Blog 3.0

2014 Retrospective

published 13 Jan 2015

TL;DR

2014 was a pretty cool year.

What Did I Do In 2014?

In my last retrospective I had just completed removing the Lua API and had high hopes for being on greenlight within the year, obviously this was hopelessly optimistic (let’s face it, you’re not qualified to be a programmer if you can estimate timetables). Despite this failing to happen 2014 wasn’t a disappointing year - quite the opposite! Epimetheus has reached the stage where I feel like it’s a solid engine and I can spend most of my time doing game development instead of engine development, in theory I should be able to very quickly make new and simple gamemodes now.

Japan

The big event of 2014 was, of course, my three and a half week trip to Japan! I took something like 2000 pictures and put together an album here.

Changelogs

The biggest change to how I do development in 2014 was my changelog videos - a quick video update released every week on Sunday telling people about “what’s new and what’s changed in the game”. I’ve skipped over a few of these on weeks when my work wasn’t particularly easy to demo, and I’ve managed to do 24 in total (roughly one every two weeks). What I haven’t done with the changelogs yet is advertise them to try and get a decent number of viewers, this is something I should really start doing once I restart the videos (this week or next week).

Open Source

I continue to be a massive fan of open source and release a lot of my code publicly (MIT License FTW). This year I have made some pretty cool contributions to open source, all of which are available on github.

New Open Source Projects

WebDesktop

A project to render a webpage over your desktop - desktop widgets using a web stack!
Not currently actively developed, but it pretty much works and I’d like to do more work on it sometime.

SupersonicSound

A very lightweight C# wrapper for FMOD
Largely complete, actively developed.

Bastet

A CoAP/HTTP Proxy server for smart home devices
Not currently actively developed, we’re working on other smart home stuff at the moment but Bastet is very core to the whole thing.

LCARS

A CSS framework for Start Trek style LCARS interfaces
Not actively developed, works for a few basic demo interfaces.
This project was just for fun and was a good way to learn various web things (Typescript, LESS, node, HTML5 custom elements).

Sorcery

A library for evaluating Combinator Algebras in C#.
This one was just for fun, I might pick it back up or I might not.

KeybaseFSharp

An F# wrapper around the Keybase API.
Also a WPF desktop client for Keybase.
This project was a way to learn about F#, and then became a way to learn about WPF. Not being developed right now, but I continue to think Keybase is totally awesome and I’ll probably pick this back up at some point.

Cassowary.net

An incremental constraint solver.
This is a fork of Cassowary.net which was a port from Java, which was itself a port from Smalltalk and to be honest… you could tell - the code was not C# style at all!
Improved code quality, implemented unit testing, implemented a new way to express constraints (using C# expression trees), created a nuget package.
This project is largely complete and so does not have any recent commits but it is in use by my city generation so it’s alive and well maintained.

SharpSteer2

This is a fork of SharpSteer2, which was a fork of SharpSteer, which was a port of OpenSteer from C++ to C# for a much older version of C#. As with Cassowary.net the code was functional but wasn’t properly up to the standards of modern C#.
Unit testing, naming conventions, removed dead and useless code, improved usability with extension methods on interfaces which make implementing the interface much easier, bugfixes and new features!
As with Cassowary.net my work on this project is more or less done but the project is in active use by my AI and is well maintained.

PlaceholderHomepage

I made a homepage for my game. It’s a bit out of date now, I guess I should fix that!

Epimetheus-Public

This is a repository for all the public facing parts of Epimetheus (my game engine) - bug reports and documentation for plugin development.

NockFSharp

A basic implementation of Nock in F#.
This was just a learning exercise for F#, as well as an attempt to get my head around Nock (which is part of Urbit, which is bizarre and awesome).

Game Development

My job is game development, so what did I do with that this year? My primary focus is the Epimetheus Engine, my custom game engine. This is supported by Placeholder.*, a (closed source) set of libraries for various game related things (advanced entity management, networking, game audio, AI etc). Finally the whole thing is based on my open source game library Myre. I quickly skimmed the commit notes for the entire of last for for these three core projects and this is the mile high view of what I did (I’m not really mentioning bugfixes in this list, so just mentally drop a couple of hundred bugfixes for each project into this list).

