Author Archives: jmcmorris

Functional Is Not Finished

Has anyone noticed how long Crea is taking? I know I have! Just a few months ago I was certain I would have Crea more or less finished by now and yet here we are still months away from a reasonable release date. “Why is this?” is something I have been asking myself recently. What is making things take so long?

I looked behind me to what I have been working on over the last few months and then ahead of me to what I will be working on and the answer became clear. There has been multiple factors that are causing these delays such as a feature taking longer to implement than expected or completely overlooking a feature when I made the release date estimates. However, without a doubt, the largest contributor is the mistake of confusing functional as finished.

When we launched Crea’s Kickstarter I truly tried to make pessimistic estimates on the release dates. I was secretly hopeful that the stars would align and Crea would come out even sooner. After all, I had the basic exploration working along with world generation, character creation, crafting, user interface, and many other things. That means I was done with these and only have to look forward to the remaining features, right? Note quite.

As it turns out, function is not finished. Many of these features only had the bare necessities implemented and were by no means ready for prime time. Take the world generation for example. Back in June it did create a randomly generated world but, as it turned out, it was very hard to build onto these generated worlds. Even more pressing, the generation would take 45 seconds for a small world and I was too scared to try a large world that is 8 times larger than the small. For some time I closed my eyes and marched on as if the problem would magically go away. It didn’t.

There are several other examples. The user interface was difficult to build onto and hardly moddable. The crafting was missing the concept of recipes the player would learn. The networking is too slow and probably needs to be moved from TCP to UDP, a major rewrite of the networking code. Add all of these up and you have a few months of added development.

This is not all bad news though. With every upgrade, Crea gets that much better. I want to ensure that Crea is representative of my best work. I do plan to release Crea before some minor features have been finished, but the features I do release with I want to be polished and ready to be built onto.

…So when is Crea coming out?

Tooltips and Japanese

Decided to work on tooltips and while I was at it I decided I would once again verify that Crea was indeed localization friendly.

Styling will likely change (such as font size). Also note that this was just a test. Crea has not been translated to Japanese.

Needless to say, I am quite excited about both of these. I was unsure of how to implement tooltips for a while now and decided to finally tackle it. Also I had not tested a foreign language on the new UI and so it was a pleasant surprise to just see everything work as expected.

And here is the English version for your viewing pleasures.

Mac Port Progress

Figured this was noteworthy – I got Crea running on mac now! It does have some graphical issues that I need to iron out but besides that things are running smoothly! And no, the toolbar is not having graphical issues – it looks bad (particularly the bag area) because I made it.

Anyways, this is huge news, mostly because it proves that what I have been developing is in fact portable. This also means that the linux port is not too far away, but it will still be awhile before I do get to the Linux port. Don’t worry though – Early Beta will have all 3 platforms!

Development Stride

The past month I have hit an amazing development stride on Crea. I am more focused than I have ever been and continue to make unbelievable progress. I am utterly obsessed. When Kelley takes me out on my daily walk I have a hard time not talking about Crea and an even harder time not thinking about it. If this is the price for raw productivity then I’ll take it!

During this stride I have tackled some major issues. One example, which I mentioned in my last blog post, I completely rewrote all of the user interface code. Since that post I have written all of the previously implemented game UI which includes the crafting, equipment, inventory and toolbar. While doing this I was sure to polish some features and move them much closer to “complete”. Such as I finally added the concept of learning item recipes to be able to craft them. Or I made it so that ctrl+click on equipment will automatically swap it with your currently equipped item.

Inventory close to being finished

Another major feat is that I rewrote the world generation. In an earlier post I talked about optimizing the world generation and how it was just too slow. I decided to completely get rid of the random noise and go with using stamps to build up a world. This was a HUGE success and generating a small world went from about 45~ seconds to now 3~ seconds. Even a humongous world, 16384×3072 tiles only takes about 15~ seconds to be generated. Not only is it much faster, but we also now have much more control over the shape of the world.

What the world generation output currently looks like

There are lots of other smaller changes that have been happening which are mostly cataloged in our project plan. On there you can also see some of the tasks I have coming up. The next two big ones are Dynamuse and Combat Refinement.

Dynamuse is a little application I’m putting together for Robot Science to be able to compose tracks that will be dynamically generated during gameplay based off of a few parameters such as the time of day and the intensity of the situation. The motivation behind this is to avoid extremely repetitive music that you inevitably mute.

