I’m not dead

 

I’m not dead. I’m not sleeping. Well… I was sleeping, but I definitely wasn’t dead, so put down your shotgun, I ain’t no zombie.

 

Finally Made it Back…

Hi everyone! I’m here again… again. As you may have remembered I’ve been away completing the taught courses of my doctorate for the past few months. My studies are now finished and I’m on to the actual project. That means free time. Lots and lots of free time.

I’m going to keep this post short and to the point, so excuse the briefness 😛

I’m excited to be back ^^ Been looking forward to this moment for so long!!!

But after thinking about CCSO a lot I have decided to make some changes for the future:

1. Future development will focus purely on the core game until it is complete. Anything extra can come later.
2. A working demo with full component features is priority.
3. These blog posts aren’t going to be every two weeks anymore. Instead I will post them when I have news to post, and each post will be focused on a single topic.
4. These posts will also be a lot shorter.

These will help streamline development and this blog 🙂

 

There is further good news too!

My doctoral project is pure programming. That means I’m developing my programming skills all the time now. CCSO will benefit greatly from this. Faster programming and a higher quality codebase.

I’m really, really looking forward to seeing where the future takes me. CCSO is a large scale project and since starting it I have realised that I’m really dealing with a massive challenge here… But I’m optimistic that I can make it to the end and share CCS with the world!

 

I’m not sure when the first true update will appear on this blog. It is going to take a while to get back in and sort everything out. I am also attending a short summer school later this month with the other people on my doctoral course including the years above. The week and a half looks pretty packed with conference-like options during the day and huge social events at night. This is at the end of next week and will last until early next month.

It’s based in the battered stormy and foggy isolated coastal town of St Andrews (woah, enough adjectives for you?). I was there for three months back in Autumn and it is really a unique home. It’s a tiny place full of ancient (some older than half a millennium) structures. It had some huge storms when I was up there and there is thick fog that can appear or disappear in minutes. (have I convinced you to visit yet?) I’m nervous and excited at the prospect of living in the place again 😮

The remains of St Andrews cathedral. It really does look this good irl.

 

Anyway, I’ll work my hardest and hope to get a real update to you soon!

🙂

Beta 7 – Closing Down

This is just a quick update to say that all abilities or effects you guys challenged me to do have been added in. These were Charger, HE Shells, Berserk, Move, MiniWalker, Pitfall, and Wormhole 😀

It’s all good. This token system is working so far and those should be some of the hardest abilities out the way.

Well.

This is awkward. Out of things to say already.

There’s actually a much bigger post coming very soon to really bring an end to the project now my classes are beginning (they start in 11 hours). But if I’m honest I think I will still add more abilities even during my studies. The reason being that this new system is really easy to work with, meaning I can add new abilities fairly quickly, and it is very low-stress even when debugging as the code is really clean.

Yeah, stress is a factor. Even back in my days down in sunny Surrey there were times when I had some spare time, albeit limited, but I didn’t want to be spending it doing what can be a very stressful hobby. This time however it doesn’t seem like it will be so bad.

The only real weakness in this tokens system that has caused me a bit of a headache is when you have a very unique ability. This system is a huge step up from the previous one as it can perform many general actions and I simply feed it a token from an ability and it processes it perfectly. But it can’t do some of the more specialist actions. An example of this is Molotov. Molotov creates a token with the damage, burn, and duration as part of it, but the damage part only needs to be processed on the first round of the token, and the token system has no way to do this – it processes all tokens fully every round. So what I did was after the first round I took the token apart, modified the damage to 0, and then rebuilt the token and put it back into the system. It works, but eh, special cases are tricky.

The other special case I have come across so far is the Pitfall ability that grants immunity to damage, but it doesn’t give this immunity immediately, instead it appears next round. So yeah, this one I fixed by using this switch; at the end of the round if the Pitfall token is there the switch flips to on and grants immunity, but if the token has expired (i.e. the ability is no longer active) then the switch flips to off and the immunity vanishes.

I know this system is going to get increasingly complicated as more abilities are added, but I’m hoping it is good enough to suit all the different abilities that exist now and that could ever exist in the future.

