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Notes from the Slippery Slope, Part 5
Posted by Chris
on Sun Aug 31, 2008 12:42 am |
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So once again, Launch is nearly upon us. Our fourth game is essentially complete, thanks to Herculean efforts by everyone on the team at Introversion. We’ve cancelled holidays and visits from family, we’ve said goodbye to our friends and loved ones, we’ve handcuffed ourselves to our computers and we’ve worked like crazy men. Lunatic crazy desperate men.
Not really. Crunch time has happened on every project I have ever worked on, and my girlfriend tells me this project is no better and no worse than the previous two she’s had to endure. I won’t really know how bad it was until I can look back with hindsight, but it feels to me like I’ve never worked so hard. In fact, this last 12 month period has felt something like a never-ending parachute jump. I’ve certainly been working until stupid o’clock most days of the week for a good couple of months now, and weekends long since lost any distinction. I really thought things would be different this time around, that we’d have everything sorted well in advance, and the final month would be a walk in the park as we gleefully played our finished game and confirmed it was ready to go.
Yeah right! I’m looking forward to the day when the final stage of a project goes this way, but it’s not the case for Multiwinia, or Defcon or Darwinia or Uplink. Something always comes up – something that knocks you sideways and forces you to cram far more extra work into the remaining weeks than you think is possible. There’s quite a story to tell about the final months of Multiwinia’s development, but right now isn’t the time or the place. I’ll save it up for a later blog. But in summary, something came up, and here I am, 1.30am Monday morning (Sunday evening really), blogging while Multiwinia compiles in the background for the hundredth time today.
I don’t really mind. My name is Chris Delay, and I am a workaholic. I’m never entirely content unless I’m working extremely hard on something, and it’s always been this way. All four Directors of Introversion went to Imperial College University in London, and it’s a bit of a sweat shop – they like to drill their students into crazy working practices, and it’s definitely rubbed off on all of us. It’s like boot-camp for engineers. Young fresh faced geeks walk in the doors in September, and by the time they leave four years later they’re like razors. They can’t stop working even if they want to.
In the end, Multiwinia has turned out pretty awesome I think. Somehow we pulled it together, and it’s been almost exactly two years since Defcon was launched, and in the end we have a great game. The box looks great, the manual looks great, the special edition tins look really great. First reviews will be appearing in about a month (online), so we’ll see what the critics think then. I’m really looking forward to playing some real people at this game that we’ve spent so long creating, and I’m also (nervously) looking forward to reading our reviews and seeing what people really think of what we’ve come up with.
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The life of a Limited Edition Multiwnia Tin
Posted by Tom
on Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:29 am |
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About 3 months ago, Vic and I were sitting in a coffee shop trying to figure out what to do about our boxed units. As you know, we started off selling boxed units of our products (handmade back then!) , and over time, we phased in digital downloads of our games, and then over more time made boxed units an optional extra. We were getting a lot of requests from customers just to buy a downloadable version.
We're quite a fan of boxed units of DVDs and games, because, well, they make the game whole / complete and keep it warm at night! Especially the nice shiny ones that packed full of goodies. So after a couple of rounds of brainstorming, we settled upon a nice shiny big tin, in which we would put a copy of Darwinia and Multiwnia and a load more cool stuff. But the question was what?
Darwinia dog tags were the starting point, but we soon found that they were 1. expensive and 2. only available in blue and yellow, which didn't sort of fit our idea of one red and one green darwinian. They were also available in gold and silver, but mindful that most of our customers wouldn't be starring in any rap videos any time soon we went on the hunt for a better idea. DarwiniaHammer 40,000 white metal figurines were considered, but were really heavy (i.e. very expensive shipping), and limited appeal. Lego Darwinians were also a nice idea, but we didn't want to get sued - well not until we can afford it!
As some of you know, whenever we go to a conference we throw out some rubber darwinians in the crowd. On occasions this has backfired - http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=41 - see NeoThermic's post about my 15 seconds of fame. However it's one of the most requested things other than games! This presented a challenge, because frankly the quality of these had gone down in recent years. The first batch was ok, but by the 3rd batch of audience ammo, we were ending up with foam Darwinians made out of flip-flip sole material. Clearly we were going to need to raise the bar on production.
