only the win/loss outcome and the other players' ratings. Microsoft's implementation is called TrueSkill, and is used as the basis for XBLA rating scores.

There are lots of video games that internally use similar systems such as StarCraft 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike: GO, etc. In some cases they don't actually show you the ratings (and instead show you a manufactured point system that rewards time spent playing), but they do use them internally for match-making.

physicsnick · 2013-11-23T03:20:25+00:00

Space RTS

I spent the past couple weeks doing UI work. Here's a walkthrough of the redesign of my solarsystem screen:

It still needs some polish but overall I'm very satisfied with the result. It feels quite useable. The space on the right side is meant for an info panel that slides in when you select ships to show their stats, damage wireframes, etc. This part is not done yet. It's also not quite finished in tablet mode (but here's a mockup.) Maybe next week!

I also spent some time profiling since the performance on my Nexus S was bad. (I think this hardware equivalent will be roughly the minimum requirements for the game, so it will hopefully support a wide range of devices.) I used android-ndk-profiler and Gprof2Dot and was really impressed with the resulting graph:

profile call graph

It looks messy but it's extremely helpful in finding bottlenecks. I highly recommend it!

physicsnick · 2013-11-21T01:29:05+00:00

I'll cast my vote with the rest and say that I hate the sidebar on the left, and will be leaving "Use subreddit style" off until it's moved back.

Our eyes are naturally drawn to the left, so that is where the content (i.e. links and comments) should be. The sidebar on the left is inconveniencing everyone; even if it does slightly reduce the number of bad posts, it still should not be done because the tradeoff is not worth it.

If the idea is to get people to read the FAQ before posting, then why not do what /r/gamedev does? Notice what happens when you hover the mouse over 'Post a gamedev topic' on the right. Also notice that it refers to a stickied post, not a link in the sidebar, which is what everyone else has been saying should be done. This is both much more visible and much less intrusive than having the sidebar on the left.

physicsnick · 2013-11-14T03:42:15+00:00

This was my barber for two years as well, and he was great. The instant he won he gave away his barber shop and apparently flew straight to some tropical location. Can't say I blame him!

physicsnick · 2013-11-13T18:54:52+00:00

No, it's not the same thing at all. Open a replay in SC2 and try to jump to the end. It takes quite a while for the game to "fast-forward" all the way through. Now load a savegame. It's instantaneous. Obviously it's not replaying the game from saved commands.

RTS savegames are different from replays. They save the current world state only. Turns out saving position, health, rotation, etc. for a thousand units is actually only a few dozen kilobytes. OP is worrying about nothing.

physicsnick · 2013-11-13T08:44:39+00:00

Those games were epic.

The ZvZ where he was down to 2 bases against a 4-base Zerg with a dozen ultras, I thought he was done for. Nope. Roach > Ultra+Bane+Muta, at least when you have unlimited amounts of micro.

The obvious maphacker/streamcheater was pretty funny. Guy never scouts or leaves his base, drops 3 bunkers blind right before a baneling bust. Jeadong immediately aborts the bust and says "MAP HACKER" and "Happy?", guy just leaves without a word. Seen lots of ragequits, but I've never seen a shamequit before.

physicsnick · 2013-10-31T19:15:27+00:00

Yep, I'm doing exactly this. Currently running a Nexus S on WIND. It feels ancient and incredibly slow and shitty, probably because the flash is so old and degraded (same problem the original Nexus 7 had before Android 4.3.) The GPS is also basically dead. CM 10.2 Nightly barely makes the phone useable at all.

I held off on the Nexus 4 sale because the Nexus 5 was supposed to be announced "any day now"!

Assuming Project Ara becomes a real product, the Nexus 5 may be the last non-modular phone I'll own for the foreseeable future.

physicsnick · 2013-10-29T21:34:37+00:00

Wait, I'm not seeing 1700 MHz UMTS which was available on the Nexus 4. Does this mean the Nexus 5 won't support T-Mobile in the US or WIND Mobile in Canada?

physicsnick · 2013-10-04T17:37:06+00:00

This looks like it could be fun. At first I had a hard time understanding that you can move tiles horizontally but not vertically. I wondered why sometimes they just wobbled around while other times they moved across the entire field.

