Viridian Games

So I’ve updated Planitia. I haven’t added any real gameplay improvements, so the overall experience should still be disappointing – but at least the download is now a third of its previous size and loads much, much faster. I also added left-handed controls! Yay!

You can get it from the usual place.

…A game programmer programs games, even if he’s not being paid to do it.

If you recall, I promised to put Planitia on the shelf a while back and post it and the source. “So where is it?” you may ask. “Why are you breaking your promises to us yet again?”

Well…because I just can’t let it go. I feel that I’m about halfway through the second 90%…and the game has so much potential that I can’t release it in its current state without wasting all that potential. I feel I have an obligation to potential players to make the software worth starting up.

But I’m not going to hold it back until I think it’s “done”, so here’s a new version!

What’s new in this version:

• A tutorial! Everybody complains about the speed of the text; half say it’s too fast and the other half say it’s too slow. I’ll be putting in a “Next” prompt, but at least it exists now and should help people understand what the game is about.

• The Flamestrike god power is now implemented and has an animation.

• Changed the in-world hit marker. It’s still programmer art, but it’s much nicer programmer art.

• Fixed the AI so that it can at least improve its own land again (for some reason, the AI got horribly broken when I put in the multiplayer).

• Optimized my loading code so that the game now loads in about half the time.

What’s left:

• Finish the AI so that there is actually a single-player aspect to the game.

• Do some tweaks to the tutorial.

• Add LOTS more sounds.

• Add a bunch of UI stuff (for instance, right now, if you accidentally click Multiplayer when you didn’t want it, you have to exit the game).

• Allow the player to switch to fullscreen.

I’m hoping to have it all done…soon.

Recent events have hammered home one thing to me…that I should be getting paid for most of the code I write.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s starting to rankle that I’ve spent two+ years on Planitia and I won’t see any income from it. I will not reneg on my promise to make Planitia free and release the source, but frankly I just don’t have much more time to spend on it.

So here’s what’s going to happen with Planitia:

I’ll be adding a tutorial mode to explain the basic concepts of the game to new players.

I’ll be implementing the last two god powers that don’t work at all (which are currently Flamestrike and Armageddon) and tweaking a couple others (Golem should not allow you to place the golem, it should appear automatically at one of your cities and randomly seek out an enemy city).

I’ll be implementing “idle” animations for the military units so that they don’t just stop dead in mid-stride…that looks weird.

And that’s it. Planitia will be done.

And it’ll be done by the end of next week.

Now, that’s not to say that I won’t fix bugs or make improvements if people suggest them; just that it won’t be high-priority.

I need to move on to a project that can actually make me money, because lord knows I need some.

By the same token…dear lord, I don’t want to do this…but you’ll be seeing ads on this website soon. I’m going to make them as unobtrusive as possible, but if this site can at least pay for itself I’d be much happier.

And I’ll also be putting up a Paypal link for donations. If you’ve played Inaria or Planitia and enjoyed them, or if my articles have helped you in any way, you may now slip me money!

Frankly, I hate doing this…but I don’t feel I have a choice. I also feel it’s the next natural step in my development as a game programmer.

Okay, a minor update to Planitia. Click here to download.

* The game should no longer crash when you try to create a golem.

* “Skirmish Mode” has been renamed “Single Player”

* The second mouse pointer has been eliminated.

* Single player mode now pits you against one enemy AI instead of three. This should make it easier to play as well as help with performance until I can get some optimizations in.

* More logging to help find other crashers.

Again, please feel free to try it out. I’m trying to get the game looking as professional as I can with the resources I’ve got; if you want to make suggestions feel free, either in the comments or by emailing me at anthony.salter@gmail.com.

All right, a new version of Planitia is now available. This version features:

* Images are now front-loaded, eliminating the pause when creating new units.

* Loading screen lets you know that the game has not locked up on startup!

* Icons are now the correct color, have the correct icons, and even have tooltips!

* Walkers now have a “farming” animation.

* The bug where units would occasionally walk backwards has been fixed.

* General and Golem units now have footstep sounds.

* Music! The music is “Overture” by Julia Ecklar, and I got it from Podsafe Audio.

Even if you don’t feel like playing it, if you could just download it and tell me what your initial impression of the game is – especially if you’ve not tried it before – I’d be very grateful.

All right, here it is! The first LAN multiplayer version of Planitia!

Of course, cleaning up the multiplayer wasn’t the only thing I did to it. You may be asking, “What took so long?”

Um…well, this.

That’s right – new units that actually animate! Many, many thanks to my friend Ryan Clark for doing the Photoshop work on these so I could focus on the programming angle and get them in quickly. Right now only movement animations work; I’ll get idle and attack animations in very soon.

