The other day, kcmmmmm grabbed a set of replays from a match played between drawnonward and smash10101, and went through them on his stream, analyzing the games, remarking on good and bad plays, getting into the minds of the players, and saying what he would have done in various situations.  I learned a ton from this; it was incredibly educational to hear how an elite player sizes up a situation and prioritizes and makes decisions.  He talks about opening theory, planning your “banana bread” and responding to it as Sniper, and highlight and lowlight strategy, and tons of stuff, so I’m posting it here for everybody to enjoy.

He works through about 10 games in an hour and a half or so.  If you don’t have time for it all, start at 32:15 and watch that game for a few minutes, there’s some great analysis of the various moves in that one (but really, they’re all great!).

Click here to view the embedded video.

This was cool enough that I added an “analysis” category to the blog, with the expectation that we’ll get more of these!

I am incredibly excited about the potential for replays!  I can’t use enough exclamation points!!!

I wrote about replays a bit, but seeing them in action is way cooler.  As usual, I streamed the release notes on the SpyParty twitch channel, but I cleaned up the video and put it on the YouTube channel.  It’s about 35 minutes long, and shows off some of the cool aspects of replays, and then I answer some interview questions from the beta testers until Comcast decided it was time for the stream to end:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think replays are going to really help people take their play even deeper than before.  Even in the few games I’ve played with it in the wild, it’s made me think about how things I did as a Spy looked from the Sniper side, and how better to protect my Spy actions.  I used to think replays were going to help the Sniper more, since you could study Spy moves, but now I’m not so sure…it’s really useful to be able to see your mistakes from the Sniper’s perspective, so you can learn to blend into the crowd more effectively.

And, now that the “hard part” is done, onward to Spectation and the Replays Database!

Oh, I put this note up after editing this stream:

• First up is kikar‘s 1000 game birthday,
• then, warningtrack for his 5000,
• and finally, kcmmmmm for his 10000!

This will all take place tonight at 6pm Pacific Standard Time, at http://www.twitch.tv/spyparty

I will record the games and put them on the SpyParty YouTube channel after the stream.

Edit: Hey, it’s the future, and the 2.5 hour video is up:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s the leaderboard for tonight’s matches:

That’s me, there at the bottom.

Yes, I wrote the game, but I’ve been heads down on this In-Game Replays feature so I’m pretty rusty, and so I expect to be beaten with increasing alacrity as the stream continues into the night.  Luckily, I love playing SpyParty,² even when I’m getting crushed.

Here are the full stats:

The gory details.

It should be a fun set of matches, come join the stream!  I will try to get my DIY greenscreen set up again!

Oh, and the In-game Replays are coming along really well.  It is so cool, it turned out even better than I thought it would.  I’m going to release a teaser video, hopefully tomorrow, and then the feature very soon after.

1. So sad that I couldn’t find another link to put on “see”, but I guess today’s stream will qualify!
2. Which is a very good thing after all these years!

What are replays?

In a skill-based competitive game like SpyParty (or Starcraft or Counter-Strike or Go or Poker…), watching and studying games is an important part of learning and improving your skills. Right now, the only way to watch a game of SpyParty that you’re not participating in as a player is to watch a stream or a video. I stream on the SpyParty twitch.tv channel, and I post videos to the SpyParty YouTube channel, and lots of other beta testers stream and post videos too. You can catch a lot of streams by signing up for the SpyParty Streams Notifier, and you can check out all the Let’s Plays by searching YouTube, but if somebody didn’t capture their game, there’s no way to go back and study it and it’s gone forever. Even if somebody did capture the game to video, if their camera angle wasn’t right, you might miss the thing you want to see.

