Neverending StoryOuch, ouch, ouch, 1 month and a half since the previous post !
So 1st, I had to completely rework the change of light when the sun moves, especially when it starts to disappear. I had a big misunderstanding about why it was working strangely when I did its 1st version last September.
To make it work correctly when the stadium shadow comes onto the court, actually, it's required to have what Unity calls "light probes" : they will gather the ambient lights all around them, and this info will be used to correctly light the dynamic objects (eg: the players, NPCs, the ball, etc...). Before I was trying to approximate the ambient light by scaling the skybox intensity, which was really not convenient and couldn't work correctly in all cases (Shanghai was especially problematic because it's high and the roof is partly closed and thus not much indirect light was coming into the court).
2023-01 - TE4 - Shanghai's Lights & Light Probes.jpg
Additionally, I found out after a lot of hunting that Unity doesn't update the skybox in real-time when we change the skybox parameters. It really surprised me ! I did a workaround to manually regenerate the skybox and then everything fell into place. I had to fix other things, though : transparent objects (ie: the net, the ball with motion blur & the helpers) cannot receive shadow natively in Unity. I had to do different tricks to display them correctly.
And all that required some work on each outdoor stadium. It wasn't too long to do 1, but there are 17 of them, so all in all it got long & tedious...
But I was happy with the result as it was at least looking alright in most configurations...
Let there be light ! (in the night, with spot lights)... although, Shanghai was still not much playable as soon as the sun wasn't hitting directly the court anymore.
So to fix that, I really needed to implement the night sessions.
The good news is that the light probes were needed for the night sessions, so that was a big part already done. I just had to add big spotlights to light the court of each outdoor stadium, and add a few lights all around them for the atmosphere. There again, doing 1 stadium was fast enough, but 17 was a drag, so I'm glad to be done with that...
2023-01 - TE4 - Night Session at the US Open.jpg
You can also see the light icons for Shanghai on the 1st screenshot.
I hope you'll enjoy these fixes & additions !
Other things & Personal managementIn addition, I also spent almost one week hunting desyncs for the online mode & match replay (a desync means the game doesn't run the same way on both PCs online, or the same way during recording & replaying for the match replay).
I found quite a few causes for them, but couldn't solve one case, so I had to beef-up the debug tracking in the .dmo in the new version so hopefully I will be able to figure out what's going on if someone gets some new desyncs with it.
During the x-mas holidays, I worked less than usually, but still worked which gave me a correct balance between work & family time.
So overall, this past month & half has been tiring but not too tiring and I still didn't get badly sick since last July (with the Covid, so maybe it doesn't really count
), so I think it means I manage better my health & fatigue. Right now I'm quite tired so I take the morning off by doing little things : I just updated the demo and now working on this mini-blog post...
However, I got some bad back issues, which mostly made me hurt at night, really troubling my sleep. I think without that I'd be mostly ok now. My back got better 2 days ago, so maybe my energy will be back to a normal level. That'd be nice not to be badly sick during the winter for a change.
Kid-wise, things are always a bit tough, but it's much better than a couple of months ago coz my wife can take care of them enough.
This week, I hope to be able to update the player base to the end of 2022 and thus allowing you to start a new career in 2023. I still didn't evaluate the work it'll involve so I'm not sure how hard it'll be ; usually, I just add the year-end rankings, but there I'll have to remodel the base to get enough players from 2020 to 2022.
On Friday, my kids will be on holiday for 2 weeks so I plan to slow down on the work side like during x-mas, and I'll test a little something (it's a surprise, coz it might not work
), and update TEM2 (hopefully, it'll be very fast, as I already did a part a few weeks ago). Then I'll finally move to the gameplay, 4 months later than what I was hoping for last September...
(but I did a bunch of unexpected things in the middle
)
(small & bigger) Victories !If you're a tennis fan, you might be a stats fan, so let's look at a few numbers :
- in 2022, the most played tennis game on Steam has been Australian Open Tennis 2, with an average of 39.4 in-game players (down from 42.0 in 2021) (source :
https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346470,1072 ... ,760640#1y ) ; TE2013 got 37.5 in-game players on average (down from 46.5 in 2021), and TE4 27.9 (up from 16.5 from June to December 2021) ; but if you add the players from the ManaGames.com version, then the n°1 was still TE2013 by a good margin, and TE4 was just a tad behind AOT2 (TEM2 isn't in a good shape, though
)
- Moreover, in the last 4 months of 2022, the n°1 on Steam was... TE4..!
This makes me very happy, although, with ManaGames.com players, TE2013 might be still n°1 by a small margin.
However, for January 2023, AOT2 is n°1 again on Steam, but it's ~10% behind TE2013 when counting MG players, which is ~5% behind TE4 : so TE4 was likely the most played tennis game on PC on January 2023.
(the MG stats for TE2013 are approximative thought
)
- If you factor in the user base, and thus get the average time played by user ( = average in-game players divided by the total number of players), then TE4 was the most played in 2022 and still now, by a huge f*cking margin...
But it's not a very fair indicator.
On the other hand, taking into account only the players who have bought the game within the last 2 years could work better to make a comparison vs AOT2, but not vs TE2013.
- Every week, I log how many online games have been played for TE2013 & TE4 ; for every week, I check if the combined total number for the 2 games goes up or down compared to the same week 1 year before. Since 2015, the trend is very downward with a few up here & there, and since March 2021, these numbers just went down none stop ; but since end of October 2022, the trend is finally up. Ok, we were hitting rock bottom, so it's still not that great, but TE4 finally broke the mark of 1'000 matches played in 1 week in mid-January, so it also feels pretty nice..!
TE2013 record is around 10'000 matches in 1 week, and the average in the great times was more than 7'000 games a week. I hope TE4 could reach 2'000 matches per week only with the PC version, and more if we get console releases.
The sales are still disappointing, especially as they are quite down at this beginning of the year, but last year was ok. We'll do the annual checking in the next mini-blog post, this one has been already way too long.
Hopefully, cu soon enough !
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=283776#p283776
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