Of course, you’re probably wondering where you can get this masterpiece! Well…

Click here to download the most recent version of Planitia! Please read the readme file if you have trouble starting a multiplayer game.

And please either comment on this post or send me email at anthony.salter@gmail.com if you have any suggestions or criticism!

I’m sorry, but I’m not going to have that multiplayer demo for you guys today…you can probably figure out what I’m doing instead. The demo will be ready on Monday, and it’ll be much better than it would have been.

I must apologize to my regular readers…you guys haven’t had much reason to tune in lately, and I’m sorry. It turns out that I had a couple other minor health issues that I had to deal with, but it appears that it has all worked out now.

So today is going to be kind of a grab bag of what I’ve been doing/thinking about.

First off, being in the hospital convinced me that I need a laptop, but full-featured laptops are quite expensive. I’ve been drawn to the idea of the netbook – that is, a small laptop with no CD or DVD drive but built-in wireless and wired internet so that it can do everything over the network. Since I already do almost everything over the network, the idea of a netbook really appeals to me. Especially since prices can be as low as $250.

Of course, the one I really want isn’t that cheap; I’ve got my sights set on the Asus EEE PC 1000HA. I’ve chosen that one because of its large hard drive, its zippy Intel Atom processor, and its larger keyboard and screen. About the only bad thing anybody has to say about it is that the right shift key is in kind of a weird place, and I’m pretty sure I can work around that. The MSI Wind was also a contender but it has the disadvantage of coming in lots of slightly different versions, most of which are cheaper either because they have smaller 3-cell batteries (which greatly reduce the life of the unit) and/or use solid-state drives instead of hard drives. I don’t like solid-state drives for a machine I’ll be doing development on because a) they’re too small and b) they are read fast/write slow, so compiling takes longer. It really feels like with the Asus 1000HA I’m going to be getting the most bang for my buck.

On a completely different topic, my favorite movie is now Kung-Fu Panda. I was amazed at how good it was; it was well written, well voice-acted and superbly animated. If you haven’t watched it because you don’t like Jack Black, you should probably reconsider. There’s a bit of his shtick at the beginning of the movie, but it’s actually funny and then he disappears into the sweet, lovable Po. And the movie has a great villain in Tai Lung; while I was listening to the commentary the writers noted that the key to creating a great villain was to remember that the villain always considers himself the hero of his own story and Tai Lung certainly fits that bill.

And finally, I have actually been working on Planitia! Can you believe it?! No, I can’t either. I seem to recall stating that I would stop work on Planitia at Midnight on December 31, 2008 and move on to something else…but that was before I lost two months in the hospital. However, I will have a LAN multiplayer demo available this Friday, December 19, 2008. Response to this version may influence how much effort I continue to put into Planitia; I’ve got several other projects I want to get started on. I know that Planitia is nowhere near done, but I’ve now spent two years worth of evenings on a project that isn’t going to make me a cent…and I’m starting to feel the whole “opportunity cost” thing. If Planitia turns out to be a quick, fun multiplayer-only game…well, I guess I can live with that.

I hereby present the world’s first multiplayer game of Planitia…with no further comment.

I’ve been working on Planitia’s multiplayer for about six weeks now. It has required a pretty major rewrite to the underlying engine as well as near-continual rewrites to how I’m transmitting my data.

But…

The game is now inherently stable. In other words, two computers can connect and run the underlying world simulation and it’ll be exactly the same on both computers – they’ll never get out of sync. Which means that when the game does get out of sync, it’s due to player interaction, which can easily be logged and debugged. Most of the out-of-syncs are being caused by code I wrote months or even years ago that access the system timer manually – you just cannot do that in a multiplayer engine; you must use update timers (in other words, instead of a villager farming for 500 milliseconds, it farms for 15 33-millisecond updates).

I need to scour all the code that performs player actions as well as all my units and make sure nothing is using direct timing calls, but after that…well, the game should stay in sync, at least on a LAN. I’ll also need to clean up the multiplayer startup code so that it’s easier to start a game (right now you have to put the IP of the server into your engine.cfg file) as well as implement the last couple of god powers and then…

And then I’ll be releasing the multiplayer demo. ‘Sright! Of course, this demo will be LAN only – I cannot emphasize this enough. If you play it over the internet and it lags horribly, I hereby revoke your authorization to come crying to me. That’s not to say I won’t fix that eventually – I certainly plan to.

Sigh…once again I can’t post a new screenshot with pretties because that’s not what I’m working on. Indeed, after doing multiplayer coding going back to graphics would seem like a holiday.

Edit: Sol suggested I present a screenshot of two instances of the game running in sync. Great idea!