Epimetheus

240 commits
5,840 files changed
12,385 lines written
41,130 lines changed

Implemented animation system for plugins (enables playing animation clips on models)
Typednames change
gbuffer shader in plugin
Steamworks.net
Plugin networking (arbitrary types in messages)
Plugin entry point
Plugin persistent settings
Improved respawning
Improved tool wielding
physics detector volumes
RequireJS UI (massive UI moddability improvement)
Plugin loading events ( etc)
Lots of wrestling with appdomain plugin system
Myre Events across boundaries
Network Pipe messages across boundaries
GC collecting too early
GC never collecting (memory leak!)
Many UI rendering improvements
Improved parallelism of world generator
Improved how the generator chooses which nodes to procedurally generate next
Massively improved world parallelism service with buffering of geometry operations (50x speedup)
Sped up procedural mesh generation (x2 speedup)
Implemented a system for 2D procedural geometry (using CSG)
Improved lighting
Improved physics body scripting
Added new physics shapes
In world user interfaces (using awesomium)
Improved input system (stackable contexts)
Implemented way to “use” items in the world (pressing E)
Mouse input to in world UIs
Exposed broadphase queries to plugins (hugely improves detector volumes)
Implemented collision groups
Physics constraints/joints/motors/limits
Split out UI rendering in rendering pipeline (future UI post processing)
Implemented a way to query the renderer about lighting conditions in a certain position
Scriptable rendering pipeline
Per camera pipeline (means per camera FX, enables e.g. night vision goggles)
Implemented crouching (seriously)
Implemented queries on the state of the character (e.g. HasSupport/HasTraction queries)
Totally rewritten chunking service
Implemented a streaming service to go alongisde the new chunking service
Implemented positional errors in world generator
Implemented navmesh generation
Goal oriented action planning exposed in plugins
Implemented a basic NPC entirely in plugins
Implemented infrastructure for pathfinding
Sped up ReST API
Implemented immediate mode debugging service
String pulling to generate smooth paths
Improved 2D geometry generation
Implemented train level using improved floorplan/2D geometry generation
Removed subtracting from the world is procedural scripts (:O)
Implemented weapon quick switching
Implemented player inventories
Implemented ragdolls (not entirely successfully)
Future proofed all event types
Implemented hitpoints
Implemented 3D audio playback for entities
Implemented a way to play sourceless sounds at arbitrary points in 3D space
Implemented a new system for defining entities (mixins)
Rewritten GOAP AiActions to be easier to use
Added more capabilities to debug drawing service
Implemented a system for NPCs to use tools (e.g. guns)
Removed sandboxing (OMG)
Vastly improved plugin API
Removed a load of hacky types to work around how sandboxing worked
Vast performance improvements
No more memory leaks
No more game crashing when GC collected a vital object on the wrong side of the sandbox
Implemented an aimbot NPC
Improved pathfinding so that queries are cancellable
Implemented a score tracking service
Enabled steam overlay in game

Myre

103 commits
780 files changed
Line count statistics unavailable (they’re thrown off by moving lots of files around)

Implemented animation in the renderer
Implemented animation clip loading in the content pipeline
Implemented parallel evaluation of animation channels
Rewritten data collections to be more strongly typed (TypedName)
Changed EVERYTHING to use TypedName
Rebuilt nuget packages for Myre
Animation bugfixes
Made property initialisation more implicit
Made property initialisation less implicit
Improved renderer pipeline infrastructure
Made point and sun lights (de)activatable
Fixed depth test in particle system
Fixed material content loading
Improved spotlights (angular falloff)
Improved shadow mapping in directional light
Implemented Vector3 swizzling methods
Dropped support for xbox360
Improved animation system to allocate less memory
Implemented infrastructure for procedural animation clip generation (needed for e.g. ragdolls)
Implemented parallel evaluation of animation instances
Improved linear keyframe reduction in content pipeline
Dropped support for windows phone 7
Implemented collection initializers for named box collection
Implemented Writer for console

Placeholder

125 commits
3,103 files changes
9,029 lines added
46,218 lines changed

Implemented system for improved thread safety for steam
Switched to Steamworks.net from my own steamworks wrapper (HotAndSteamy)
Implemented logical assertions for GOAP (AND OR NOT XOR)
Implemented network translators for a load of types
Improved CSG system (error handling)
Made BSP transforms more robust
Implemented 8 way BSP splitting
Implemented navmesh generation (Recast based)
Implemented funnel narrowing path generation
Modified navmesh generation to check ceiling heights
Expression based GOAP condition/goal system
Improved agent plan selection
Improved behaviour tree
Implemented navmesh raycasting
Implemented new nodes for behaviour tree (Condition, Setup)
Implemented rich presence providers
Made CSG operations entirely deterministic
Implemented ADSR amplitude envelopes for audio renderer
Implemented variable length floating point encoding
Implemented a jukebox system to play music (based on XNA MediaPlayer)
Removed Jukebox (XNA MediaPlayer is terrible)
Implemented system for playing sounds at a position (with no associated emitter entity)
Improved expression based GOAP system
Implemented cancelling pathfinding tasks
Begun works on Audio2, a new audio renderer based on FMOD

Plugins

I haven’t got detailed changelogs for these (there are too many) but I have done a lot of development of plugins too. A lot of functionality is tied up in these plugins and they’re a significant part of development. Remember, every plugin I develop is open source, and you can find them all on Bitbucket.

Deathmatch Gamemode

Testing moving, shooting, NPCs etc.

Base-ArtificialIntelligence

Library for building NPCs for Epimetheus.

Electronic-Infrastructure

Library for building circuitry in game (e.g. wiring up logic for controlling automatic doors).

Construct Gamemode

A sandbox test mode.

City1

A set of scripts for the procedural city generator.

Character-Controllers

Library for building player controlled characters for Epimetheus.

Base-Equipment

Library for building wieldable tools for Epimetheus (e.g. guns).

Base-GameUI

A HTML template along with a load of Javascript plugins for constructing UIs (mainly HUDs).

Base-Sneaky

Library for implementing sneaky things (stealth, detection, disguises etc).

Default-Shaders

A set of shaders for the engine (including fundamental things like the GBuffer shader - you can completely change how the renderer works by replacing these).

Base-TrainGeneration

A set of scripts for generating trains. Trains are compact and have lots of little rooms and narrow corridors so this was a great test for the procedural city generator.

Base-CityGeneration

A library for implementing procedural generation scripts.

Base-Achievement

Library for tracking hierarchies of goals.

Things I enjoyed

It turns out that I have spare time to do things that aren’t game development (I know, was surprised too). These are some of the things I enjoyed this year:

That Was Longer Than I Expected

Turns out 2014 was a busy year! let’s hope just as much exciting stuff happens in 2015 (Heist released on greenlight? Could it be!?).

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