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Dev diary number thirty three : Ups and Downs

Posted by Germain on 03 Dec 2012 / 46 Comments



Dec
3
2012
 46
Hello!

So the month of November is over. Mustaches have been shaven and money has been donated to cancer research. We gathered a whopping 80$(!) total, including one 10$ from a non-sauropod, and total stranger. Thank you Casey Braastad, you are hereby awarded 10 Karma points! You may now kill a kitten without any consequences!

In other news this week has had its ups and downs. Here’s a short list of things we have done:

  • Tested alternative tools for Castle Story’s GUI. It’s been known publicly for a while that we have a strong dislike for Unity’s terrible UI tools. And we may even have mentioned it in the last weeks. However, we only actually tested alternatives in-game this week. The consensus seems to be that dynamic web intergration plugins seem to be the most future-proof option. Plugins like Awesomium or Uwebkit offer a HTML5 layer to code on that includes the abiblity to display webpages in-game. This would allow us to code our UI in HTML using JQuery.
  • Started actually coding a new version of the Radial menu. We have grand plans for this part of the interface. It’s too complicated to explain, but we will probably do a video in the coming weeks to explain how exactly it will revolutionize Castle Story’s core gameplay. ;)
  • Started actual work on CastleStory.net, what will essentially become the main landing page for all information about Casle Story in the future. The process has officially begun, and images and wireframes are actively being exchanged with our webdesign partners. Exciting stuff!
  • Found a hosting service that suits our needs. The search has been long, since we neither have a large AAA budget or a small one either. Hosting services and/or content delivery networks seem to ignore completely the mid-range budget customers.
  • Continued our search for a third-party game patching system. We are looking for something similar to the League of Legends launcher, or the Guild Wars 2 launcher. Essentially, something that would behave simliarily to Minecraft’s automatic patching system. Currently there are very few services, and they are either bound to DRM (like steam’s patch system) or too expensive (like League of Legends solution). Let us know if you know about something that could help up.
  • Put the finishing touches on the Kickstarter reward posters. Be ready to be amazed because Luis Gama has done incredible work. I will post picture of it as soon as we have test-prints done. Speaking of which, this brings me to the next topic:

 

What is that?

Luis Gama, our kickstarter poster artist just sent me this awesome fan-art piece. I was just blown away. This gives you a taste of what our posters may look like. Click on the link for a bigger version.

 

Bell Canada is shit

Yes you read this all right. Screw Bell Canada, who has the monopoly of most of the internet service network in Montréal. We’ve been losing incredible amounts of time and patience at the hands of their inept, uncaring and soulless drones that they call employees. We have been looking for a good and fast ISP for our new office for about a month. And the conclusion was that Bell owned the box in our office building’s basement. Every other ISP said that they could not connect us and that we would be forced to go with Bell. This should have been a big warning sign to us. But nothing could prepare us for the odyssey that awaited us in their meandering bureaucracy. Here’s a few things that happened to us:

  • Waiting on the phone for half and hour, only to be told, once we connected with a human being that we were in the wrong department. And then being transferred TO THE SAME DEPARTMENT. Of course, after waiting another half hour.
  • Taking in the wrong address (this part is unclear who’s to blame, I admit) but then refusing to change the address to which the router would be shipped to. Being transferred to Purolator, who are supposed to handle the shipping, and being told that only Bell can change the order.
  • Being transferred from Purolator to Bell, only to have the transfer fail, because Purolator did not enter the regional code in the telephone number.
  • Not writing the regional code for Bell’s customer service ANYWHERE on their website. Forcing us to guess which one it is (we never found out).
  • Changing the day the technician is supposed to show up at our office without telling us. Considering the fact that we need that technician to tell us if internet will be available in our office AT ALL, it’s pretty important that we be there to ask him that question. So far we have waited two whole days in an internet-less, empty office, sitting on the GROUND.
  • Cancelling our order without telling us. This is the point at which we got mad and started asking for a supervisor. We had been recording the conversations for a while now.

Consider the fact that Bell is known for price gouging, bandwidth throttling for large users, and overall awful service. Please, if you live or ever plan on moving in Canada, CHOOSE ANYTHING BUT BELL!

 

Sang-Froid has been greenlit!

VICTORY! Our friends at Artifice Studio has had their game accepted on Steam Greenlight!