The other thing that's also been frequently requested is a book about IV. I still think it's a bit too early to be recounting our memoirs; of when we nearly lost Mark and John off the side of a cliff as part of a 'spirited' drive along route-1, or when Mark and I would call back distributors from Peru after Vic had taken a message, telling them we'd just popped out of the office for tea-break. Co-incidentally we'd recently had a page in a posh coffee-table book which we'd filled with some really great looking screens from Darwinia (award winning artwork you know  ) , so we thought - how about a beautifully made picture-book about the evolution of Multiwinia. Expensive to make, but very cool.
And so it was - Darwinia / Multiwinia / a jazz mag for pixel fetishists / a couple of laser-cut foam Darwinians and one of each of the Multiwinia postcards presented in a shiny Multiwinia stamped tin.
Problem was, the only thing we had to had was a copies of Darwinia. Thankfully a contact in Hong Kong put us in touch with some well regarded tin-box makers and a factory that could laser cut foam (not of the flip-flop variety). So begun the long life of a Multiwinia limited edition tin. Having been made in Hong Kong, the tins were wrapped / packed / padded and sealed into large cardboard cartons and stacked inside a container on the Maersk Tukang.
Then tins were transported in their warm cartons, from the dropoff to the flying hamster 3 at a time, every time I happend to drive by the storage (which took several weeks) in my, ahem, tiny Smart Fortwo car (which frankly was a better bet than my 50cc scooter).
Still. The effort was well worth it - the (surprisingly heavy) limited edition tins and their contents look fantastic and we're very proud to present them for sale!
[EDIT] it seems that you think so too! they're going like hot cakes 
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Tales from the front line S01E07
Posted by Byron
on Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:57 am |
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Multiwinians are cowards!
No, it's true. A bit of fire and they run around like headless chickens. Come up against a troop of mad Multiwinians and they will fight to the death but a little bit of fire and it's 'RUN FOR THE HILLS'. Pah!
Okay, in some ways it's understandable because fire has a nasty way of spreading and it's not nice listening to all the Multiwinians screaming as they are about to shuffle their mortal coils while being slowly imolated but in this case their cowardice is causing me issues because there is a bug 
I found this bug as the result of creating a special version of Multiwinia called the 'TestBed'. If you have been playing the Beta you might have seen this appearing in the server list. If you do then know that it is two copies of Multiwinia playing against each other at 10x normal speed and sometimes 100 the normal speed. It's a sight to behold and perhaps one day after launch we will enable this feature for all to see. The purpose of this is to be able to run multiple automated tests so we can be sure that Multiwinia is relatively bug free. By multiple tests I am talking something in the order of 100+ runs of the game in one night. This is quite important for a company that doesn't really have a QA dept. The beauty of it is that we can get it to play exactly the same game over and over again just be pre-seeding the setup values with the same amounts each time. This is why I say Multiwinians are cowards because I have been watching the same game over and over again where they run away from fire. The scenario goes like this:
1, The purple team take over a spawn point with just one MWG.
2, The blue team immediately take offence and send in a squad to execute him - which they do.
3, Purple takes this as a personal insult and sends in a squad also who proceed to lob a few grenades.
4, A crate drops in purple's camp.
5, The fight goes on while purple opens crate.
6, As luck would have it there was a flame thrower turret in the crate which purple then takes immense pleasure in placing right next to the spawn point.
7, Flame turret immediately begins to toast all of the MWG's in the vincinity - including I might add the purple team.
8, One of the four trees around the spawn point catches fire.
9, The fire spreads from the first tree to one of the other trees.
10, A single MWG panics and runs.
Step 10 is where it all goes wrong.