Dynamuse Mockup – Be glad I’m not doing the UI

The Combat Refinement is a little more vague and I will likely do an entire post on the topic at some point. We have very basic combat implemented at the moment. You are able to swing a sword, very similar to Terraria’s long swords, and hit monsters. It is functional but not quite what we want. My goal for combat is to be a little more involved and skill based rather than “click-click-click-cli-cli-click”.

One of the biggest challenges with combat in a sandbox game is that the world can be reconstructed and, if we’re not careful, could easily mean some monsters are unable to even reach a player. So, some of the things we are looking at are: monster mobility, range attacks, multiple attack animations for a single type of weapon, skill and magic types. It is a lot but I have a good feeling we’ll be looking back at it before too long thankful that we took the time to refine things.

Oh and I’m still doing livestreams everyday. Feel free to drop in anytime!

From Good to Awesom-ium

This has been quite a week! We FINALLY released alpha to a handful of people and it has been well received. Just over the course of a few days over two dozen bugs were uncovered (some already known) and half of them fixed. Between the bug fixes I began looking into moving the UI (User Interface) over into python. Why? I wanted to make all of the UI completely moddable and make it easy to add in new UI through mods. I had attempted this before and had problems getting the library I was using to be exposed. That was when I found something very shiny – Awesomium.

Awesomium is a full fledged “web UI bridge for native applications.” In other words, it is Google Chrome inside Crea. This was not the first time I had looked at Awesomium. I had considered it before for a previous project but had foolishly decided against it.This time I was no fool.

I have made the jump and I’m not looking back. I have been making great progress over this last week. This has been one of my most focused weeks – ever. I completely tore out the previous UI which I fortunately had the foresight to decouple from the rest of my engine as much as possible. Then I implemented Awesomium and got a prototype working surprisingly quickly. From then on I have been working on re-implementing Crea’s UI such as the menus, inventory, crafting and so on.

What does this all mean?

Crea UI will be 100% moddable
UI visuals and interaction is implemented in HTML5/CSS3/Javascript
UI interfacing with game logic is implemented in Python
Crea’s UI will be Awesome

For those web devs reading this, we have decided to use JQuery, Ember and Handlebars for templating and data binding the UI. You can also point your browser to a port on your localhost and you get full access to Google Chrome Developer Tools for the UI in the game. How awesome is that?

Screenshots coming soon!

Oh! I almost forgot I am doing regular livestreams now! Click for more details.

Optimizing Systems

In software development there is this pitfall known as pre-optimization, which is the attempt to make code more efficient before it has even been proven to be a problem. I have been careful not to fall into this trap and I think I have done a reasonably good job at it. So much so that this past week I noticed that the game was running under 60 fps. Next thing I knew I was waist deep in a code profiler, the debugger, and my paper notepad filled with ideas. In the end I came out victorious with three beasts slain at my feet and Kelley wearing a tightly corseted gown, gratefully clinging to my muscular arm.

The first of the three, the lighting system, was a tricky one. The lighting is made up of thousands of tiny squares called subtiles. Each square is 4×4 pixels which means there are 16 of them in a single tile. That means if the resolution is only 1280×1024 then there are 81920 subtiles. That’s a lot! I have some awesome algorithms to calculate the lighting at blazing speeds, but when it came to rendering them, I didn’t have much optimization I could make.

Profile of my lighting rendering code

After an arduous journey to the top of a mountain, I sat in meditation for 3 days until the solution was given to me in a vision. A great deal of the tiles are a solid value – either pure black or pure white. With this I made light represented by a solid tile and only broke it down into subtiles if the tile needed multiple values. After a day of rewriting a large portion of the lighting system to handle this concept, I was greeted with a constant 60fps, up from the lowly 40~fps. The first beast was slain and onto the next I galumphed!

The second beast was one I had been avoiding for awhile for no real reason – tile blending. Tile blending is a cool concept I came up with awhile back that helps smooth the transition from one tile type to another.

Each tile type has a priority. When a tile is drawn it checks its four direct neighbors and if it has a higher priority then it slightly draws over that neighbor. The problem with this is that I was comparing the tile priorities every frame, slowing down the fps rate.