Replays are the solution to these problems. A replay is a recording of the game, but it’s a recording of the stream of animation commands and events and movements instead of just a stream of images like a video, so you can move around in the replay while it’s playing, freeze it and look at the layout of the party, where the Sniper’s laser is relative to the Spy, and even rewind and study a section from different camera angles. Once replays are in, they’re going to revolutionize the study of elite SpyParty games; the plan is to capture a replay of every game ever played, and add them to a database that can be queried by any beta tester to study any game. About to play in a tournament against kcmmmmm? Study the last 100 of his games against other high level players and try to get a feel for his play style. Heck, you can even sort of play the games from the Sniper’s point-of-view, trying to find the Spy, although since the Spy won’t repond to the laser sight it’s not going to be a real test. I don’t know whether this is going to benefit Spies or Snipers more,¹ but it’s definitely going to raise the level of play across the board.

After I get replays working, the same technology will be used to implement “spectation”, which will allow you to log onto a game in-progress and watch it live, which is like watching a stream, but you can move the camera and see the action from either side, or even from a different camera position. At that point, if you join the lobby and everybody else is playing, you can just go spectate until somebody else joins to play. This will be huge for streaming, since it will allow people to cast other games, and commentate on the play! I’ll even implement mini-tournaments and simple betting within a spectation match, like some of the Starcraft mods do.

First, though, will come raw replays saved locally. You’ll be able to review your games, but to see somebody else’s you’ll have to get the replay file from them. The files should be pretty small, like hopefully one or two megabytes. After the bugs are worked out for that, I’ll get the replay database server up and running, and then spectation.

I really excited about replays, and I think they’ll increase the depth of the meta-game, and help the community share and discuss strategies.

Video Previews

Here’s a video I recorded from last night’s stream for drawnonward‘s 10,000th game (!). I gave a short preview of the current state of the replay system, which is still buggy but the hard part (rewind) is mostly working:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’d like to see videos of the terrible things I did to the partygoers as I was getting rewind working, you can check out these two videos:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. my hunch is Snipers will benefit a bit more, but I don’t know

These builds were a long time coming because I had to re-do the entire inside of the game in preparation for spectation and replays, which aren’t quite done yet, but are getting closer.  However, I put in a bunch of really important bug fixes, the cool looking “menu party”, the oft-requested “back button” on the game setup screens, and Practice Mode is now handled properly so it can be used for bug repros much more reliably.  Also, you can see some nascent spectation action developing with the addition of hitting <tab> to switch between Spy and Sniper views in Practice Mode.

Oh, and of course:

Santalanterns! Inspiration courtesy of zerotka, as per usual with our holiday Easter Eggs!

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. If you really want to see that, here is your link.

What is This Bug?

The bug that was discovered allows your laser to pass through certain sections of certain characters. This makes it seem like you miss some of your shots even though you really shouldn’t. This bug is easy to reproduce as well. All you have to do is aim at these imaginary holes and that’s it. For example, you can aim your laser at the stomach region of Alphonse “Snaps” Mcgee, or at his hat: 

Since there was a good repro, checker was able to find and fix it pretty quickly. I asked him if he could give us a more technical side to this bug and he agreed. Here is his response:

Okay, so the characters are made out of triangles. For the old characters, there are about 1.5k tris, and for the new ones there are about 11k tris.  It’s slow to do a raycast against all these triangles, so you do check on the overall bounding box of the character first, since that’s much faster.  If your bounding box is conservative, then that means all the triangles are inside it, so if the ray doesn’t hit the bounding box, you don’t have to test all the triangles.  But, since that test assumes all the triangles are inside the bounding box (hence the word “bounding”), if that’s not actually true, you won’t test the triangles at all. 

This is what the bounding box looked like before the fix:

This is what it looks like after the fix:

I looked into this bug so I could gain my own understanding of it. I noticed the holes seemed to disappear during animations and while holding a drink. I asked checker if he could give some insight into what’s happening. Here is what he had to say:

With animated characters, you really don’t want to build the bounding box from the triangles as they move around because that’s slow, and you often don’t have access to the posed triangles because that happens on the video card, so you build the bounding box from the bones themselves, and then expand it a bit (20% in this case) to get all the triangles. Well, with the old skeleton, it’s almost flat on the xz plane in the rest pose, so the expansion doesn’t do much.  When you’re holding a drink, your arm is forward, and that makes the bounding box actually bound the whole body! 

