Homebrews and CFW

If any of you reading have a psVita and you've ever wanted to carry around your old games now is the time to get a custom firmware (CFW) after this last weeks huge exploit release all be it poorly timed if you were looking forward to the new official firmware (OFW) update anyway.

What is this nonsense? basically a CFW is a custom shell to a given system and can be used to do things the developers of a given console probably don't want you doing or simply aren't allowed to let you do from a legal standpoint. In this case on the vita it has a natively built in psp emulator to play psp titles which we can manipulate to give us access to the whole psp system with some work. We can then modify it to do things the psp was never meant to do such as emulate and play older titles from older consoles. In my case I love my old SNES and the zelda game I have for it and link to the past works amazing as a portable game it's like it was meant for a handheld. So I put my SNES collection on my vita so I can play it wherever I go and put away the old console because now if I get the itch it's quick and easy to just get into it and play. No dealing with setup and finding everything and whether or not the cartridge is going to work without some effort.

As a consumer I much prefer being able to play everything from a single device, part of why I've always loved my pc gaming is I didn't need to have a dozen different pieces of hardware floating around to play different games. If the day ever came I could repurchase any of these games on my vita I'd do it in a heartbeat. Hell I've known since back in the ps1 days that ps1 discs are pc rom format so I can just put them on the pc and run most of them without even needing an emulator they just work natively (FF7, MGS) and most ps3 users apparently didn't realize that either that they'll work fine on a ps3 regardless of ps2 compatability. I have yet to check on my ps4 so I'll have to get back to everyone on that but I'll be sure to mention it at some point. Supposedly they're working on it and in the mean time there's psNow and rumor has it some discs already work while officially they're not supported so I'll just need to do it myself and see. In spite of knowing though about these discs when I saw FF7 and 8 on steam I didn't even wait for a sale or price drop I jumped on it. When halo comes out I'll be all over that as well. If suddenly steam added a retro market to play all the old titles I'd be all over it. It's a damn shame how much money publishers are missing out on as well as developers simply because of focusing on the now and ignoring nostalgia.

Though as a dev I understand that there's all kinds of licensing issues as well as how the markets are competing with each other and thus don't want pc players forgoing a console by making these titles available. I've said before though that I see the day we all sit down on a unified hardware structure with swappable OS' in a virtualized system allowing us to play whatever we want however we want without worrying about hardware and paying more for extra consoles. Though it'll be a far way off considering profit margins on consoles in the long run. That's part of what makes everyone angry about CFW's as well is because they know they're effectively losing money regardless of if it was money they never would've gotten anyway, though their main concern is losing money on active titles they could still earn through legitimate means. That is to say a CFW on a vita sadly can be used for piracy of psp titles which they still make money on if you buy the game like you should. They're less concerned with the homebrew I imagine and only slightly concerned with emulators for older consoles because these are things they wouldn't make money on anyway. While its true a homebrew has earning potential from sales and distribution on the platform the titles tend not to meet their so called quality standards and thus wouldn't make much money even if they were officially released titles.

What do you think? Do you have a CFW and some emulators, if you did what kinds of games would you have stocked on it?

A man of many hats

So most of this blog has been from my work and as a dev with some insights on my views as a consumer and a rare post as both. I thought this was to separate my blog from the many consumer based game blogs out there. Now I see combining the two should be more of a focus as neither stands out on their own for me now.

This is my official return to regular posting after my long hiatus. During this time I would like to say it was self discovery that brought me back or reinventing myself. The truth being I'm roughly the same as I ever was simply with more life experience in the past few months.

The recap of my time off is basically my going around to conventions and seizing opportunities. I managed to sell most of my work while retaining some of the IP rights to reuse my material in the future. And on an unrelated note I was sued for a bill I paid years ago and that's been fun so far. I still have one court meeting left to officially resolve everything but all the paperwork and evidence is in so I'm feeling good about it.

