Obey local ordinances!

It seemed to work pretty well, we played it during the release notes stream, where I did two different “birthday games”, the first set with scientist for his 5k birthday, and then smash10101 for his 1k birthday.

I made a few subtle behavior changes for this new map:

• I made paintings more attractive on this map, and to do that I had to slightly change their probabilities on Ballroom. I think it won’t be noticeable, but we’ll see.
• Due to restrictive local ordinances, open containers of alcohol cannot be consumed or served on the sidewalk. Some people flout these ordinances, but most partygoers are responsible citizens.
• The conversations are a little less crowded now. People will still stand close to each other, but they won’t all jam into a tiny conversation circle, so you have to be a little more aware of how the NPCs behave around crowded conversations. I had to be careful with this code so I didn’t break the delicate balance of Balcony, but I think I was successful. I’m sure the beta players will tell me if I screwed it up!

Also in this build, I worked around a bug in Wineskin so MacOS beta testers should have their replays directories updated properly now.  

If you’re a beta tester already, come try out the new map, it’ll be there after you auto-update. If you’re not, what are you waiting for?

Here’s the video, and if you want notification of videos like this, you can subscribe to the SpyParty YouTube channel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, naturally, given my competence in this area, I’m going to start yet another mailing list!  Hmm, I need a cute name for it…right now I’m just calling it the SpyParty News.

This new one doesn’t require you to be in the beta to subscribe, so if you’re holding off on joining the beta, but still want email updates on SpyParty, this is the list for you.  You can see the place to enter your email address over there on the right side at the top of the sidebar.   Oh, too far to move your eyes?  Okay, here you go:

Enter your email to get SpyParty News!

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There’s more!  I’m also going to start actually sending to these mailing lists a little bit more frequently.  I’m going to shoot for one mail a month to this newsletter list and see if I can stick to that.  Baby steps.  Making indie games requires wearing a lot of different hats, and time management is not my strong suit, but hopefully I can handle sending out a mail every month talking about what cool stuff I worked on for the game.  I think the mails to this newsletter list will be different from the mails to the beta announcement list, since the former is mostly for people who aren’t in the beta, while the latter can be more specific about build numbers and have links to the beta forum threads and whatnot in it.  If you’re already in the beta, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter to receive more of my inspiring prose, but don’t feel like you must to avoid missing things if you actively check the forums and follow SpyParty on the social interwebs.

The other thing I’m going to do is add the 25k people who signed up for the closed beta but that haven’t joined yet, and who I haven’t emailed since the beta opened.  These people expressed interest in the game, but  if they don’t check the social media outlets or the blog manually, I’ve completely neglected to let them know what’s happening with SpyParty.  I’m constantly seeing comments and tweets from people who don’t even know the beta is open and are pleasantly surprised to find it is; as I said in a GDC talk a couple years back:  No One Knows About Your Game.

Gallery

And if you made it this far, here’s a teaser image from the new map I’m working on, called Gallery, that should be out soon, maybe tonight if everything goes smoothly.  The idea behind Gallery is to recreate one of those SOHO art gallery spaces, long and narrow, and the Sniper can only see in the end, so there’ll be a bunch of character-based-occlusion.  It should be pretty different from the existing maps, which is in line with my goal of exploring the space of maps and missions.

Hopefully Toby won’t serve drinks out on the sidewalk. Going to have to add that to his AI.

Didn’t like the dumpster? Fine, have a restaurant YOU CAN NEVER VISIT.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s that you say? You want another half-hour ramble by me showing off some major (and some minor) new replays features? Okay, well, we’ve got that too:

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. highlighted?

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.

You can catch the full story below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!