The previous system was a load of crap basically and had no general structure so treated every ability as a completely unique case. Each ability took a long time to code in and then it had to be tested against every other ability to make sure it didn’t break. That’s why the progress slowed down exponentially as more abilities were added. This lack of general structure is also why the database needed several thousand columns so that each ability could be individually processed in all cases. Although I was proud of the architecture at the time, these days I am deeply embarrassed that I created something so bad.

But I guess that’s how you learn. Remember that I am new, or at least I was new, to this and it was only by making these serious mistakes that I was able to learn the correct way.

I’m just hoping this isn’t another one of those mistakes that I have yet to realise >.>

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That’s it now. The last update post until summer. Expect a funky post sometime next week about my experiences and thoughts with CCSO, but as far as beta goes, it’s goodbye. Hibernating in this frozen place (literally <.< Scotland is cold) until that one day of sunshine Scotland gets every year. Although I do hope to work on it a bit during the next two semesters 😛

Goodbye! ^.^ And thanks for all the testing, destruction, and comments everyone 😀

EDIT: Also, we’re going to pass 1500 blog views with this post! What a way to end the summer 🙂

Beta 6 – Challenge me!

Amazing Advancements!

Welcome to the final true CCSO update for this period of work. I mentioned last week that I wanted to work on the game a bit more, a task that originally defeated me cruelly back last autumn. If you remember I had a lot of trouble adding abilities in particular, with each one contributing a hell of a lot of complexity to the code and being full of bugs. It was a complete disaster!

My fix for it involved redesigning the entire code around a database table with some 2765 columns and a modular design. It was completely unmanageable, although I do have to admit that if I had infinite time to program, bugfix, and fine-tune all these columns then the game may well have worked. I was along the right lines, but just applying my knowledge in the wrong way.

Since then I have had plenty of time to reflect upon my nightmare experience and figure out exactly how to go about combating this problem. I had to figure out a way to get the database size down to a reasonable number.

Guess what? I did just that! 😀 Ditching the modular and expanded design in favour of a new system, called Tokens, I have managed to shrink the table down to a mere 38 columns! Although this sounds like a lot, it really isn’t when you’re dealing with a game like CCS, and it is about 1% of its former size anyway!

Tokens are a surprisingly obvious and simple mechanic I’ve implemented. It involves creating a standardised system to convert every ability into a “Token” where a Token is simply a string of text and numbers detailing the ability and its upgrade level. These tokens are then stored side-by-side in a single database column.

The backend code reads these tokens and processes them to figure out what they do. It then collects all this information together and applies it to the target of the abilities. Every token has an expiry time on it, dependant on the duration of the ability when it is used. At the very end of the round all expired tokens are removed from the game – aka the effects are no longer active.

It’s a much simpler method than how I am explaining it (:

Now, I have been extremely pushed for time this week. Those of you who stalk me know I’ve recently moved to Scotland – St Andrews to be precise – to study at one of the most prestigious universities in the UK for one semester. This place is right up there with Cambridge and Oxford and absolutely reeks of prestige.

Anyway, due to this I have been lacking on time for the programming, but I have the entire base system completed and I have started adding abilities. I’ve chosen a large mix of abilities, including several of the more complex ones, to test out how well the Token system is working. Thus far it all seems good!

There’s a playable demo featuring Molotov, Stun Bolt, Missile, Toxin, and Glue Bomb available to try out. The link is on the homepage of the old alpha site. Instructions on how to use the demo can be found on the page itself.

You may also notice a few cool new features not previously seen in CCSO such as loading bars and tabs for the round data. My abilities are more diverse than ever and it’s beginning to show in my work.

Now

I present to you an offer. I am confident that my Token system can handle any ability or effect that can be thrown at it. I challenge you to pick out the most complex and horrible abilities or chassis/weapon effects in CCS and ask me to program them ^^

I have already taken on many of the hard ones :p

Now, you perhaps believe that I have no spare time now and will not be able to work on this anymore. Not true! I have some spare time this coming week and so will continue with CCSO over the coming days. There will be a final update next weekend at this time, and there may be a mid-week update too.