The Future Platform

I often rant slightly about the current gen for it's poor timing given how dramatically things are shifting in computer tech this year. I'm also on record about various ideas of what could have been done or should have been done and what I think of pc gaming and digital distribution. With my general discontent I'm often asked "well what would you do then since you have all the answers?" in as condascending of a tone as they can muster. My answer is the best of both world and as much of a reduction in the flaws as is possible with such a combination.

To elaborate on what I see for the future generation of gaming platforms as I will describe shortly. First however I shall lay the foundation to explain my logic. This current gen was in planning for a long time and most of the developers of both teams saw the landscape changing in gaming and tried what they could to adapt for the future they saw knowing they would be inadequate. Which is why when this current gen released they already starting planning an entire new generation with both sony and xbox quietly stating that the next generation after this one would come much quicker than the last. In a previous post I elaborated on a number of technologies I had expected to see in this generation that simply are not present. The unfortunate problem at this point though is even if the next gen fixes all of the problems and complaints I have with ps4 and x1 there's still one major problem I can't get past which they'll likely never fix. That problem is that there is a console war in place with waring factions on both sides and even within console families there isn't much support or cross-play. While consoles move to less hardware dependent virtual OS to allow for future upgrades making backwards comparability almost guaranteed for the future and moving closer towards being dedicated PC's and Steam making it's own OS to be more like a console the fact remains our games are still land locked. Steam might let us play our games under different OS on different machines, but not on consoles, and games from one console don't play on another even if they exist on it. There's the added development costs for releasing on multiple platforms and gamers are stuck picking sides or going broke trying to play both sides. Content on one console won't transfer to another making you not only buy the game twice but all the dlc as well if you decide to hop platforms. Some games with system crossplay or upgrades like ps3 to ps4 and vita sometimes require purchasing the game all over again instead of just an upgrade cost.

So what do I propose to solve these problems? I suggest combining forces. If xbox and sony teamed up on developing a single console hardware platform they could both release their OS on the same machine and players wouldn't have to pick a side, and we might even be able to add SteamOS as well and just keep adding and opening up the market for other similar OS's. Perhaps peripherals are still different having a sony style or xbox style controller but being able to play your games across multiple platforms without having to buy them multiple times. Add the option for dedicated hardware upgrades or expansion kits if they're really needed perhaps taking an idea from a new modular design system to add hardware as needed. This unification of the gaming world would be revolutionary, unfortunately however it'll likely only ever be a pipe-dream. Then again now we have things like NeoGeo that plays all the old cartridge games... so maybe it's not that far fetched?

what's taking so long?

In the true newb fashion I thought I'd be done in a matter of months and now it's years later with no true end in sight. The fact of the matter is almost all of the work has been done on my own without much outside help except once in a blue moon when I find myself with spare cash to pay someone for something specific. Yes it's true I have a basic build that's up and running but it's still so broken that to even call it a proper alpha would be just short of an outright lie.

That having been said what have I been doing the last couple months? I've been selling off chunks of what code I've done so far to other developers and shopping out the rights to the games. I'm not giving up by any means rather handing it off is more of a means to an end. The games will still get made and by people that have much more experience. Realistically I probably should've done this much sooner. What about kickstarter? True I could go that route and I would be able to afford to work how I really want and get things done, but it wouldn't have the same effect as putting it in the hands of truly experienced developers that will know what to strip out or add in for maximum effect.

What does this mean for the blog? It means I start new projects and elaborate on them while detailing what's happened to what I've already done. This blog isn't going anywhere if I can help it. Not to mention the games themselves haven't been sold off yet and I'm going to keep working on them until they are. With any luck I'll be able to keep working on them after they're sold too.

So what have I done with the games since my last post? I've brought back the old mech's as a clutch game mechanism which is to say they only show up at the end of each match as game changers in an attempt to swing the battle for a last minute come from behind victory possibility. I also brought back the stock system in a manner I finally think will be free of complaints. Namely most loadouts use the existing system and special flare items that don't have game impact aside from visual are the only things the stock system is really useful for right now. It functions more as a mini metagame and not as a real mechanic. I've also added special items with other equivalents that can be bought in other ways, these special items are one time purchases that can be re-used. You might think of them as similar in nature to the blueprints from dust 514 without the expense. I've made a few other tweaks here and there and worked on removing some of the game crashing bugs but otherwise that's all the major news.

