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    Enhanced SpaceOreMiner Stats – Now with graphs!


    2010 - 10.06

    I love pointless stats.  They make me happy.  Well kinda.  I think they are pretty damn interesting, and as mentioned earlier, I have been collecting stats from every finished game of SpaceOreMiner.  Though the sample set is still pretty small, I think it’s quite cool.

    I use a call to a PHP script to log end of game stats ( score, ore(s) collected, time game played ) and insert this into a mysql database.  The stat screen pulls this data and uses it to display the various messages on the the screen.  The four graphs are dynamically generated graphs php scripts, not actually an image ( feel free to right click on them and check! ).  Each graph also pulls the data down from the stats database, which it then displays in a really sweet format 🙂

    You might notice the bit of javascript on the page that updates the Total <whatever> Ore mined graph, if you right click on the graph itself, you will see I am actually passing it a parameter.  This parameter tells the graph which ore I am intrested in, and only pulls that info out of the database.

    Sample graphs, for those to lazy to click on the stats screen 🙂

    The total amount of copper mined in game. The sweet thing about dynamically generating this graph is that it is updated in real time. Go on, play a couple of games, collect lots of copper ore, reach the game over screen and come back here if you don’t believe me 🙂 ( a poor poor attempt at psychological manipulation heh ).

    A slightly more interesting one, is the total numbers of games played :

    This shows, obviously, the number games of played a day. Still very small numbers 🙂 The biggest short coming of this is that if a player leaves the game without reach the game over screen, I loose the stats. This is a bit of a shame, but I don’t mind … I can always improve stat tracking as I develop the game further.

    I’m tracking amount of ore mined, and amount of money made, anyone got any ideas where I am going with this? hehe

    If anyone wants a tutorial on how to write their own stats gathering system with php and a database, feel free to comment, more than happy to spread the knowledge 🙂

    As for my unity development, it has stalled completely 🙁 Upgrading to version 3 wasn’t my best move. Unable to import my project at all to with, it bugs out with the following error when I try and load my main scene :

    Assertion failed!
    Program: C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Unity.exe
    File : ..\..\Core\Common\src\IceAdjacencies.cpp
    Lime : 785
    Expression : !”Adjacencies: found non-manifold mesh!”

    If anyone has come across this error, please get in contact! I’ve submitted a bug report, and posted on the support forums, but had no response yet, I guess they are kinda overwhelmed with everything at the moment. If I can’t get it fixed in the next couple of days, I’ll downgrade to 2.6 and continue the work with that. So keen to get back to it 🙂

    Well thats all for now folks 🙂

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    Unity 3 woes


    2010 - 10.05

    Alas, it seems Unity 3 doesn’t like the SpaceOreMiner project, I get a rather ugly c++ error pop up when I try and load the main scene :

    Expression !”Adjacencies: found non-manifold mesh”

    If anyone has come across a solution to this, please feel free to get in contact with me about it 🙂  Very glad I didn’t decide to change to unity 3 during the 19 hour challenge – that could have been frustrating 🙂

    On other thoughts, the amount of feedback I am getting on SpaceOreMiner is slowly increasing 🙂 which is fantastic.  Feedback really helps me – provides me with inspiration and motivation.  Oh and total games played so far is 23 🙂  yay! 🙂  Actually the live stats are quite helpful in working out how people play the game, so definately pretty sweet to see games being logged there.

    Anyway, back to poking unity 3 to get the project loaded 🙂

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    Some images


    2010 - 09.28

    As the videos are a bit low res and yucky, I thought I would just quickly post some images before I start the next hour later tonight.


    The Mole descending the shaft ( run in full screen )


    I spy silver! ( run in full screen )


    Green tyronic crystal? oO ( run in full screen )


    Copper at the bottom of a shaft ( run in full screen )


    The game running inside a browser!

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    Hours 1 – 5 : General thoughts on SpaceOreMiner, Blender and Unity3d


    2010 - 09.26

    So now is the day after the five hours before 🙂 Looking back at it I think it went pretty well. Downloading Blender and installing it was pretty simple. I even had python pre-installed, so that went without a hitch.  I can see how amazingly powerful it is as a tool.  The draw back being an incredibly complicated UI.  Definitely need to spend some time with Blender in order to get better at it.  Quite pleased at how the models went, though initially I had wanted to get them all done in the first hour.  However, I think this was pretty unrealistic in retrospect.  Will totally need to spend some time on UV mapping the Limar and the Mole after the 19 hours, but so far quite please with the progress there.

    Downloading and installing Unity3d was even easier 🙂  It needs to be activated online where you have the choice of either picking a 30 day trail of the pro version, or an unlimited version of the indie version.  You need to give it an email address as well.  I’m glad I didn’t pick the pro version, I think being exposed to the uber version, then having to downgrade after it would be pretty sucky.  But each to their own, its nice that they have the option to trail it.

    Now about Unity itself.  I am loving it.  Everything seems really simple and really logical.  This is always good.  I haven’t had too much of a problem with the UI at all ( though navigating in the scene view window is a bit clumsy feeling at the moment, but I have a feeling that is my relative newness to it ).  So far, however, everything I’ve done has been pretty generic in nature.  I’m starting the meat of the coding today, will be interesting to see if the speed of progress continues once I am doing more specific things.

    The 19 hour challenge overall is definitely a very interesting way of developing.  Though I know I am mostly writing/recording/talking/tweeting to nothing but search spiders, I am finding it a great way of motivating myself.  However, taking a 5 minute break within every hour to write the blog post and record/upload a video is actually a bit of a nightmare – uploading a video to YouTube completely kills my home internet, and as I am alt+tabbing between unity3d and google, this is a bit of a hindrance to development 🙂  So from now on I will be doing the hour, then after the hour, making the videos and writing the blog entry.

    So there is  a brief overview of my thoughts on the first five hours.  I’m hoping to do another five hours today, but alas, I have some chores that need to be done first, so will have to come back and announce when they are starting later.

    tl:dr; Blender rocks, Unity3d rocks

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    D’oh! Used names


    2010 - 09.23

    Every name which is simple has already been used on the internet … d’oh! Or atleast it seems that way.  As such, I’m going to rename my SpaceMiner to the slightly more obscure sounding SpaceOreMiner.  Not wanting any law suits or what have you not.  I was going to go with RoidRaider … but that gave me funny mental images of Lara Croft with one of those ring type seats.  As such, I am just going to go through the posts and edit them to reflect the name change 🙂

    Edit : Hopefully changed everything, if anyone has a suggestion for a better name, or indeed notices any references to just SpaceMiner, please comment 🙂

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