However after that it is likely that CCSO will hibernate for one final time until summer again…

But wait…

You may be wondering why weapon damage, weapon/chassis upgrades, custom units, and so on aren’t included in this play testing area. It’s simply because they already work elsewhere and I wanted a clean environment for testing abilities in. This ability system is 100% compatible with everything already seen in the alpha release last Christmas, so once all abilities are added I can just link up the two systems to create a full game.

Good luck everyone and have fun! I look forward to hearing ideas and feedback from you! ^_^

Beta 5 – ForumFixed

Part 2 at the end!

Shoop has really outdone herself once more. I honestly can’t express how fortunate we are to have someone as hard working as her 🙂

 

Forum Fixed

All the bugs you guys have found have now been fixed. There are a small number of minor bugs still on my private list that will be cured very soon, but ignoring these the forum is extremely stable now 😀

Pages and editing have also been added and displayed times are now shown as a count up rather than a static time. Thread titles are now shown for threads and I have redesigned the colour scheme too ^^ The forum is worth visiting again if you haven’t recently!

I know for many of you this isn’t the most interesting topic in the world: you are waiting for the actual game to be released (see the end of this post). But you must realise that this forum is a crucial part of the final product. Without it members the future community would lack a way of connecting to each other. In addition, the skills I have learnt during this development are required for more advance communication features later on.

Yes, this forum has been really pushing my SQL skills. SQL is the language that bridges the website you see and the server in the background. It sends information back and forth between the server and the PHP that formats it to your screen every time you press a button. It also stores all the forum data in the background. Anything you see on the forum pages that is persistent when you refresh the page is stored with SQL.

As you can imagine this forum uses a lot of SQL and some fairly advance statements as it has to link all three sections of the forum (boards, threads, and posts). Making a change on the post level can cause changes on the thread and even board level on the website. It’s been an interesting puzzle trying to figure out how to link it all together. I would even recommend that anyone who loves puzzles and has a fair amount of PHP, SQL, and HTML knowledge gives forum building a try 🙂

 

Final Update Next Week

When the next update comes I will be in Scotland starting my doctorate. The workload looks nasty, but I guess when you are going for the highest level of academic qualification it has to be. This means CCSO work will unfortunately pause once more and it won’t be until next summer that work starts back up properly. But from next summer onwards I will have left full-time education so shouldn’t have any more delays like this ever again.

So…

I’m going to be working on the gameplay itself for the next two weeks! I have been itching to get back to it since the start but kept putting it off as I wanted to try other projects first and I found it extremely frustrating before But I have a lot more skills than before, and I have had plenty of time to think about how I can tackle the problems I faced before!

The forum will be changed a little bit more to fix the rest of the bugs, but the rest of the time shall be spent on the game itself. Look forward to it! 😀

COMIC – PART 2

The glue represents how I have limited you on the forum so you can’t break any more things 😛 Have fun ^^

See you soon!

Beta 4.2 – Forum Version 3

You guys figured out a way around the defences surprisingly fast o.O Although I did notice that many of the things you did before you werent able to repeat.

Yet the damage was bad…

But I have improved the systems even more. This time working on how some HTML tags were slipping through the system and being interpreted.

NULLIFIED

Ball’s in your court, testers ^^ I believe this will be safe now 😉

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UPDATE (11 GMT)

Turns out I set my defences up too strict and kind of broke the entire forum…

So I’ve knocked them down a bit. However this brings back a few minor problems…

The hunt is on 😛

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UPDATE (17 GMT)

All problems resolved. Also added spoiler tags to the forum. Have fun!

Beta 4.1 – Forum Fixes and Updates

Over the past 24 hours… the forum has shown some cool tricks… …some funky colours…

…and the power of invisibility…

…so I decided it was time to upload a fix.

 

FIXES

• Line breaks now work.
• There’s a new formatting box full of cool features.
• HTML tags are no longer executed within the system >:T
• Padding has been added to all posts.
• Empty thread titles are replaced with “(No Title)” to allow their threads to be viewed.

Phew. Disaster averted! Or so I hope. We’ll see what new ways you guys come up with to destabilise the forum now 😛

I shall leave up the old threads for a while so you can all entertain yourselves with them. They’ll be removed soon though.

More features on their way!

Beta 4 – I spy a Forum!

