Imphenzia

I've been occupied with fixing up my Yamaha WR250F for the upcoming race, Ränneslättsloppet, on Saturday: New oil and oil filter New air filter with NoToil air filter oil Changed to the enduro tires I also used on Stångebroloppet in July (with new inner tubes) Fitted the coolant reservoir again (engine it runs hot in races like these ones, three hours of slow movement isn't great for the engine that relies on fast flowing air through the radiator) Fitted new hand guards Removed the indicators and number license plate Fitted the race numbers Here's are some clips from the 2008 year edition of Ränneslättsloppet... Let's hope it isn't too wet this year =) What about Astrofighter.Net then? I've also been working on Astrofighter.Net during the past couple of days but most of my work has been shuffling around boxes in Visio to try to get the menu flow and GUI design in order. Even thought this is a fairly small game I want to make sure that the lobby scr...

Today I was also contacted through my ImphenziaGames YouTube-account by a couple of guys who play a game called Subspace. I wasn't aware of this game although I now understand 1) it's been around for a long time, and 2) it's a 2D multiplayer space shooting game. Both guys asked me whether Astrofighter.Net is influenced by Subspace and at the moment it isn't. In fact, there is no influence from any particular space shooting game and I have deliberately not researched any "competition" as I didn't want it to cloud my ideas for Astrofighter.Net. Due to the nature of my game, and in comparison to Subspace, there will probably be less players on a server in Astrofighter.Net. I will, however, based on how much I can optimize the networking code allow for as many players as possible. My current goal is 16-32 players and since I use rigidbody physics (instead of simply moving objects using velocity and direction) the game uses a fair amount of bandwidth. I now hav...

The importance of a flowing menu system Today I prioritized looking at the menu flow of the game. If there was anything I learned from Beat Ball 2 it was that I shouldn't take for granted that a menu makes sense - especially with assumptions like "people will probably understand." Many won't. The reason why the menu system in Beat Ball 2 is confusing is because I added features "on the go" without any proper thought to it. I've got a chance to get it right in Astrofighter.Net from the lessons learned before. Flowchart the menu I've created a flow chart today that contains all the menus: Main Menu, Find Game, Host Game, Options, Lobby, etc. For each screen and item in the menu I think very carefully about: Does the flow between screens make perfect sense? Are the options labeled correctly? Is every screen absolutely necessary? Is every option absolutely necessary? I'm putting effort into this process now because how I continue with develo...

Just a quick update today - I've just added support from missiles with optional homing / seeking functionality to Astrofighter.Net . The homing feature will need some tweaking though, have a look at this video =) I'm going continue with development for another couple of hours now.

Today I spent 3 nice hours in the autumn sunshine riding motocross at Uringe which is about a 45 minute drive from where I live. When I came home I first had to wash the bike, then I had to wash my Enduro bike that I had left in the garage all muddy the week before. Since the gear was out I also decided to wash my car. It was 5:15 PM by the time I got in and we then headed straight to the playground with my son so he could play for a couple of hours. Back at 7:15 PM. Then it was time for him and my daughter to go to sleep so after changing into PJs, the nightly bottle, brushing teeth, saying good night, getting them a sleep, it was 9:00 PM. Still no development as it was time for me and my wife to eat. I made some fanjitas, or was it burritos, and by the time they were done and we'd finished eating it was 10 PM. Finally, I'm really tired but I launched Unity to get some more development done. Today's progress Didn't get a huge amount done today during the 3 hours I coul...

Last night and today I rewrote the weapon class for Astrofighter.Net so that it can support a wide range of custom properties for each weapon. I've added about 40 properties so there will be a great number of ways to upgrade weaponry using powerups. Here is a short video demonstrating two of the properties named "ChargeUp" and "Multiload." If "ChargeUp" is applied to a weapon you can hold the fire button down to increase the power/velocity/life of a shot. The "Multiload" upgrade allows you to hold the fire button to load X number of rounds before discharging the weapon.

Today I redesigned the code for weapon handling in Astrofighter.Net and the game now supports very dynamic creation of weapons and weapon upgrades. Each weapon is configurable with tons of settings such as various sound effects, autofire, charge up for increased power, rounds per minute, and so forth. In all there are about 40 customizable settings for a weapon and for potential powerups / upgrades. While rewriting, and documenting , my code it strikes me how much I'm starting to like C# and the intellisense autocompletion of all variable names and functions. Today I learned about the ability to use the {get;  set;}  feature to treat a variable as a property - quite nifty. What this means is that you simply define a variable like this: public float velocity { get; set; } This enables you to from other scripts access the variables directly: // this automatically uses set remoteScript.velocity = 10; // this automatically uses get Debug.Log(remoteScript.velocity); The only downside ...

