Author Archives: Nicholas

Particles; The Homicidal Aurochs

Daniel and I are crunching a little bit this week in order to meet an internal deadline. (“El Dorado”, named after the mystical city that doesn’t really exist and has never been found; we only chose that codename because “Titanic” was apparently used for a Microsoft product.) We try to avoid it as a general rule – after Dredmor, which was released after we  crunched for about three months, non-stop, the old batteries need time to recharge – and were more or less successful doing this for the Dredmor expansion packs; however, we’re a little bit behind where we want to be and we need to do a little sprinting until the end of June in order to get everything back on track.

Daniel is hard at work on aurochs this week – killing them, and butchering them for their meat. This led to twenty-five homicidal aurochs immediately rampaging your settlement and killing everybody before you have a chance to collect your firearm.  He has subdued them… for now.

It also turns out that the singular form of “aurochs” is, actually, “aurochs”. Who knew? David, apparently.

You may recall me mentioning back in May, or so, that I’d started work on a particle system and editor for Clockwork Empires. At the end of last week, I had some of the particle system done but very little editor functionality, having promised that I’d “get to it, yes” – and then ending up doing things like, say, combat or more work on dynamics lines or any of the things that I would rather spend my time doing other than a particle system.

Finally, David started holding things hostage. FINE. Particle system. Right. Good. Editor? Writing? Blech.

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Moods, Sleeping, and Fortifications

Happy June! It’s a bit early this month, but let’s have a technical status update. After all, E3 only comes once a year. Thank goodness for that. Let us, therefore, scour our eyeballs with the contents of the programmer-taken screenshot-mobile* and look at some new features that have made their way into CE that are, in fact, not related to E3 at all.

* Sanity adjustments performed by art team; Programmers have funny ideas about composition. And everything, really, though I admit if you need a fine pair of shoes or a man’s hat, Nicholas can hook you up. -d

standing_in_the_water

“Ah, the water — so sublime! So bracing! It’ll make beautiful feedstock for our steam-piped power network.”

This happy naturalist, for instance, is not going to E3.

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May Technical Status Update: Building Interiors, Workshops, Outlines, Hidden Work

Things are slowly coming together. Some new developments have occurred in programmer town, and we are delighted to finally show you what we spent the past month-and-a-half doing.

Bluntly, things are coming together at last. People can harvest resources, process them in workshops, and convert them to other resources. People have their own actions as well; if people can’t eat, for instance, they’ll die. Poets still wander the hills, trying to be inspired by things. The noble aurochs plough through the land, and so forth. Want to see a sneak peek? Read on for some new features…

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A Day in the Life of a Programmer

The programming team codenamed our current milestone El Dorado after the mythical city that doesn’t really exist. Most of the stuff that we have been doing towards El Dorado… well, it isn’t ready yet. Also, a lot of it is systems which are transparent to the user (networking, refactoring, serialization, etc.) It’s all important, but it’s not glamorous. We should, however, have a few interesting things to show next week. We (well, mainly Micah) wrote up some of the work that we did on our threading and messaging system, and submitted it to an academic conference; I am pleased to report that HotPAR ’13 (the Usenix Hot Topics in Parallelism conference) decided to accept our paper, which will be presented at some point in June. I should figure out when that is…

So instead of the big Technical Status Update, which we’ll probably do next week, let’s look at a very small slice of life that makes a big difference. A lot of people ask me what it’s like doing game development, as a day-to-day process as opposed to the big picture; this is a good example of what it’s actually like on a given day, what graphics programmer thought processes are like, and so on and so forth. Also, I’ve included the picture of a tortoise next to a pile of ammunition that David refused to last week.

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April Technical Status Update

It’s April! There is a Technical Status Update. You know the drill.

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PC Gamer Interview

The good folks of PC Gamer have posted a very long interview with us, filmed while we were at GDC a few weeks ago.

You will note at the end that we give a new, intended approximate release date. We’ve decided to push our intended release date for CE back a bit, from “late this year” to “early next year”, around February/March 2014. Simply put, this is a large game and we need more time to do a good job of it and make it fun. (Also, we don’t want to compete with a bunch of console launch dates.) We hope you guys understand, and we promise the game will be better as a result.

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CPU and GPU Run-time Profiling in Simulation Land

[Warning: This is a very technical post.]

It’s not easy writing a complicated simulation. There are lots of complex, interconnected moving parts to worry about and when something goes wrong, it can be hard to figure out where that small, broken thing is in the midst of a larger picture. We recently discovered that the game was running… unreasonably slowly, shall we say? My desktop was getting 15 FPS, and it wasn’t clear what the problem was. On Chris Whitman’s machine, which uses a slightly different graphics card than my computer, our FPS was in single digits. I don’t like optimizing too early – as Donald Knuth pointed out famously, “premature optimization is the root of all evil” – but something was going on. Finally, sick and tired of the problems, I decided to get some answers.

There were three solutions for profiling that we looked at: Intel’s VTune, what we might call a ‘classical’ profiler which you can download a 30-day trial of from their website, and Telemetry, a different sort of profiler made by RAD Game Tools (specifically by Brian Hook, who you might know from such games as Quake 3.) RAD Game Tools also provided us with a 30-day trial of Telemetry, and this gave me an interesting opportunity to compare two profilers. Finally, we tried our luck with NVidia’s GPU Perfstudio to see if we could figure out what was happening on the graphics card.

Three profilers. One slow down. Who cracked the mystery? Find out below.

These actually have nothing to do with what Nicholas is doing but It Was Decided that the post needed some more visual accompaniment. Think of it as a tenuous thematic connection.

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Yet Another Technology Status Update

Last time I wrote a programming team update about Clockwork Empires, I made a comment that was somewhere along the lines of “the game is starting to hit that point where it transitions from a bunch of technology bits to something that looks like a game.” Well, we’re a lot closer to that goal than we were last update. Some of the edited highlights:

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