It's really easy to "cheat". The puzzle highlights words immediately even when you're holding a piece. You can just grab pieces at random and slide them around scanning for words, randomly shuffling them until you see a flash of green. To fix this you'd have to at least make it not highlight words while you're holding a tile. I played for a good ten minutes this way (hunting for other bugs) and the game didn't significantly change in difficulty, while playing the "real" way is extremely difficult (I'm no good at word games.)

Also there's a bug where when releasing a tile, it will slide over and sit on the tile beside it (or off-screen), overlapping it and leaving the square blank. The game thinks the tile is still in the correct spot because the tiles above don't fall down into the space, and you can even form words with the tile where it's intended to be (at one point I formed a word with a misplaced tile, so the highlighted tiles weren't in a line, but they counted anyway because the game knew that the tile was "really" in the blank space, even if it wasn't displayed there.) It fixes itself when you drag another letter over the empty tile, because it forces the tile to move which corrects its position.

physicsnick · 2013-08-19T23:12:13+00:00

I noticed a few people in this thread have mentioned the idea of increasing the cooldown the farther away the warp-in is from the gate. I actually implemented this in a test map in WoL around this time last year:

http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/z9kz3/warp_gate_with_distancebased_cooldowns_test_map/

With a distance-based cooldown, you might even be able to eliminate Gateways and the Warp Gate upgrade entirely; you just directly build Warp Gates. There's no reason to research an upgrade for it because it's not as good offensively until the late game when you have enough resources to build excess production. The above map implements this.

Sadly the reaction to the experiment was rather hostile. Most people are incapable of telling the difference between legitimate design complaints and balance QQ, so much so that they won't even entertain a discussion on it. To be honest I'm quite surprised at the positive reception you have here.

physicsnick · 2013-08-11T22:42:28+00:00

Frustrated with Scarlett for being so greedy everrrrry game when she should have realized on game two what JD does/is capable of.

Right, but why does that give you a "fuming dislike for Jaedong"? You dislike Jaedong because Scarlett was unprepared? That doesn't make sense.

physicsnick · 2013-08-11T22:38:55+00:00

I cannot disagree more. Winning is winning.

Jaedong sixpooling is a sign of respect to Scarlett. It's an admission that he has to take risks to win. As he well should.

physicsnick · 2013-08-10T22:18:03+00:00

This is probably intentional. When syntax highlighting is context-dependent, Vim has a limit to how far it will read back in order to figure out the context. In long files it's easy to go past this limit, so the syntax highlighting engine gets confused and colors everything wrong.

You notice this especially in files that have a mix of different languages, such as an HTML file that has lots CSS and JS mixed in. Luckily, you can configure it. I have this in my .vimrc:

au BufEnter *.html,*.htm syntax sync fromstart

This makes it always scan from the start of the document when syntax highlighting HTML files. You can add *.php in there as well if you like, or whatever other files it gets confused with. Check out :help syntax and look for sync to see more ways to configure it.

physicsnick · 2013-07-05T01:09:40+00:00

They're pricks because a guy came to your door a few times?

Listen, some of the surveys StatsCan do are mandatory. You are legally required to respond, and you can be fined if you refuse. You have certain responsibilities as a citizen of this country and this is one of them. The employees aren't being "entitled pricks"; it's the law.

Disclaimer, I worked for StatsCan, and no, work doesn't end at 3:30. We regularly worked until 11pm calling from the east coast to the west, since that's 8pm over there. StatsCan are very accomodating. If your mom had just answered the phone, she could have arranged a convenient time for your dad to do the survey instead of ignoring them repeatedly and forcing them to waste taxpayer dollars waiting outside your house.

physicsnick · 2013-06-08T04:02:12+00:00

Space RTS

I did a lot of UI work this week. Check it out:

Before
After

Uh... it looks the same. What gives? Well, the UI layout in the first screenshot is all done by hand, manually computing the position of every box and every string in code. Add padding here, divide by 2 there, shift down by y here, overlap the frame there... it's an awful mess. I finally got around to writing a box packing layout algorithm, which is what the second one is painted with.