Astrofighter.Net is my new game development project for learning  Unity and C# . During the past week on every spare moment I've been able to find I have been developing and creating assets for the game. When I'm not on the computer I am coming up with about a billion ideas for the game, or at least so it feels like. If you want to read about Astrofighter.Net directly - skip this next section =) The dangers of being in a situation such as mine is starting  a tremendous amount of projects and never finishing them. With "a situation such as mine" I mainly refer to the wide spread of hobbies I have, all of which must fit in to an otherwise normal life. Non-computer based hobbies aside (motocross, photography, martial arts, spending time with wife, two children, and friends) I am, as many of you are aware, currently dedicating much of my time to: Being the independent electronic artist Imphenzia with 85 tracks and 6 album releases to date - this includes maintaining...

I'm happy to day that today I redeemed myself from yesterdays failures . Getting the missing parts After today's daily pickup [of my child at daycare] I set off to buy the toilet seat, the front brake disc, and the hand guard mounts that I failed to get yesterday. My son only threw up once on the journey as well, that's not bad. Also, he refused to exit the huge plastic car attached to the shopping cart at Bauhaus so we were stuck in the parking lot for a god 10 minutes convincing him that it's much more fun traveling backwards in our real car so he can throw up properly again. Raycast my bullets please I also managed to implement a great Raycasting bullet script  in Unity3d. My previous bullets, or projectiles, were using rigidbody physics and a collider but even with continuous collisions enabled my fast moving bullets went through obstacles. This is not uncommon in Unity from what I understand which is why I had to switch to Raycasting instead. Basically, raycasting ...

I went to town today because I had to do three things. 1) Eat lunch with a mate of mine, 2) go to 24MX and buy a new front brake disc for my motocross bike and get a missing mount for the hand guards for my enduro bike, and 3) get a new toilet seat from Bauhaus. I had enough time for 1) and then I had to go back to pick up my son from daycare... See it's not that sharp I'm switching to C Sharp (C#) from Javascript (JS) in Unity3D and it's slowing me down at the moment. I'm switching because I kept being told that C# is so much better - but so far my experience is that you just have to write more code and find workarounds for stuff =) Still, I gather I'll find use of C# knowledge so I'll persevere. It'll also help me from snarfing code because most code is Javascript and if I manually convert it to C# I can understand it better... and improve it? The bottom line is that I haven't managed to get very far today on my Space fighter project today. I've go...

I was told off today and rightly so! My son has been in daycare for two weeks now and "I STILL hadn't sewn his doll" one of the staff reminded me in a friendly but firm manner. All the kids have dolls that their parents make for them in case they need comforting. They can also be used when resolving conflicts between children where they act / replay an event using their little dolls. Me? I'm convinced it's a voodoo doll!! Since I'm the one who sewed it I'm sure my son will be able to inflict great pain even when he's at daycare. Anyway, I had to give the doll full priority tonight and sewing isn't one of my strong skills. I just finished it now and I hope he forgives as he will probably have the plainest looking doll of all children. I overheard the mothers discussing the dolls last week. It was all about fashion, choice of fabric, what accessories to make them, and so forth. To make up for the lack of detail I gave the doll a superhero cape (and s...

So far I've wasted about 8 hours of my time trying to get the masterserver communication to work in Unity3D. I'm currently troubleshooting Network Address Translation (NAT) issues that prevent my test game from acting as a server. So far, I've tried to get it to work through my existing firewall/router which is a virtual machine running pfSense. Despite configuring uPnP and outbound NAT according to this pfSense forum post  to emulate what's referred to as Full Cone NAT  it's been a no-go. Unity's networking test function still claims it is Port Restricted NAT which then means I can't really host any games. Ok - what about my Cisco LinkSys WRT320N router - I've got that one set up as well with it's own public IP address. I changed my default gateway to this device instead, and behold, it didn't work. That device also has a poor implementation of uPnP and NAT traversal so that does not work either. I found this list of devices  that describes whic...

For years and years I've been wanting to create a network multiplayer game. Ok, I already created one about 10 years ago called Netris but that is a type of game that does not rely on any sort of speed or major synchronization of game data. I tried to implement network multiplayer capability to Performa Cars (previously named "Computer Touring Car Championship") - but I had to throw in the towel in the end. Too many design issues with the game itself (how the physics was implemented) and lack of proper networking libraries for Blitz3D proved to be too big of an obstacle. New hope Today I bought an asset package called " Ultimate Networking Project " for Unity 3D . It's a combination of a tutorial and a bundle of useful scripts and functions to simplify multiplayer networking in Unity. I've read through the 25 page tutorial and looked at the included examples and I'm very hopeful to be able to create a multiplayer game in Unity. What appears to be pr...