These are images with the old bounding box built from the bones:

So what was the fix?

I looked at the code, and with the current (read: slow) animation code I decided it wouldn’t actually be any slower if I just computed the triangle-accurate bounding box.  Once I optimize the animation code, I’ll have to come up with a better solution, potentially having bounding boxes for each bone authored in Maya, or something smarter, I’m not sure yet.

How was it Discovered?

krazycaley took on challenger virifaux in Spy on the Hill week 7. It was during one of these games the Sniper appeared to shoot through one of the characters to both the stream viewers and to himself.  Interestingly enough, he did!

You can hear  krazycaley exclaim “Noooo! Miss!” right after the shot. He knew who virifaux was and virifaux knew he was dead to rights. Yet somehow he was still alive. This was enough to pique the interest of virifaux and he chose to pursue it more deeply a day later. Once he discovered a reliable way to reproduce the bug, he made a quick video showcasing it in action, marking the beginning of the end for this bug.

Streaming was a big help in squashing this bug.  SpyParty doesn’t support replays yet, which makes bug hunting difficult sometimes. Streaming is probably the next best thing. If pictures are worth a thousand words then videos are probably worth a couple million. In this case, the video gave clues to virifaux for where to start looking. He knew exactly what it looked like when the bug occured. He could watch it over and over until he formulated his hypothesis. Then he could go into practice mode and test it out. 

Streaming and videos give us great insight into reproducing pesky bugs. Streaming may not always be the main tool in bug hunting, but streams and videos are almost always helpful for gathering more evidence and figuring out a clean repro.   This was the case with another bug’s story. I don’t think streaming was the main reason this bug was caught and squashed but it certainly played a role. 

Why is This Interesting?

I find it very interesting the bug was discovered only now. When first looking over the new bug report, checker made a post stating he remembers this happened a long time ago and that it was super rare, so we know this bug has been in the game for quite some time.

I am going to throw some numbers your way to help give an idea of the scope of this thing. There are currently over 11,000 people who have registered with the beta. The top 100 players have a combined total of 185,520 games played. It’s safe to say there have been a lot of games played across the entire community. This isn’t even counting the number of people who have played at conventions. In all of the games that have been played, this bug is just now being talked about and reproduced.

That’s not the only thing about this particular bug that makes it so interesting to me. Not only have there been tons of games in which it could have been discovered, the steps needed to reproduce the bug are really simple. When you combine these two characteristics together, it’s crazy how long this bug has lasted! However, thinking about it more deeply, maybe it’s not so crazy after all…

There are a few things that need to align correctly in order for this to be spotted. The main thing is looking at the character from the side. Next the character can’t be doing the vast majority of animations nor can he or she have a drink in their hands. Finally, the sniper has to aim in the correct spots. Perhaps you also need to be streaming for Spy on the Hill week 7.

Whatever the case, the bug is nearing the end of its lifetime since it’s fixed on checker’s local copy, but until the patch goes live you might be able to utilize this bug in a game mode. As beta tester virifaux said, “Now that we have a reliable reproduction, we’ll have skill shots where we shoot through McGee to hit the spy.” Bugs can be fun to play with so get in your skill shots before it’s too late!

Hello! My name is Keith, or zerotka in game, and I will be bringing you weekly updates for what’s going on in the world of SpyParty. This will allow you to keep tabs on all the interesting discussions on the forums and stay abreast of all the wonderful things happening in the SpyParty community. Speaking of wonderful things happening in the community, let’s talk about Spy on the Hill!

Spy on the Hill’s sweet logo

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! 

krazycaley keeps his throne after another battle in Spy on the Hill. This will mark the 7th week in a row that KrazyCaley is king! 