Multiwinia uses a predictive physics system to keep all of the clients in step with each other which means certain math functions like rand have to operate together. For the most part because each game is seeded with the same startup conditions every time you play - but those values are random for each actual game started so that you have a different experience against the AI, but all of the clients get the same copy of that random value to ensure they are working from the same page - coupled with the fact that any request to do something has to go through the server before a client executes it means that any call to rand on one client is matched with exactly the same set of sequences and calls to rand on the other clients. This ensures that all clients see the same game and experience the same game. When this mechanism goes wrong we get a 'sync error'. Step 10 produces exactly that, the lone MWG makes a call to rand that is not replicated on the other clients so the game dies. As the person charged with the 'stability' of the game leading up to launch it's my job to correct those type of errors.
The process of working out what has gone wrong can be a long one. Mainly because while the de-synchronization of rand may happen at one point it's effects may not actually be felt till later when the game does internal checks to make sure that all of the clients are seeing the same thing. So the only way to track down the where the actual fault happen is to output and compare lots of log files. I am lucky that I developed the TestBed because it means I can reproduce this same error 100% of the time - that is not always the case and usually leads to Heisenbugs. So at this moment I am attempting to work out the unique ID of this particular MWG and then track his (or her - do they have a sex?) through the lifetime of the game to work out the actual point of being scared and then work out what exactly scared it to see where the client's differ and then correct that difference. Might not sound like a lot but it's a huge amount to go through but somebody's got to do it.
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Tales from the front line S01E06
Posted by Byron
on Mon Aug 04, 2008 11:34 pm |
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So here I am 00:05am on 5th of August 2008. Pretty soon I will be 37 and I find myself doing the same thing I have been doing since at least 2001 – working late on a game. So far my average going to be time is 02:30am and getting up time 09:00am at which point I start another long day of game coding and testing. This time it feels little different though because it’s a project I care about and it’s worth the extra effort being put in. Tomorrow (today?) we burn the gold master, which will then be sent for review and possibly to our distributers so it has to be damn good, hence the mega crunch.
To compound things, last week I was with Mark and Vic at the Develop conference in Brighton. And while it was an amazing conference where I met up with a lot of old friends from various games companies and made a few new ones, I didn’t get much sleep. Mainly because the hotel room was hot and I had to have the windows open which was obviously an open invitation to Seagulls to start screaming at me. ‘Why me?’ I would plead to them followed by ‘Look – Mark’s window is open, go scream at him for a while’. Needless to say it didn’t work and Mark reported a totally restful night and what the hell was I on about? Vic on the other hand is an absolute party animal and would be rolling into the Hotel at about the same time as we were having breakfast and would still look amazingly fresh as if she had not been out.
So, what have we been doing on Multiwinia? Mainly, it’s been an exercise in going through the bug database trying to get rid of as many sync errors as we could. Not easy since a lot of them are damn near impossible to reproduce. Today was fun though because we had nearly all the dev team playing the game at 16:30 for an hour trying to test all the possible ways to generate a sync error. We managed it too which came up with the conclusion that the spectator mode I put in this week has to come out till we find out what all the bugs are to do with this mode and sync errors. This had the knock on effect of me writing code to stop players joining in on a full server. This currently manifests itself as greying out the full servers in the server list and having them not respond to mouse clicks. The problem with games when they come to gold master time is that as a developer you never feel they are ready. I mean, when is a game ready? When all the bugs are gone? Show me a totally bug free game and I will be shaking you to try and wake you out of the deep sleep you are obviously in. MMMmmm sleeeeeep… I can see a pattern forming.
So hopefully tomorrow will go fine. It has to because we all booked to go and see Dark Night at the London iMax tomorrow and I for one need some time off – I have even begun to dream about Multiwinians and sync errors.
On a lighter note: There are some events in game that have me laughing out loud. One such event was when testing the game today. I noticed that the Yellow team had sent out a small force to creep up on me. So, I promoted a Multiwinian to an Officer and formed a small squad to meet these sneaky Yellows. So there we were poised to pounce onto one another when suddenly a lightning strike hits the Yellow squad and they scattered in all directions on fire – screaming as they ran. This caught me by total surprise and all I could do was laugh hysterically and then feel really guilty about those poor AI units in pain. I’ll get over it.
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