Creating a forum is harder than I first anticipated…

 

Forum

Long, long ago, before this blog went public in week 24 of development, CCSO had a fascinating forum. Those of you who have been around since the beginning may well remember my adventures… my discovery, my journey, and my fights with phpBB.

Essentially a forum in a box, phpBB is a godsend to any novice web developer. You set it up and you’re all ready to go. Hundreds of cool features, amazing styles, and everything else you could ever really want.

Anyone remember that image? 26th July 2014. From one of the private weekly updates before CCSO went public.

Anyway, long story short… I lost two months on phpBB. It was amazing. I could have worshipped it. But, it was inflexible. You got what you got, and nothing more. I wanted something that I had more control over. I spent so long reading through the documentation, testing so many things, and yes I could edit it to an extent, but it just wasn’t enough in the end.

I waved goodbye to phpBB 😦

I knew creating a forum was way above my skill level at that time so I left it and moved on to greener pastures…

But now the forum situation changes!

Gah! Not quite as handsome as phpBB, but it is a starting point!

I thought this would be a fairly straightforward task, yet I grossly underestimated the confusingality* of it all. Forums are pretty complex systems, if I’m honest. There are so many variables you have to keep track of and juggle as you traverse or make changes to the forum.
*Now a word.

It was a difficult task (as you can probably tell by the intro comic). Despite this, I succeeded! I am proud of the achievement. The forum is solid and provides a good base to build upon.

I know you are eagerly scanning ahead in this text searching for how to access it. Stop right here! Here you go: Visit the index page of the alpha site. The link is there. You’ll be prompted to log in if you aren’t already as this is required to use the forum.

I greatly look forward to seeing the twisted and warped mess you make of it ^^ Just judging from past experience when I let loose testers on a new feature. Once one of you finds a bug it spreads like wildfire!

Updates to this forum are likely going to be frequent throughout the coming fortnight. I found it quite an enjoyable object to work with – at least once the functionality started to all click together – so I’m motivated to continue to work on it and add even more features.

 

Art

And where would we be without an art section? This time only one piece but there is something bigger we’re working on at the moment! I’m sure you’ll see the secret soon.

For now though… have a Drill!

Great work, Shoopiewoopie! (she hates me calling her that hehe)

 

That’s all for this week!

The beta site is coming together nicely. I know a lot of these projects aren’t 100% complete, but they are getting there. My skills are improving all the time, allowing me to attempt larger and more complex tasks and functionality. You all have a lot to look forward to! See you soon!

Beta 3 – New Unit Creator Design

Thanks Shoop >.<

 

Unit Creator

For those of you who have been around since the alpha, you may remember this image that I posted a while back.

What a sexy thing. Anyway, I had a go at creating it.

Ok, it’s not quite the same, but that is pretty close. Also, while I was at it I streamlined this unit creator so that the overall page now loads a lot faster. In fact, the only part that initially loads is the list. All the art and unit data is loaded in by a server request when you click a component*. The load is a tiny bit slow, but nothing too much and it is only slow the first time you click each component.

* Yes, I have been sharpening my skills a bit so I can do some cool things. Also, I fixed the bug with Boost and Boost+ not being next to each other (you can see this bug in the alpha version of the unit creator).

P.S. you can try this yourself by navigating to /secret/unitSelector.php

This new unit creator is not yet linked up to the rest of the game, so trying to buy or customise a component will throw a 404. The buttons along the top also don’t work yet.

Oh and thanks Shoop for the cool colour scheme. Thanks to her notes and my amazing programming skills and top-notch decision making and leadership, we have made it look pretty awesome. If you don’t like the colours then go moan at Shoop. 😉

Next stop will be linking this up and offering a search feature so users can find the component that suit their needs.

 

Art

Dueler, Boomer, and Bomb+

 

WAIT, WHAT? Bomb+?!

Isn’t that … Laura’s?

Yes, that’s right! 😀 Now Laura has finished all her exams I’ve jumped on her back and dragged her back to the drawing boards of CCSO.

It is great having you back!!!

Also thanks ElD for the other two pieces 😛 Sorry you’ve been a bit overshadowed this time, but you understand? ^^ I’ll get Shoop to bake you a cake or something. But really, Boomer looks really sinister and strong, just like a bomber unit should. Dueler appears fast and nimble, suiting its fighting style. They are both great pieces! 😀

 

Map Editor

As I understand it, the map editor doesn’t work as expected on all browsers.