Fortunately a profound solution was not required this time. I made the exchange of memory for cpu. Now every tile is caching if it has priority over each neighbor using a bitwised enum stored in a single byte. Since I only have a fraction of the world loaded at a time this is not such a bad thing. And on I went to the final beast.

The last of the beasts is the world generation. We’ve been building onto the world generation for awhile now (and it’s still in progress) and it started to get way too slow. It was taking nearly 2 minutes to generate just a small world. So I unsheathed my mighty brain powers and did what I do best – code!

I quickly found that this beast was no ordinary beast. It was a hydra and had three issues that I had to cut through. Before getting into the gory details, I’ll give a brief overview of how the world generation works. First the world terrain is created and everything is either dirt or sky. Then the “world” biome is placed down which is a pass over the entire world such as adding in other tile types such as silver and gold. After this all of the biomes are laid out and each performs its own actions to reshape its allotted area.

The first and remaining issue is that the first step, the terrain generation, takes about 98% of the processing time. The way I am generating the terrain, through the Accidental Noise Library (ANL), is just very slow. There are likely optimizations I can make, I just need to continue hacking.

Another issue that really started slowing things down was the way we were placing down all of the tiles during the world biome pass. I would randomly calculate an area to place the tiles in and then generate a circle with noise once again going through ANL. Doing this a few hundred times was just too much. I realized that I did not really need to generate a new circle with noise every time. No one would notice if we reused the same ones especially if we stretch and flip them. Thus the concept of “stamps” was born. Stamps can either be created from noise generation as before or from an image.

The final issue was with an unmentioned feature/tool – creating an image out of the generated world. I put this together so it would be easier for us to iterate on the world generation. But there was a problem with it… It was taking 30 seconds. It was still worth it but still – ouch! I quickly verified that the part I suspected was indeed the culprit. Reading through all of the tiles and converting them into a color to save to the image was taking 99% of the time. This was written in python so I moved just this part into C++. It went from 30 seconds to roughly 1 second. Victory was mine!

Alpha Map with sword and bed stamps

Needless to say, I’m covered in the bloody remains of ones and zeros.

Feature – Inventory and Toolbar

Overview

The player’s inventory in Crea is handled through bags. A bag is an item which, when equipped, provides additional inventory for the player. Once equipped, a bag can only be unequipped if it is empty. The number of bags a player can equip is increased by leveling up in the gathering proficiency. Bags can also be upgraded to hold more items. Since a bag is an item that means it can be traded to other players or given to new characters.

Bags are for storing items and the toolbar is for using items. The toolbar is only a reference to an item type. Consequently, a dirt block on your toolbar would represent all of the dirt in your bags. When an item is completely consumed the item remains on the toolbar unavailable until you get more.

Modding

There are two components specifically for these, InventoryComponent and ToolbarComponent. The InventoryComponent allows you to get access to all of the bags the player currently has equipped as well as check and change the items in each bag. Similarly with the ToolbarComponent you can check and change the item references in each spot.

Feature – Interactive World

Overview:

As expected in a sandbox game, worlds in Crea can be fully reconstructed. Terrain exists on two tile layers referred to as ground layer and wall layer. The ground is collidable and sits in front of the wall layer which is not collidable. Aside from being able to rebuild the terrain, it is also possible to place and remove entities such as tables and treasure chests.

Unlike tiles which are grid based, entities are free to be placed wherever there is provided support. Item placement has been made as simple and intuitive as possible. When a position is suitable for placing the active item a visual hint is provided, that is a transparent rendering of the item and where it will be placed at. If an item does not quite fit where the mouse is hovered but there is an available nearby space then it will show a hint there.

These items can then be interacted with, such as opening a door or flipping a switch. Interacting with an item is not restricted to right clicking on it though. There are other interactions such as harvesting it with an axe, stepping on a button, using an item or attempting to remove the item’s support. With all of these interactions, the world moves from a static playground to a very much interactive and alive one.

Modding:

The key to having an interactive world is the modding support. New tiles can be created, there is a placement component that can be added to any item, and an interactive component added to any entity.

