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    Unity 3 – Support Joys!


    2010 - 10.07

    Wow.

    Seriously wow.

    As mentioned before, I was having some problems getting SpaceOreMiner playing nicely with Unity 3.  I was considering downgrading just to continue development work.  I know I have been raving about unity in general on the blog and the youtube vids, but I thought I had found a niggle point.

    How wrong was I 🙂

    In my thread on the support forum, this morning, I had one of the team ask me to send him the project as I hadn’t included it with the bug report.  My bad :).  Less than 12 hours later, I get an email from the bug team saying that they had located the problem and that they would release a fix.  Awesome.

    The truly awesome thing?  They had removed the bugged asset from the game, and sent me a fixed version of my source, so I could continue to develop right away.

    I’ve just loaded it up in unity 3, and lo and behold, its working fine 😀  Considering the fact I am using the indie ( read free ) version of unity 3, I am SUPER impressed at this level of customer service.

    So to both Jonas and Alexey and whoever helped inside the unity team, you have my personal thanks 🙂 As I can’t reward with you monetary gains for just doing your jobs, I thought instead I would pay you with a picture of my cat, who is looking scary on top of my spare mattress :

    My cat thanking unity for sorting my issue 🙂

    Now time to play around with SpaceOreMiner and Unity 3 😀

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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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    SpaceOreMiner – Current Stats and Thoughts!


    2010 - 10.04

    A total of 17 games played so far 🙂  only 4 of which were me hehe.  To whoever is managing to mine the Omicronite, how on earth are you doing it?  I can’t even manage that 🙂  I’m guessing there is a glitch somewhere 🙂

    I’ve had a grand total of three bits of feedback, which was honestly more than I was expecting 🙂  I’m gathering all the feedback together, along with ideas I am having for expanding the prototype before sitting down and decided what the next feature(s) will be, and how I will be coding them, along with an approx timeline.

    If you wish to leave feedback, feel free to email me, or write a comment here.  General thoughts/feelings about the game would be awesome.  I’ll respond to every bit of feedback 🙂

    If you have stumbled upon this blog, and have no idea about SpaceOreMiner – please click here and enjoy! 🙂

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    Real-Time stats for SpaceOreMiner


    2010 - 10.03

    Just stuck together a quick script to let me monitor the game – and you can use it as well 🙂 The game sends all its info on game over to the server, which gets saved into a mysql db.

    Real-Time Stats for SpaceOreMiner

    Intrestingly, since release yesterday, only two people have seen the game over screen 🙂  Well, one really, the other player was me testing to see if it working 🙂

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