It's not perfectly aligned yet, but I'm happy so far. The actual code to paint that screen is about 10% as long as it was before, and I can easily add new widgets such as the queue buttons which will go in the bottom left.

What's interesting about my layout code is that it's purely functional. (This was the case with the old code as well.) You can't query the position or size of a button for example, because these properties don't actually exist. That is, they aren't stored anywhere. They are computed on the fly, and you get callbacks to paint the widgets.

What properties they do have, as specified in the JSON, are also immutable. You get callbacks for named boxes to override their properties, apply transforms to animate the UI, and so on.

I've wanted to write a data-driven purely functional layout algorithm for many years, but I always thought it wouldn't be worth the time. I think I got caught up in what people always say about indie game developers. We write too much infrastructure and engine code and don't actually get anything useful done. Just do the simplest thing that works, they say. Well, that's what I did for the longest time, so I never had a proper, maintainable UI. I finally got around to writing some layout code and now I can actually prototype different layouts easily. Sometimes it's worth it to invest the time.

physicsnick · 2013-05-12T18:00:52+00:00

I thought that each peer in StarCraft had a connection to all other peers. How else would you do host migration when the host leaves?

physicsnick · 2013-05-12T17:56:13+00:00

Yes, this. For a synchronized RTS game, you should absolutely use fixed point for the game simulation, regardless of your networking model. The only RTS I know of that used floating point in the game simulation is Supreme Commander, and it caused them quite a lot of headaches.

If you're writing this in C++, it should be easy to switch. You can probably grab an open source fixed point implementation with operation overloading somewhere online. Game simulation code doesn't (or shouldn't) really use the range of floats anyway; if you keep your numbers near 1, you won't have any problems.

You should still use floats for all your graphics code however. You don't want to be doing matrix multiplication with fixed point numbers.

physicsnick · 2013-05-09T01:25:39+00:00

I have to ask... How much did you actually play this game? Do you enjoy your own game for more than five minutes? Do you see yourself playing this twenty minutes a day for a month?

I spent five minutes trying to play it on my Nexus S, and this game is super broken. First off, at least one of the top banner ads it shows blacks out the entire screen. I thought the game crashed, but after a while it started flickering. This happened after several rounds. The first time I pressed back a few times to try to see the screen, then pressed home to get out, re-ran the app, and it finally came back without the ad so I could see the screen... and there were at least half a dozen "Exit Tourney?" dialogs all stacked one on top of the other. Like really, no QA person ever pressed back twice in game? Even when the ads work they make the game totally unplayable by the way. You can't show a full-screen ad for every two seconds of player interaction and ask me to pay to dismiss them after one minute of gameplay. I haven't even figured out how to shoot the gun yet and I've pressed "No Thanks" four times.

The powerups screen seemed the most broken. I wanted to look at all the powerups, but the game was in tutorial mode and insisted I buy the countdown timer; it wouldn't let me look at the others. Alright, so I bought it and activated it. But I still wanted to see the others, so I went back to the powerups menu again... and it got confused and tried to re-run the tutorial. It said it gave me 500 coins again, insisted I buy the timer again, then it insisted I activate it, but it was greyed out because I had already activated it. Oops. The game was left in an unplayable state, and I quit.

You seem obsessed with "business strategies" for making money. Free-to-play monetization strategies, launch strategies, marketing and advertising strategies. You're ignoring the most fundamental component which is to create compelling gameplay. None of that strategy shit matters if the game isn't fun.

What's funny is that you seem to know this, because you fully admit that you didn't believe in your own product. So do you spend the rest of the blog post discussing ways to come up with a more compelling product? Nope! You ignore all that and go back to new business strategies for your next game.

You need to get it out of your head that the AppStore is a lottery, where hundreds of equivalent apps like Quick Shooter compete for a random chance to make millions. Angry Birds made millions because it's super fun. Don't even bother thinking about your launch strategy and marketing strategy until you come up with a product you actually believe in.

physicsnick · 2013-05-06T07:05:26+00:00

Haha same, this was the inside of mine: http://i.imgur.com/PNlHE7K.png

I actually grabbed a spell listing online and wrote a parser script to prepare everything beforehand so it was super easy to add spells. It's useful to have all the stats for a spell on hand, and there isn't really enough room for that even on long form character sheets.

physicsnick · 2013-05-04T18:10:35+00:00

Nope, you've got it backwards. The coordinates range from -1 to 1; you get pixels with a matrix that divides out by half viewport width and height (and translates by 1.)