Creating a new tile requires the use of the TileComponent. Here is an example with some embedded comments.

name = 'Dirt'
render = Render('mods/base/tile/dirt.png')
add(render)

#ItemComponent making it possible to collect this tile
item = Item()
item.stack = 999
item.delay = 50
add(item)

#TileComponent
tile = Tile()
#Number of tile variants
tile.variants = 3
#Tile priority used for tile overlapping
tile.priority = 10
#Amount of life the tile has.
tile.durability = 10
#Defines the groups the tile belongs to.
#This is used for tool compatability among other things.
tile.groups = ['soil']
#The layer this tile is placed on - either 'ground' or 'wall'.
tile.layer = "ground"
add(tile)

#This sets up the frames for the tile to make it easy to draw
render.data = standardTile(tile.variants, tile.priority)

As mentioned above, there is a placement component which makes very easy to make items placeable. A item PlacementComponent is composed off a list of possible axes that the item can be placed on.

placement = Placement()
floorAxis = PlacementAxis(AxisType.AXIS_FLOOR, Vector(5, 37))
floorAxis.addSupport(PlacementSupport(SupportType.SUPPORT_TOP, Vector(5, 37)))
placement.addAxis(floorAxis)
add(placement)

The item can be placed on any axis but only one at a time. The types are floor, ceiling, left, right, backwall and wall. The ‘backwall’ is support from the wall layer and ‘wall’ is the combination of left and right. In addition to the axis type, each axis has a range, an area, and a list of supports.

The range of an axis defines where and how much support is needed to place the item down. This is the second parameter for PlacementAxis. Here we have Vector(5, 37), which means to start at pixel 5 on the bottom of the image (since it is floor axis) and go for 37 pixels. This will default to starting at 0 and using the entire axis length (width or height of image). The reason for this feature is to enable items to have a skinny base and only require support for the base and not the entire width of the item, such as a candelabra.

Area for an axis is the game’s physical representation of the item relative to upper left corner of the image. This area is used to reserve space for items in the world. This area defaults to the size of the image.

The last part of an axis is the list of support it can provide. It is defined very similarly to an axis with a support type and a range of where and how much support to provide. The type can be on any one of the four sides; top, bottom, left or right.

Moving onto InteractableComponent, which is much simpler. An InteractableComponent contains a list of interactions and a callable object. Here is an example of the door InteractableComponent.

def interactDoor(args):
    #Toggle between being open and closed
    #We can check which animation is currently being played to know the state
    door = args["entity"]
    if door.animation.isPlaying("closed"):
        door.animation.play("open")
        door.physics.setActive(False)
    else:
        door.animation.play("closed")
        door.physics.setActive(True)

interactable = Interactable()
interactable.add("interact", interactDoor)
add(interactable)

The second to last line adds an interaction, the “interact” which is called when right clicking on an item. As mentioned in the overview there are several interactions built into the engine. Because the interaction is simply a string, it is entirely possible to create new interactions.

Links:

Feature Post - Stay up-to-date with this feature here!
Discussion Thread - Want to discuss this feature? Join us on the forums.

Feature – Equipment

Overview

All equipment in Crea is randomly generated to some degree. Each piece of equipment is made up of attributes. These attributes can be either positive or negative effects such as stat increase/decrease, increased health regeneration, or vampiric hit. The human race has a large assortment of equipment slots: Head, Body, Hands, Legs, Feet, Ring, and Neck. All but the last two will change your character’s appearance.

The majority of equipment found in Crea will have some constant attributes as well as some random ones. Such as all Copper Greaves will always have a DEF +5 attribute and will randomly be assigned 0-2 of the following attributes: ATK +(1 to 2), MDEF +(2 to 4), and AGI +1. (This is just an example).

Modding

All aspects of equipment are completely moddable. Not only can you create new pieces of equipment, it is very possible to create entirely new attributes and even add new equipment slots.

Creating a new piece of equipment is reasonably simple. In addition to creating a normal item entity (Render, Item, Craft components), add an equipment component to an item. An Equipment component has a list of image substitutions and a function (onCreate) called when a new piece of that equipment is created. Inside of the onCreate function is where attributes are added to the equipment component.

equipment = Equipment('chest')
#These are image substitutions similar to what is discussed in Character Customization
equipment.addSub('customizations/shirt_front.png', 'mods/base/item/armor/chest/silver_breastplate/torso.png', Vectorf(2, 0))
equipment.addSub('customizations/sleeve_lower_0.png', 'mods/base/item/armor/chest/silver_breastplate/arm_lower_0.png')
equipment.addSub('customizations/sleeve_upper_0.png', 'mods/base/item/armor/chest/silver_breastplate/arm_upper_0.png')
#... and more substitutions

def createSilverChestplate(component):
    component.addAttribute(ChangeStatAttribute('HP', 5))
    component.addAttribute(ChangeStatAttribute('Attack', 3))

equipment.onCreate = createSilverChestplate
add(equipment)