Following some very positive feedback on the tutorial video on how I create trance music I also decided to dedicate today to make another tutorial of how I arranged the entire track Spirit Within You . This video takes a detailed look at all the sections that form the track - such as the intro, the build up, the breakdown, the culmination, and the outro. It also explains how various instruments are introduced and modified during various stages of the track. I am, by no means, saying that this is how you must make trance music - it's just at peek into how I arrange most of my tracks. When I started out making music in the 90s I found no tutorials like this and I'm hoping that this video can help some of you that are interested in making music. Right then, here is the tutorial of how to arrange a trance song / track: As usual, I use Cubase 5 and my trusted VST instruments Nexus2, VanGuard, and Sylenth1 - but this arrangement technique can be applied regardless of what software y...

Today I decided to create a tutorial based on my latest trance track " Spirit Within You ". It's a detailed look at a section of 15 measures of the track where I go through each and every instrument, what notes and chords are played, which presets are used, what VST instrument was used, etc. This should hopefully give you the foundation of percussion, bassline, melody,  filling effect - but it won't teach you how to arrange a full length track - that will come in another tutorial. Have a look at the tutorial What's in the video? The video describes the following elements: Percussion (drums) - kick, closed hihat, open hihat, claps, cymbals First bassline (rapid 1/16 notes) Second bassline  (offbeat 1/8 notes) Cluster of 5 simultaneous leads for extreme atmosphere Two trance gates for an even fuller effect Pads for more euphoria And a classic trance piano with delay end reverb First the video lets you listen to the end result. Then I solo each instrume...

As an artist I released my new track " Nostalgia [Dub Chill Edit] " yesterday. Today I found the time to create seamless loops and music hits of the track and released it as a Level Kit under Imphenzia Soundtrack. This means that the music is available for non-exclusive licensing at a ridiculously low prices for indie game developers. The easiest way to check out all the loops and music hits is to visit the Nostalgia Dubstep Level Kit page where you can listen to all the stuff in high quality. You'll find a full length theme track (4:09 in duration), 7 seamless loops, and 3 music hits. It's all available individually so you only need to license the ones you want to use - not the entire level kit. The music is suitable for futuristic games and games with attitude.

I've recently discovered the Dubstep genre and even though there are a lot of the tracks of that genre that I don't particularly like, there are quite a few I really DO like as well. As I mentioned in an earlier post  it was "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" by Skrillex that got me interested and I really liked the structured randomness of stabs and the wobbly bass. I suggest, while reading this post, that you listen to Nostalgia [Dub Chill Edit] =) Yesterday after I dropped off my son at daycare I had the melody of Nostalgia in my head and I imagined what it would sound like with some wobbles and random stabs in that track. When I came home I launched Cubase and loaded the chill-out version of Nostalgia to play around a while with the idea. A few hours later I had a decent draft going with a duration of about a minute. I had to stop for the time being to resume some everyday-normal-duties but around 9 PM the kids were a sleep, we had finished eating Thai food, an...

After recently discovering and listening to the Dub Step genre I got influenced by it and modified the Nostalgia chill out edit to incorporate some of the elements. Well, mainly it's the wobble sound but there are other aspects I like as well like the random stabs and effects. The track that caught my attention was Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex . And I also liked Kill EVERYBODY  a lot. Without attempting to make a "proper" dub step track I decided to boot up Cubase and this is what I got so far: Nostalgia [Dub Chill Edit] - Work in progress by Imphenzia I'll continue this piece tonight and hopefully it'll result in a 3-4 minute edit of the Nostalgia track to be added to a new edition of the maxi single. I'd be curious to find out what you think of this so feel free to comment =)

Tonight I added three loops to the non-exclusive music library. Bitcrusher  ( Short Loop and Long Loop ) is a dirty distorted futuristic beat with attitude. Arm For Battle  ( Loop ) is a heroic orchestral loop portraying hope and preparation in a battle scenario. What else did I do today? Even though I am on paternity leave things are quite hectic at the moment - but in a good way.  I drop my son off at daycare at 08:45 in the mornings and then I have some time to spare for my projects until 13:30 when I pick him up again. He is only spending short periods of time there still as he just started last week but it's still a bit heartbreaking leaving him in the morning as he bursts into tears as I leave him. My wife is taking care of our new baby girl most of the time so I can spend the 4 hours on my projects most days. Today was an exception though, I had to spend 2 hours searching for my wallet (which I had apparently left behind at the daycare center) and another 2 hours cleani...