From here I plan to work more on teamwork mechanics because the current system breaks down at more advanced skill levels and becomes a lone wolf game again which is not what the game is about. Hopefully when I finally get teamwork mechanics done properly it won't be an elmer fudd situation where I find out I turned the shotgun around the wrong way.

An Exercise In Creativity

A question I've gotten a couple times is how I manage to spam so many ideas. My usual answer is creativity or something similar to it. It's no guarantee that any or all of the ideas are good but it's better to filter out the unnecessary that than to struggle at adding new material, at least as it relates to my method for working. I manage to come up with so many ideas by having the ability to link otherwise unrelated objects and how to improve them. It's the concept of taking any idea and simply playing with it to see how you could change it then seeing of you think it's better or worse.

One classic example is building your own card game using standard materials. Grab a standard 52 playing card deck and a pair of dice. Now make a new game you've never heard of before, write down all the rules and ideas behind them, then organize them and present them to someone and have them play your game. It's very basic but helps in the fundamentals of design and helps you learn to think creatively.

Another method I like to use is taking a random concept from a game and then building an entirely new game around it. This is usually video games but it can be any game. The more ridiculous it sounds when you say it out loud the better it probably is as a source of entertainment.

new features

it's been a long time since I made any real posts about the larger title I've been working on and quite honestly there's so much that's changed now it's hardly even the same game anymore
however since the new code has been compiling for over a week I figured now is a good time to try and do some kind of an update

side note, I'm seriously considering using some of the budget on some kind of server farm to compile next time because it's literally been compiling for over a week and is only just about to finish in the next few hours or maybe early tomorrow

we've completely rebuilt the networking from ground up and to test extreme scenarios we've been using simulated traffic in addition to our volunteers so we can really see how plausible it would be to have massive players in smaller areas like we were aiming for. So far we almost managed to get 700 players roughly 128 of which were real and the rest were simulated on a smaller map where players were basically shoulder to shoulder and moving around and the network could almost handle it from a movement perspective. Sadly once we had half of them shooting it completely crashed. We're still condensing information down to absolute bare minimums. In a larger map with real space to move and narrowing down what information each player needs for their area we managed to get the same number of people most of which were shooting and all we had was some nasty lag but only a couple of dropped connections.
 Basically packets currently contain location, direction of movement, and client side final calculations. Which is to say if a player shoots and hits or misses all that is currently client side because the servers can't handle it, the player's computer will determine from it's information if it's a hit or miss and then send that along to the server to pass around to relevant nearby players. Right now though information like trajectories or exact aiming isn't transmitted and there's no secondary checks so if someone shoots at you and misses all you get is a randomized bullet trajectory that's calculated from your position and the other player's position. I't stupid easy to hack though because if you find a way inject your packet with something that says you killed player x then that get's sent out to everyone and you could kill everyone on the map without even shooting so we're going to have to work on that soon. Though in terms of maximizing use of packets I must say final calculations of saying if a player hit or missed and having everyone else calculate details of what that means is really quite efficient.

When it comes to massive scale weapons systems we use the above networking to do what I described which is send a few packets out saying all players within a given distance of a position take x damage, with client side calculating if they're in the area or protected by a defensive structure, etc.