Their game, Sang-Froid: (french for “cold blood”) a Tale of Werewolves, has been in development for more than 3 years. Incredible effort has been put in telling for the first time ever, a story based in folkloric 19th century Québec. They teamed up with acclaimed auteur, and werewolf expert Brian Perro. Their gameplay is quite unique, blending hack-n-slash mechanics, tower defense, and incredible strategy elements, necessary to defeat enemies that are (realistically) much stronger that your own character.

We posted a blog asking you guys to vote for them about a month ago. Knowing that we may have had a small role to play in their game being greenlit make me incredibly proud. Castle Story has the greatest community ever, and I hope you guys can transfer some of that love to the guys at Artifice Studio.

Their game being launched this month is such a wonderful coincidence, considering the fact that the story begins on the 5th of December. It almost makes me forget that Bell Canada are such assholes.

 

Soundtrack of the week

Sang-Froid has an excellently awesome soundtrack. Including traditional folk artists like Nicolas Pellerin and La Volée d’Castors. So I think it is fit to include one of them as this week’s soundtrack.

If you can understand french, you will be rewarded with great stories in every song with an odd number. If not please do not miss Boubou, Péribonka, Beauclair and Têtes de violons these instrumentals are simply epic.

 

Thanks for reading!

Team Sauropod




46 Comments for Dev diary number thirty three : Ups and Downs


ArbitraryRanger
6 months ago


Thanks for the update, I seriously can’t wait to see all the upgrades and updates you’re working hard on! Unfortunately service providers in the US are just as brain dead – maybe you can create corruptrons that have bell hats and are so incompetent they run and jump off of the islands instead of attack.

(Reply)

    a
    6 months ago


    lol yes.

    (Reply)

    TheOtherPlayer
    6 months ago


    They should totally have that as a easter egg or some other word for a in-game secret. Of course it would have to be well hidden to avoid the lawsuits I assume.

    BTW Sauropod, I was told by kickstarter that I would have a beta by october… and it’s December so if I could get it soon or at least get a new expectation date that would be nice. No offense by this Im just a little impatient.

    (Reply)

      Jdawgmasta
      6 months ago


      Evidently you did not read past the rewards carefully enough:

      The Prototype came out on October 17.
      The Beta release date is currently unconfirmed.

      If you backed with the Prototype reward tiers, you should contact Sauropod, but if you were only looking for the Beta then you will have to wait.

      Rob
      6 months ago


      you feel like you are impatient? :P ha if you have been waiting for two months already, you are properbly one of the most patient people around here :P even though the beta wont be released for some time, and you properbly mistake it with the prototype ;)

      bills6693
      6 months ago


      No, the actual rewards did say estimated delivery october, which they corrected in an update to say it’d be later but kickstarter does not allow the changing of reward descriptions, so it still appeared that it was october unless you read more…

      And here in the UK, at least in any town or city, there is no monopoly on ISPs as far as I’m aware – heck, there’s tons of them, 3 really big ones, a lot of midsized-large ones, and little ISPs too. Come live here :) we have fibre-optic provided to most homes in most cities by several providers :P healthy competition. And because there is so much competition they have to be fairly competent or you’ll move provider.

greniermichael
6 months ago


have you guys check out Unity’s Asset Bundle? They are made to override content, thus updating (modding) a game. You could check out the recent Unity hangout (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTy3x4Op7Js). They had a question about third/first party solution to updating system.

(Reply)

mag0ca
6 months ago


I hear you with the Bell issues. I refuse to go with them for anything if I can help it. too bad they control most of the telecommunications in Ontario and Quebec. Not much choice for internet access in the great white north. Glad your taking it so well. Keep up the great work. Loving to Prototype.

Mark

(Reply)

Casey Braastad (Valgaard)
6 months ago


Wow…just wow.
I feel so honored right now, I literally jumped up and down like a happy puppy in front of my entire dorm.
Still in a state of shock I was mention in a dev. diary. I was just trying to be a good person…

Love you guys, *Virtual hug

–Valgaard

(Reply)

    Rob
    6 months ago


    well… you deserved it ;) I only helped with my own mustache:P

    (Reply)

Plazmic Flame
6 months ago


Definitely looking forward to the revamped radial menu. You guys could essentially have that been the main UI for placing down objects. The only thing that would have to be on the edge of the screen is the functions for placing/removing mines and what not.

(Reply)

doodleopaper
6 months ago


Please don’t kill a kitten though.

(Reply)

Smidge
6 months ago


No Videotron?

(Reply)

    Menekis
    6 months ago


    no, unfortunatly the cable is not available in the whole building, wich is a complete shame because in that case we could went for other company like Teksavvy and have a relatively good internet connection.