Spy on the Hill is a weekly competition where a challenger dukes it out with the current king for the throne. The catch is the challenger dictates what custom SpyParty game rules they will be playing. These rules can range from slightly unbalanced game types to completely wacky ideas, as you’ll see below! 

Strictly speaking, being king just grants you the title of being King of SpyPartia, the fictional country where all the Spy on the Hill events take place. You don’t get any prizes, badges, or special powers. However, this does not stop the community from taking it a little further and having fun with it. Every week the king issues humorous decrees and he has even appointed a royal advisor. Some people chime in with “Long live the king!”, while others say “Someone end this tyrannical reign!” It provides a little competition and it’s all in good fun. 

Every game is casted live by toboshi and warningtrack over on the SpyParty twitch channel, and overseen by the Spy on the Hill creator and mastermind wodar. Here’s a quick summary of the last five matches, and links to the videos (each of which is around an hour):

• Week 1, Drawnonward vs. KrazyCaley 
  H-O-R-S-E Style. Each players pick a map and mission type. This is mostly balanced game types between two high level players. You can check out a highlights reel from this match here:
  

  Click here to view the embedded video.

  
  

• Week 2, KrazyCaley vs. KCMmmmm
  Full Random Mode. Each player will randomly pick a map and mission type. Being completely random can heavily favor the Spy or the Sniper. Having to do known mission types tend to favor the Sniper but doing any 3 of 7 favors the Spy.
  

• Week 3, KrazyCaley vs. MikeChilds
  Spies must wait 30-60 seconds between each mission. This mode puts more cognitive load on the Spy because they have to keep track of when they completed the missions and plan accordingly.

• Week 4, KrazyCaley vs. Varanas
  Snipers must say who they lowlight and neutral light. Spies can’t use their forward key. Spies now have knowledge of when they get lowlight and can get away with lots more because of this. However, not being able to use the forward key can cause some funky pathing.

• Week 5, KrazyCaley vs. SlappyDavis 
  Players win by either playing Snaps McGee (the photographer) and finishing their missions or by getting the Sniper to shoot poor Snaps. This element adds more mind games to the mix.

• Week 6, KrazyCaley vs. WarningTrack
  The Sniper must name a state in the USA whenever he or she lowlights, highlights, or shoots. States must be in alphabetical order. Snipers must know their states or be stringent with their highlights and lowlights.

• Week 7, KrazyCaly vs. Virifaux
  Each mission the Spy completes is counted as a point. Whoever has most points at the end wins. You don’t need to survive after you complete the missions, you just need to do them. This gives interesting opportunities to the Spy.

Any SpyParty beta tester can sign up to be a challenger to the throne. It’s great if you can stream, but it isn’t a requirement. So, if you are interested in ruling over SpyPartia, feel free to sign up in the beta forums and come up with your own crazy custom rules!

Will KrazyCaley remain the king for next week and issue new decrees, or will this week’s challenger come up with a clever game modification that ends KrazyCaley’s winning spree? Find out later this week! Spy on the Hill usually streams on Friday evenings around 7pm, US Pacific time on the SpyParty twitch channel.

Why is This Important?

Now, for a little editorial from my point-of-view as both a long-time SpyParty beta tester and a big fan of competitive games and streams…

In my opinion, competition brings a lot to any game. It helps build the community and allows onlookers to admire some of the best players out there, but more importantly, it helps create stories that people can relate to.

If someone new is watching the game, they probably don’t know too much about it. Sure, they can get the gist of things, but they might be missing some aspects that will make it interesting for them. Why would they watch a game if it’s mainly just gibberish to them? Stories are something that everyone can relate to, and they make the game better for both new players and for people who are well-versed in the game. One classic story that often emerges is “the underdog”. Research has shown time and time again that we love to root for underdogs. This is something we can all get behind, regardless of our knowledge of the game.

Another good example is the story of “the comeback”. In this story the current champion gets beaten and after some time passes they get a shot at being the champion once again. Everyone knows that they are capable of being a champion but are they able to do it again? 