(image courtesy of Melarec)

It works best on Chrome. However, a friend pointed out that my method for creating the map editor was outdated and I should be using the new HTML5 Canvas.

I had a look into this and it offers a blank canvas where you essentially code the art on it. It looks extremely flexible. For example. the well-known game of Entanglement (http://entanglement.gopherwoodstudios.com/) is created on a canvas. This really demonstrates the power of the tool and I have spent a lot of time this week reading into it.

Unfortunately I have nothing new to show you yet. But soon perhaps I will have the Map Editor moved into a canvas so it is more compatible with everything and offers more features. Canvases may well come in handy for other parts of the site too, such as the core game itself. But that is a maybe. We’ll see how it goes. 🙂

 

Graduation

BOW BEFORE ME. I AM NOW A MASTER!

…of Physics.

…which I guess is even cooler than being a regular old Master?

Yeah, I passed all my modules. I understand the universe now. Seriously. After four years of physics I can now never watch a single action film again because all I see are the mistakes in its physics.

Sigh.

But even so, I do not regret this degree path in the slightest. It has been an amazing and highly rewarding journey and I have developed so many skills along the way. And well, I guess it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows the entire way. We’ve lost a lot of good people along the way. In first year we started with over 70 people. I went through the graduation list and only counted half that number. I remember in first year how we used to fill huge rooms. It hit me hard when I was in the graduation ceremony and saw that my class took up only four rows.

We lost about a third of the class by the end of first year alone. People switching to different courses or vanishing completely. Second year hit us hard too. I guess I witnessed first hand how friendship groups can fall apart completely if a few key people are removed. By the final year the rooms looked so bare. In some there would be more fingers on your hands than students in the classroom. But I guess this brought us all closer together. By the end of it we weren’t a class of friend groups. We were a class of friends. We would all look out for one another and work together just so we could pass.

Less than half of us made it, but only 19 of us achieved the rank of Master, which is the highest qualification. 19 people out of 70+. How I made it just seems impossible. I was never that smart. I just. I don’t know. I just knew how to knuckle down and work through anything.

To anyone out there thinking about studying physics. DO. There is a shortage of physicists in the world. With such a degree you will never be unemployed, you will never be poor, and you will get to see the world. But all of that is insignificant to the major problems that humanity will face in our lifetimes. Global warming, terrorism, overpopulation. It’s not that we lack the potential to fix all these problems. It’s that we just don’t have enough people. There is a skills void.

Still. Do not worry. The future of your world is in good hands for now. We are highly trained and we will work for the best of all of us.

But. If you want to study physics for the sake of prestige or money (physics opens doors to banking), then don’t study it. You will fail. Only follow physics if you have a true passion for it, if you are by your very nature a problem solver, if you are a mathematician. Anything else and you are lining yourself up for disappointment. Physics is not easy and I cannot stress this enough. You have to be strong. I remember in first year there being a girl who was in tears because she couldn’t handle the workload. She didn’t make it beyond the year. But then there was another girl, in second year she came out of an exam in tears. It was a challenging paper – they all are. But she recovered from it and went on to be one of the 19 graduating Masters. We all have our own stories to tell, but stories can only have happy endings if the protagonist is able to overcome every obstacle.

 

It is the combination of the canvas learning and this graduation that has left me short on time since the last update. I’m still happy with what I’ve achieved but I know it’s not a whole lot. I hope from here on things develop a lot quicker.

Beta is coming.

Beta 2 – Map Editor (Demo)

Oh my god I have just figured out how to make graphics come out full sized in the text…

 

Map Editor

I had some strange urges this week regarding Shoop. I felt really motivated to create that map editor we’ve been talking about for a while and use those tiles of hers.

Then I thought for a while and was like Pfft… nah! That would require an insane amount of JavaScript! I’m going to look at cat pics instead.