    (Reply)

      Danny
      6 months ago


      Tsk tsk, you guys didn’t check the building you leased if they had access to cable. Some buildings are under contract and cannot allow other ISP to plug in. Or there is a fee which applies to the building owner, and they sometimes don’t want to pay.

      Better luck next office. ;)

      Robbie
      6 months ago


      It’s too bad Teksavvy wasn’t available. They’re probably the best third party ISPs in Ontario/Quebec , and I love them.

      I’ve had both Rogers and Bell, and they’re just terrible, for prices, bandwidth, and throttling.

Rocktalon
6 months ago


I hate this. I got Castle Story ONE DAY before my birthday just to half my computer break 2 days after i got it. i got to play once. :(

(Reply)

BBoss
6 months ago


Bell is shit, even their modem which you have to get is shit It crashes constantly then you have to restart it and even then it doesnt work. I dont know if you have these ISPs in montreal but there is rogers, xplornet, and nexicom that I know of.

(Reply)

    Menekis
    6 months ago


    the problem is not really other company, is that the whole system is owned by two major company (Bell and Videotron). They own the lines and disavantage all small companies who want to use their lines. in our building they let only the 7mbs/640k speed for the others and apparently they reserver themselves the right to control the switch that could activate the 25mbps/7mbps . So for activating that switch we need to go trough Bell…

    (Reply)

Space Narwhal
6 months ago


YAY!

P.S: Couldn’t YAY on the last one because there was no place to write a comment.

Love,
Space Narwhal

(Reply)

    Menekis
    6 months ago


    yes i’m locking all the comments for the moment because i’m starting to switching servers. It’s just wierd that we are still on a shared server today.

    (Reply)

    Teknonick
    6 months ago


    YAY for you!

    Anyway, aww….

    Anyway 2.0, nice music! Wish I could play something like that, would be AWESOME!!! It also sounds very… Irish…. :3…

    (Reply)

Thomas Johnson
6 months ago


In regards to update and patch tools, there are some basic tools that may be of use, even though they’re not part of a larger service. Google Chrome used to rely on a binary patching tool called bsdiff until they switched to an in-house tool called Courgette.

bsdiff homepage:
http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/

Courgette’s design overview:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette

Courgette’s sources:
http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/courgette/

(Reply)

Benjamin
6 months ago


Doesn’t matter if you can understand French. The odd number songs made me think of ren-faires, fairy tales and other symbolic representations of taverns from the middle ages. Not to mention I think I almost cried from the first violin instrumental.

(Reply)

Daniel Friesen
6 months ago


Don’t know about 3rd party patching systems. Personally I’d have just spent some time writing my own. Use librdiff to make the transfer sane. And run a nicely load balanced set of servers. Or you could always use a p2p library to reduce the load. Though you might have to drop the rdiff idea.

Shame about being stuck with bell. I don’t get how Quebec can be a major area for development while Vancouver’s game devs are starting to disappear. The internet connectivity is usually better here in western Canada without Bell and Rogers to deal with.

(Reply)

    Menekis
    6 months ago


    well we are thinking about using Xdelta on our side. I think what is the complicated thing is that we need to support the patcher for 3 different platforms.

    (Reply)

      Daniel Friesen
      6 months ago


      My original thought was bsdiff. Though I switched to the idea of rdiff after thinking about the thought that you could do the update without having to care at all about any case where the user doesn’t have the data you were expecting them to have. (Modding being one possibility, though I’m usually just paranoid and try to over-guard against possible issues). Though of course you’d want to have the updater memorize checksums for the version the user already had so it could warn them that if they did do some sort of mod the updater may override it.

      [----]

      But yeah, cross-platform would be a bit complicated. Actually compiling it to run on multiple platforms may not be that bad. But the real issue will probably be the GUI. With there being at least 4 windowing systems to deal with.

Anthony
6 months ago


Hi/salut!

We are curently looking for your patcher problem. We would like to know more about what your looking for. Contact me and I’m sure we can develop a great solution for you guys!

Hope to hear you soon!

(Reply)

Blastmetal
6 months ago


Well i don’t know much about the the com network of canada but i had my fair share of BS with internet company’s back here in my home country so best of luck guys ur gonna need it, loving the proto so far keep up the good work.

(Reply)

Benjamin F.
6 months ago


Cool. Keep up this good work :)
For the UI, for the last mobile projet I worked on, we took NGUI and were quite happy with it. Did you give it a try ?