With Spy on the Hill, we get a glimpse of the future of competitive play in the game. Also, you may recall this isn’t the first competition SpyParty beta testers have held. Previously we’ve had other player-organized tournaments, including the “New Years Cup” and the team-based ”Pre-Open Beta Tournament”. I am sure there will be many more to come, especially when spectation and replays make it into the game. What better way to test a feature than to use it?

The community has done some pretty amazing things and will continue to do so. Spy on the Hill is just another thing to add to the list.

As you will recall from the pilot episode writeup featuring r7stuart,  the SpyParty Masterclass is the streaming show where I get the elite players to mentor me in-game and on-stream, so I can learn to suck a little less at the video game I’m making.  

When you’re trying to design a deep player-skill competitive game, you have to be able to make tuning and balancing decisions, and to do that you have to have a clue about the way the game plays at elite levels.  It’s a great feeling when players beat you at your own game (literally), but I felt like I was falling too far behind, so I decided to get some lessons from the top of the leaderboard, and to stream it and then upload it to the SpyParty YouTube channel afterwards so the whole community can learn from the lessons too!

This next episode will feature kcmmmmm, the player at the tippy top of the leaderboard, who you may remember lost me a bet with Seth Killian at Evo.  

There are a few different things about this episode:

• I’m going to stream my side live on Raptr’s twitch channel, http://twitch.tv/raptr, and kcmmmmm is going to stream his side to the SpyParty channel at http://twitch.tv/spyparty.  I recommend watching the dual-stream view so you can see both sides at the same time!  I will edit them together before posting the final episode, like last time.
  
• We’re on Raptr’s channel because they’re working with extra life to raise money for Children’s Miracle Network and they invited me to stream, so I thought this would be a cool way to help out a good cause.  You can join the Raptr extra life team here. 
• We are going to keep it to one hour!  The last one was almost four hours long, which is too long to watch and too long to edit!  I’ll probably do some Q&A in the twitch chat on Raptr’s channel for a bit afterwards if folks are interested.

If you missed the last episode and have a spare 4 hours to go deep on SpyParty, here you go:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I don’t mean technically; it’s actually really great that YouTube now allows long videos. I mean in every other way. It’s too long to edit. It’s too long to watch. It’s too long to watch again to see if you made any editing mistakes. It’s too long to compress. It’s too long to upload. It’s just too long.

That said, the actual content of this too-long video is pretty awesome, so I apologize for the length, and I’ll try to keep these shorter in the future.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the new streaming video show I’m going to do called the…SpyParty Masterclass!

I was originally going to call it “Chris Tries to Learn to Stop Sucking at His Own Game”, but I think SpyParty Masterclass rolls off the tongue a little better.

The idea is this: every so often, like hopefully at least weekly from here on out,¹ I will invite one of the elite SpyParty players to mentor me, to teach a masterclass with me as the student. I will do this on live-stream, and I will have the mentor stream too, or at least record the match locally. We will play some games, I will lose a lot, and we will discuss why I lost after each game. I will then edit the two recordings together for better post-stream viewing, and post them on the SpyParty YouTube channel.

Here is the first episode, the pilot if you will, recorded with r7stuart on his 1 year beta birthday:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you go to the YouTube page for the video, you can see links to all the individual game timestamps in the video description. This makes it somewhat easier to navigate this giant monstrosity. I’ve put the Sniper side first in each game, so you can play along with me (losing) or him (winning) before you see the corresponding Spy view.  After both sides of the game, you can hear the discussion about what I did wrong.

Even just watching the first few games and commentary will teach you a lot about elite level SpyParty play. I will try to keep the episodes to an hour or so from here on out. As one of the players watching the stream said, “I’ve learned more in the last couple hours than I have all week.” 

I am really excited about doing this show. I love playing SpyParty, even when I lose, and I love learning why I lost, and I especially love learning things about my game I didn’t know, even though I wrote it.