But for some reason though I found myself in my code editor writing this script. I forgot how fun JavaScript actually is. I’ve remembered a lot and for some reason my skill seems ten levels higher than it did in the alpha. I wrote some pretty complex code without too much hassle. And the next thing you know…

And while this editor is only a simple demo at the moment, I have decided to open it up to all of you. You can find it by looking around the Alpha site 😉

It’s pretty cool to be fair, and that is a really bad thing because it means I’ve spent so much time playing with it – as you could probably tell by the face pictures – so here’s a little note to self: Do fun things last!
I’m learning one step at a time.

Anyway. Enjoy the editor! Do screenshot and post your best pieces 😛 I am aware of a few problems with the tiles such as tiles with water on being largely incompatible with each other, and there being some colouring/texture problems. Oh and larger structures like dunes and bushes being made piece by piece And the lack of T-junctions and crossroads.

If you think anything else is missing, let us know! I’ll get Shoop working on it straight away.

(P.S. the map editor is bootstrapped so resize the page, refresh it, and the map and tile selection will resize to fit the new size. Note that refreshing will reset the map.)

 

Art

  

Trident and Capsule at the top and two familiar looking chassis at the bottom; a new Juggernaut with an improved flame on the left, and on the right is CMFR with a golden disc on the top. Little things that make quite an impact.

Cheers ElD and Shoop for such great pieces! ^^

 

What next?

Lots of small fixes and additions to the map editor and lots of code translating from the alpha site into bootstrap.

See you soon!

Beta 1 – Responsive Design

I think I’m finally getting to grips with Bootstrap. Lost no more than one computer in the process.

Beta updates now as I develop the new site – The Beta site. I’m also hoping to use a new system for the playable game to allow easier development, so hopefully there’ll be some progress there again soon.

I looked through the public alpha site the other day and I remembered it as much worse than it actually is. I have always hated that site, but when I was browsing through it I saw and remembered just how much hard work I had truly put into it… Good memories 😮 It is a fairly good site. But still, Bootstrap has outdone it entirely. I’m still playing around and learning Bootstrap but it is so easy to make decent looking pages with it (pics later).

These last two weeks I have been translating some of the old code into Bootstrap while also tidying it up and separating logic from mark up to keep it manageable. The old code in places is truly horrific. That is what happens when you code as you learn…. At least now it is all changing 😀

I’ve remembered more than I expected from before. In fact I’ve barely looked up anything since coming back. It feels so good ^^ Coding that is. Once you get good at it you end up surprising yourself with how fast you can make new stuff.

Anyway, straight to the designs.

Responsive Layout

This was more me playing around with a potential design than anything too serious. I wanted to learn bootstrap so this is what I made.

The top image shows the site on a large device (laptop or desktop screen) and the bottom image is on a phone.

Note how the top bar contracts, and how sections can vary in size, position and visibility. All to the power of bootstrap.

Yeah.

I’ll bring you some interesting pics next update 😛 But this shows that the site will be smooth on phones as well as large desktops. Bootstrap is much better than I expected. Ok yes, it is really limited in areas, but it does look pretty good and is serving as a stepping stone while I continue to develop my skills and expand. This time last year I knew very little, but now I know so much. I wonder what I’ll achieve this summer 🙂

 

Translating Code

So far I have only translated a small amount of the old code into the new site, but next week I will have a lot more to show you.

 

Bootstrap 4

I’m using Bootstrap 3, but I was reading their blog and it seems like Bootstrap 4 is just around the corner. They mentioned it in a post that it will come out in December …of 2014. So they’ve missed that by a long way. But on browsing other blogs and reading what other web developers have been saying, everyone expects it to come out either this year or next. It offers more flexibility and is designed to be easier to use. If it comes out it shouldn’t be that hard to update the site version 4.

 

When is the Beta site going to be public?

No target. It will be done when its done. One thing I found in the alpha development is predicting times is really hard. Sometimes you’re a month ahead of schedule, other times you are two months behind. I’m really not experienced enough yet to tell you when it could be out. I am still diving deep into the unknown here and I want the beta site to be highly developed before release.

Of course I will probably give you dates closer to the release, but until then all I’m saying is it will be ready when it is ready. It may be this year, it may be next.

 

Next Update

Lots of translated code so I could show you some of the old alpha pages in bootstrap and possible updates to part of the site as I prepare it for beta.

 

See you all soon!

 

P.S. Artists, where are you? 😦