(Reply)

Jim
6 months ago


Wheeeeee

(Reply)

Mr_FJ
6 months ago


I would definitely prefer if you used Steams patch system, for the Steam version… Games that have a seperate patching system, really annoy me… That way I have to actually open the game ot see if there is an update, which means that if I suddenly get the urge to play it, there is a larger chance, that I have to wait for an update, before playing :(

Please, please, PLEASE, use Steams update system, for the Steam system :’(

(Reply)

Joel Santos
6 months ago


You probably know it already but why not M2HPatcher?

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/111671-M2HPatcher-The-Unity-patching-solution

(Reply)

Pachydermus
5 months ago


Hey, for the patching thing, you could ask Nils Drescher (https://twitter.com/nilllzz) how he does his launcher for Pokemon 3D! Although, his is on a much lower scale, and might not work for you guys. Give it a go anyway though! :P

Also, I really hope there’s no legal repercussions with the posting about Bell Canada being crap… >.<

(Reply)

    PowerBlunt2069
    5 months ago


    Sauropod is a legitimate company. They could legally be sued for slander. Probably not a smart thing to do especially if this game goes big.

    (Reply)

      Scipio Xaos
      5 months ago


      They could be sued for slander… if it’s not true. (I think.) Honestly, though, it’s not like they’re going around and posting it all over the web. They’re only posting it on their website so I’m pretty sure they’re fine.

BvL
5 months ago


2 thoughts:
1. For the patcher, what Overgrowth (a game made by Wolfire Games – still in alpha) did was, they have 7zip files that you have to download and extract into the game directory,
- but there also is a windows updater that upon running it automatically checks the games version, and checks for updates, if there are it downloads all the 7zip archives and extracts them into the game folder (replacing the old files)
- the only downside of using this method is that if you have a v2copy of the game and its at v10 then you must download all 8 7zip files in order to update your game, so this method would only be particle if the changes you make to the game are small (in MB)

2. I’m also a Canadian, i hate bell, rogers is to expensive for my needs. You probably checked all the alternative ISPs, but we are using TekSavvy (“http://teksavvy.com/”). They offer bough DSL and Cable internet, for DSL they use Bell’s infrastructure, and Cable they use Rogers. Over all they are well priced and have good customer service. If you should check them out if you haven’t already.

Great Game

(Reply)

TheBoble11
5 months ago


I really like the prototype, but i cant play for more than 10 minutes without it becoming unresponsive.
Are other people having this problem?

(Reply)

Scipio Xaos
5 months ago


Several other people have already mentioned patching solutions, but…

Why not just build your own patcher straight into the code? I’m not very familiar with Unity so I’m not sure if this is possible or not..

(Reply)

Cabe
5 months ago


Don’t place the blame on the poor Bell Employees, the bullshit they have to put up with from Bell is just as bad as the customer gets, except they get it 8 hours a day.

Don’t get me wrong, hate Bell, they deserve it! But the front line soldiers have it really bad, they’re treated awfully.

Source: My wife worked CSR for them for two years. Bell is the reason she developed IBS.

(Reply)

hotmailcompany52
5 months ago


Sauropod i have an idea for your patcher issues it is: you have a fast server where the update is hosted then when it comes out have the game or patcher check when launched for an update and when it is found it overwrites all files apart from the save games and stuff hope you find this useful.

(Reply)

ednos
5 months ago


Please do not use Adobe Air, Pando Media Booster, or any of the other tools that are used by the Blizzard/League of Legends launchers! Those are some of the worst user interfaces ever designed! Adobe products are all terrible and should be avoided unless someone’s life is at stake.

I personally strongly dislike HTML5/jQuery as a platform, and would recommend against using it in a game, but as long as it does not use Adobe Air, it will probably be fine.

Whatever distribution system you choose, it would probably be best if it could use the HTTP protocol, for those who are behind proxies or restrictive firewalls.

(Reply)

    Daniel Friesen
    5 months ago


    Adobe AIR is a top-level tool that lets you build standalone applications using HTML or Flash. It has absolutely nothing to do with user interfaces. It’s basically a web browser with no chrome (it’s own UI) that displays HTML/Flash based content that is locally part of the application rather than downloading the sources remotely. It’s nothing but tool irrelevant to what the UI looks like; like C++, Python, HTML, CSS, etc… everything can be used to create the same UI.
    —-
    In any case, AIR is for making completely standalone applications. It’s completely irrelevant here because Castle Story is already a standalone application. All they are doing is integrating a HTML engine (I’d bet WebKit) to render part of the UI, in whatever way they want the UI to look. AIR wouldn’t fit in anyways.

    (Reply)

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