When I’ve explained this to some newer players, they’re surprised I’m not the best at my own game. If I was the best at SpyParty, I’d be very worried about the depth of the design. I’m ecstatic I’m not the best at the game, and I haven’t been for a very long time. This is a good thing. The feeling of getting “beat at your own game” is an amazing one that every designer of a competitive game should strive for as early as possible. I would even claim if you have a reasonable number of players and you’re not getting beat at your own game, it either means they’re not that into your game so they’re not spending enough time to get really excellent at it, or it doesn’t have the systemic depth for them to find ways to get better at it than you. Either way, it’s a problem you need to fix!

If you’ve got feedback on the format, please post it in the comments. It’s my first even remotely complicated editing job, and it’s pretty rough. I hate editing video, it just takes forever, but I really want this show to be educational and useful, so don’t hold back with any constructive feedback!

If you want to hear about when these are going to happen, follow @spyparty on twitter. If you want to find out about any SpyParty streams, check out the SpyParty Streams Notifier.

1. although the summer is a little crazy for me with PAX right there at the end of it

I wasn’t worried about the server’s performance this time, since the robots pounded pretty hard on it, I was mostly interested in how a crowded lobby would feel as a player.  We hit 170 people at one point, which meant we filled up Headquarters and people created overflow rooms, so that was good.  Chatting was crazy and hectic, as you’d imagine.  I need to move the Practice button from the bottom of the lobby list or no one will ever see it.  I found a few different things like that I need to fix, but best of all, I got a suggestion for fixing the lobby list moving around while you’re trying to select somebody, which is awesome!  I ♥ my players!

Beta tester KY called this “Mount Loadtest”

Original Post:  I’ve been trying to write this blog post for three days.  I am…let’s just say…a little frazzled.

As you may have read, I recently finished optimizing the lobbyserver using robots in the cloud¹ to loadtest it.  I then moved everything (including this site) to a new faster server, all in preparation for opening up the Early-Access Beta.  You’ll also notice, if you clicked through that last link, I’ve disabled beta signups now, and I’ve finally sent all the invitations, including around 5000 to people who had never been invited, and over 13000 to people who had been invited before, but hadn’t responded.  If you missed signing up for the beta, don’t worry, you’ll be able to play very soon, just check back here or follow the game on one of the social media outlets you can see on the sidebar.  I still need to send a few hundred here and there for various reasons, but I’m done with the bulk of the invitations, thankfully!  I am so happy to be out of the “invite business”, and almost into the “just buy the game and play it now” business.  Getting mail delivered on the internet in 2013 is a disaster.

On the topic of almost opening the beta, and all the new people playing the game, I want to run a loadtest with actual humans tonight.  Yes, I know, this is short notice, but I’m barely treading water here, so it’s the best I can do right now!  I need to test with lots of humans in case the robots didn’t do a good enough job pretending to be humans, testing-wise.  Trust me, they were very boring to talk to.

Sorry this is not a great time for most of the US or the world.  If you can’t log on that late, come earlier, and maybe everybody who can’t go late will make their own crowdsourced loadtest before the official one!  But, if you can be on at 10pm, whether you decide to come early and play or not, please be there!

Here’s the player graph for the lobby over the past week.  This is averaged data, so it’s a little low, but I’m told by zerotka, the  resident SpyParty historian, that the max was 53 simultaneous at that spike on Sunday evening.  Let’s see if we can beat that.  Over 100 would be awesome, because the room size limit is 100 so it’d be nice to test that code with humans.

I may try to stream the loadtest at the SpyParty twitch.tv channel.  Not sure how exciting watching a lobby list and chat is going to be, and not sure if I’ll be panicking and fixing things and have to turn it off, but we’ll see.  I’m also going to play kcmmmm‘s 5000th game with him tonight at 10:30pm, and we’ll try to stream both sides of that.

Come play if you can!  Thanks!

1. ROBOTS IN THE CLOUD!!!!