Creating a new type of attribute involves a new python class that implements an interface. Here is an example with a brief description is provided with each method.

class ChangeStatAttribute(object):
    name = "ChangeStat"
    def __init__(self, stat='', value=0):
        self.stat = stat
        self.value = value
        self.changed = 0

    def alignment(self):
        #Called to determine if this is a positive or negative attribute
        return self.value >= 0

    def quality(self):
        #Reports the quality of this attribute. The quality of an equipment piece is the sum of its attributes.
        return self.value * statWeights[self.stat]

    def onEquip(self, args):
        #Called when this attribute is being equipped
        player = args['player']
        stat = player.stats.get(self.stat)
        if stat.hasMax():
            self.changed = stat.adjustMax(self.value)
        else:
            self.changed = stat.adjust(self.value)

    def onUnequip(self, args):
        #Called when this attribute is being unequipped
        player = args['player']
        stat = player.stats.get(self.stat)
        if stat.hasMax():
            stat.adjustMax(-self.changed)
        else:
            stat.adjust(-self.changed)
        self.changed = 0

    def save(self, stream):
        stream.saveString(self.stat)
        stream.saveInt32(self.value)
        stream.saveInt32(self.changed)

    def load(self, stream):
        self.stat = stream.loadString()
        self.value = stream.loadInt32()
        self.changed = stream.loadInt32()

When creating a new piece of equipment you must specify which equipment slot the new item is compatible with. In order to create a new equipment slot it only requires adding the slot to the character body script (see Character Customization). After this is done any new equipment can use the new equipment slot.

#Define which gear slots this body supports
#These show up in the character equipment UI in game
body.gear = Gear()
body.gear.slots.append(GearSlot("head", "mods/base/body/hm/gear/head.png"))
body.gear.slots.append(GearSlot("chest", "mods/base/body/hm/gear/chest.png"))
body.gear.slots.append(GearSlot("hand", "mods/base/body/hm/gear/hand.png"))
body.gear.slots.append(GearSlot("leg", "mods/base/body/hm/gear/leg.png"))
body.gear.slots.append(GearSlot("feet", "mods/base/body/hm/gear/feet.png"))

Feature – Crafting

Overview

In Crea the majority of items are obtained through crafting them. Crafting is a simple process but in order to craft an item you first must obtain that item’s recipe. There are several means to acquiring recipes: monster loot; treasure chests; quests; and, most importantly, the Researcher NPC.

The Researcher is specifically for discovering new recipes. First you provide the researcher with materials. Upon returning to him after some time, you gain any recipes his research turned up. Upon request the research can provide hints as to what items he may need to discover more recipes.

After obtaining an item recipe, you must obtain the materials needed to craft the item. Additionally, many items will require you to be near “crafting surfaces” such as an anvil or furnace. To make crafter lives easier, materials in nearby containers will be accessible during crafting. This means you can stash all of your ingots in a treasure chest next to your anvil. Then you do not have to move them from the chest to your inventory before crafting.

Modding

Creating new items to craft is quite simple. All it requires is to add a craft component to the item. Through this you can specify the item’s category, subcategory, surface requirement (if any), list of materials and quantity required, and the quantity produced.

#Example for Copper Ingot
craft = Craft('Recipes', 'Smelting', 'anvil')
craft.add('mods/base/tile/copper_ore.ce', 3)
craft.quantity = 1

The surface requirement can be left empty to designate that the item can be crafted anywhere. If it is specified, the surface requirement does not refer to a crafting surface item but to a crafting surface service. There is a “Surface” component which enables entities to provide any number of crafting services.

Most items requiring an anvil can be crafted with any anvil; however, some special items may need an upgraded anvil. This upgraded anvil would provide the services needed for both the special items and any other items requiring an anvil. Any item can provide any surface service, so it is entirely possible to create uber surface items. It is of course possible to create entirely new crafting surface services that new items can require.

#Iron Anvil
surface = Surface(["anvil"])
#Uber Anvil
surface = Surface(["anvil", “uber anvil”])