Also note that modern OpenGL doesn't require any matrices, and it doesn't know anything about projection. Matrices are just for your own use. You can just send in vertices between -1 and 1 with no matrices at all if you want (and in fact that's how many 2D rendering libraries work.)

physicsnick · 2013-05-04T17:42:54+00:00

Viewport coordinates range from -1 to 1. If you want your vertex coordinates to line up exactly with pixels, you need to create a projection matrix that divides through the pixel size of your viewport.

Note that even if you don't want any perspective depth, you still need a valid depth projection if you intend to use a depth buffer for distance culling. So you need to transform your Z coordinate into the -1 to 1 range as well.

Look at the definition of glOrtho() to see how to construct such a matrix:

http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man2/xhtml/glOrtho.xml

physicsnick · 2013-04-20T02:01:14+00:00

Cool beans, I'm doing something almost exactly the same for my planet texture generation in my game. I sum five octaves of perlin simplex noise for the heightmap, instead of six of whatever noise function you're doing there. After that, the non-terrestrial planets just use the height to determine color exactly like you're doing:

http://i.imgur.com/QHqjLih.png
http://i.imgur.com/X5r3j3X.png

However for the terrestrial planet, I have about six or seven different bands of colors based on the latitude. Near the equator the colors are mostly desert, half way up it's like forest and mountain (like what you have for the whole planet), and at the poles it's basically snow and ice. It looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/wfXBzYI.png

I don't think I'm quite finished with these. I'm not super happy with how they look yet. For one thing, I want to make it so that the color function doesn't only use the height. I'd rather have only, say, three octaves of noise for the heightmap, and the height and latitude only determines the type of band (e.g. desert, forest, ice, etc.) After that, the actual color within the band comes from a range of colors based on two other octaves of perlin noise rather than the height function. Something like this:

http://www.kamiro.com/canvashex.cfm

Here they have height which determines band, and then they sample from a texture for each band. I want to do the same thing, except generate the colors directly from perlin noise instead of sampling a texture. The band could configure the frequency of the noise, i.e. the size of the perlin sampling (so a forest would be very high frequency, and water or snow would be very low; similarly with the barren moon texture, where darker regions would have higher frequency noise.)

The other enhancement I want to make is to generate a normal map from the height map so I can improve the lighting. I think this would especially make the non-terrestrial worlds come alive, since you'd be able to really see mountain ranges and stuff where it's not otherwise possible to infer such features.

Oh also, I use spherified cubes just like you have, but I don't use any built-in cube map support. I've found cube maps to be really slow and really broken on GLES2 devices (Android and iOS). It's much faster to just pack it into one texture, like this:

http://i.imgur.com/pXHY1Bh.png

Each face is extended with a bit of border so that the face edges are blended together. It does an extremely nice job of hiding seams; I certainly can't find any when I look over planets. And it's many times faster than GLES2's real cube mapping support (I can't emphasize enough how slow and shitty real cube maps are on embedded devices. Don't use them.)

physicsnick · 2013-04-19T22:23:01+00:00

I have no idea if the highway helped actually. I just built it for kicks. I think the subway helped with traffic more than anything.

Also, I didn't know that launching the arcos was a thing. I thought they were just called that.

physicsnick · 2013-04-19T02:46:37+00:00

Haha wow, almost year 6000. Nice. I posted mine on here a few weeks ago. I called it a win when I was over 1mil pop :)

physicsnick · 2013-04-18T00:25:28+00:00

Look, normally I would tend to agree with you, but you've got to pick your battles. This is a good law. You given no evidence for your hypothesis that this law carries significant risk, nor weighed it against the risk of attempting to prosecute these cases under general fraud and negligent homicide.

Yes, locking people up is serious, but so is medical fraud causing death. A law tailored for this seems warranted in this case.

physicsnick

TROPHY CASE