While small groups of people can handle high level detailed graphics we've been having a hard time with our distance based level of detail when dealing with so many players the graphics can really take a hit unless you have ungodly system specs

we updated most of the sounds now that we found a decent sound effects guy, so there are a lot more sounds now and they sound much better. We opted for proceedurally generated midi to keep sizes small similar to our texture and geometry methods.

there's been a lot of balancing and smaller tweaks that I won't enumerate suffice to say the higher skill levels got slightly nerfed and the beginning levels have been accelerated to narrow the power gaps a bit across the board

we improved terraforming algorithms from larger weapons with such an ability which is seperate from structural fracturing which also got a massive overhaul for various new material types and definitions, stress patterns, weight allocations, etc

there are several new weapons  such as
the nighty night baby doll and goodnight kiss traps which are gas traps that knock out your opponent for a while unless they have a gas mask
a customized directional shield adjustment where you can pick where your shield is the strongest and to what extent
some new grenade types
a couple new accessories and more customizations for each, as well as a new related feature where you can see outside of matchmaking all the different gun combos your opponents were using and what you get killed by most often with suggestions on how to increase your defense against them.
the weapons system was also given a small overhaul for more components with subtle alterations of each and their overall effects as well as what are called "efficient combos" which give additional bonuses not immediately noticeable when you're just looking at component stats but that are noted in the gun description
there are other similar types now for "power combos" and "weight combo" which is to say if it's obvious you're going for most damage, or the lightest weight you may get additional bonuses to damage, fire rate, movement speed or a cut in a movement speed penalty if it's a heavy weapon,  and you can have multiple bonuses though you won't get the maximum bonus of a given type unless all components have those qualifications and the biggest bonuses generally are only of a single type unlike some components that may have multiple types but of lesser values.
I'm currently working on displaying all such values for that in each component description as well as a primary component enumeration in the gun description to know how many components of the gun have said bonus and how many components there are in the gun

I'm also working on a prototype forge section where you can create new components with randomized variables you can then modify to boost their values eventually leading to a total gun creation mode aside from the one now that just uses the exact same components across the board

macro information systems are also finally being built in to gather information on how and when players change classes, detailed gun info and combos, k/d's with verbose stats per class and per game, relative accuracy as opposed to absolute accuracy, and all the other details I listed for stats when I started this blog and listed concepts.

I know I'm missing so much but this covers a few of the larger broad strokes we did.

first week summary

I had an amazingly difficult time getting in on the mantle beta for developers and I somewhat regret throwing myself at it so hard. I'm still excited to see what other developers do with it, especially a big budget like BF4. From my perspective it's perhaps a bit more work than usual but it's just worth it and it certainly makes more logical sense so even if it's more work it goes much faster actually saving time. Though I don't have the specific need for it myself I see the potential and because it is so much better I'd still develop for it anyway if I had the budget for it. For now even though it's an open API to my knowledge nvidia still doesn't like it or allow it.

CES also started and all the news coming out from there is exciting as always. Though sadly when it comes to some of the more important hardware I care about things are fairly run of the mill. I'd love to hear something truly exciting about processors we're not expecting like more cores, more power, more heat, smaller form factor, etc. I'd love to just hear same performance for lower power.

Though we are finally hearing processors with ddr4 controllers and are supposedly being surprisingly stable in comparison to previous generations launches. MSI apparently finally has a good ITX amd mobo which has me excited even though I know I won't be getting it. They're also releasing ITX form factor graphics cards which is nice if you want more graphics than you'd get from an APU.

Apparently Dell might be first to market with a 4k OLED monitor, which is a little sad but at least it's something instead of nothing. Though from my experience dell monitors don't live as long as other brands and considering we're expecting a shorter lifespan on OLED to begin with this has me a bit worried.

hybrid hard drives are doubling in capacity which sounded nice at first until I found out the SSD space is staying at 8gb and they're just doubling regular HDD space so now we have 4tb regular and 8gb nand when the main complaint I'm sure was how small the SSD side was.

there's all kinds of CES news beyond this which I suggest everyone read. My last really exciting thing that comes to mind is some DSP controlled PSU's which I don't know why I never thought of that before, the basic explanation is that DSP is digital signal processing unit which is a digital controller to increase efficiency which leads to the new 80+ titanium above the 80+ platinum for upwards of 95% efficiency.

I'll probably post about these more next week. so what does everyone think about steam OS? anyone annoyed with it moving to UEFI only so quickly?