Mana Games

[manutoo]

TEM2 Unity Alpha Version Released !

Pfff, it has been a few tense days, but here we go : the Alpha version of the TEM2 Unity port has just been released..!

So the new save system only took me 2 days, as I was able to keep most of the existing structure and only apply the new save/load method to it.

Before to do that, I spent 1 big day cleaning up the code after the port was done ; this will save me time in the future, as maintaining and adding stuff to a clean base is faster than plumbing into dirty crap...

And after the save was in place, I discovered I had forgotten a couple of things : the user couldn't change the video mode in-game, it was not possible to check for a new version nor to register the full version. So I finished all that. And along the way, I found a bunch of annoying bugs, so I fixed them all. And more importantly I had forgotten to check the tournament registration and the resulting match screen and there were many issues that required immediate attention for the game to be playable.

And then I did the packaging : build the release version, create the installer, set up the upload system, and automatize the most part of the process so it'll be fast to release each new version. I already did that pipeline for Dungeon Guardians and it saved me a tremendous amount of time. For TE2013, I was just doing it manually, but at that time, I had much more free time than nowadays and I didn't mind a few-minute break to rest a bit or check other stuff ; moreover, with TEM2 the installer got bigger so its creation & checking take longer, so it was really important to have an automated process to make the best use of the little time I can put into development...

Anyway, now it's all done, so while I'm expecting to get some bug reports (if anyone is brave enough to test that new version ), I'll be working on transforming this Alpha version into a Beta one and soon a 1.0.

To do so, first I need to put back the 3D player rendering in the menu. Presently it's gone mostly because I have to rewrite a good part of the texture customization for the player (which is required to change his outfit), as it doesn't work the same in Unity.

Hopefully, it'll be done by end of this week.

After that, I'll have to make the 3D match works again, which might take another week, then do a complete rehaul of the animation system as I'll be now using Unity's one (likely another week), and then rehaul the replay system as it was based on the old animation system (hopefully less than a week). Adding the expected debugging and the unexpected hassle, this should lead us to the end of March for the Unity Beta, and mid-April for the 1.0 with the new Coach Center and a few user-requested features.

I keep my fingers crossed to make the whole process going smoothly, and hopefully cu soon for more updates !

[manutoo]

Let's start with some bad news

So in the nice planning I wrote in the previous post, I totally forgot 1 important thing : I have many assets to import into the Unity project and adapt. eg: there are 200 animations to re-export and then configure inside Unity. That's half a week of work at best at my current pace. With all the other required things, it might take me a couple more weeks to reach the v1.0, so that'd be early May at best (and then early June at best for the TE4 pre-alpha).

But it doesn't stop here, as today it's the end of the week, and the 3D match engine still doesn't work 100% (and that doesn't include animation, replay, NPC & stadium rendering). It might be ok at 95% but the last 5 percents are tough.

Right now, there are some random crashes when playing, which means I likely have at least a couple more days of work to dig into all that and fix all the main bugs. Plus the HUD doesn't show up, pressing escape doesn't open the in-game menu, the input isn't plugged in, the court lines aren't shown, etc. All that are small things but added they'll take time as well.

When I realized that my mood took a hit, as I was really hoping to get done with the v1.0 of TEM2 soon enough. Plus I kinda get fed up hunting bugs and doing grunt work, as both are really not the most fun parts of game development, even though they are indispensable.

2019-03 - TEM2 - Match Basics.jpg

Crash snitching

A part of the delay is because in the 1st half of this week I added a crash reporter in the game, that automatically sends the latest saved or loaded game if needed, so it'll be much easier for the users to tell me when something is wrong :

2019-02 - TEM2 - Crash Report.jpg

And thanks to it and our 1st anonymous sender (ie: he didn't enter his name nor email), I was able to fix a game-breaking bug in the Tour engine, as well as a couple of other annoying bugs.

Also, the week before went (almost) as planned : as you can see on the screenshot above with the court, the players are customized. So they are visible & configurable in the menus. It was a bit harder than expected because the old Unity GUI system I'm using has some serious limitation : it's not possible to put a 3D object in front of the GUI elements. So I had to find some tricky way to make all that work. (the new Unity GUI system is really not convenient for my own GUI system, especially as it might have some annoying performance issues)

Next week, I hope to get the 3D match near to 100%, if not 100%, so it'll be nearly playable for the users, even if visually it won't be complete and the animations won't be there.

Cu soon for the next update, with hopefully better news !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=255397#p255397

[manutoo]

Slowly getting there

Last week I fixed most if not all the issues in the gameplay engine, so now it's running normally with the gameplay and the physics identical to the non-Unity beta.

After that, I added back the input & its configuration, the in-game GUI, the court lines, the Aiming Preview, the Danger Zone, the Ball Impact and its Preview, so it's getting close of a playable state, except the animations are still missing, and also some little things (eg: the ball size can't be changed and it's currently too big ).

I even added the code to scale correctly the in-game GUI, so it's not strangely stretched anymore when your screen is not 16:9.

And then in the 1st half of this week, I put back the camera handling, so now it works same than before, and even a little bit better for the 3rd person camera as it looks up faster and more naturally when you're facing a lob or a high ball.

2019-03 - TEM2 - Match Basics Continued.jpg

Kid interlude (skip to the end if you don't want to hear about kid issue )

So the main reason I'm working slower than hoped is my son. Since he's born, I always think it'll get better soon, in a few months. Actually, it almost never does.

And since last September, he got into a big rebel phase : it's like the adolescence, but it happens to babies usually between 2 and 3 years old ; for ours, it even started at 18 months old.

So he fights with his mum a lot, especially as now they have issues to understand each other (she's Thai and doesn't speak much French for now ) ; it means I hear screaming almost all day long when my mum doesn't take him to her house, and thus I get up from my chair every 5 or 10 minutes to diffuse the situation. Plus he constantly wants to play with me as I'm way more fun than his mum...

Anyway, I thought again it'd get better after a couple of months, but it didn't. The only improvement is that since December he understands French very well and thus I was able to find tactics to calm him down and change his mind, but it's very tiring to deal with him all day long (and at night as well, like in January-February when he was waking up super early and couldn't sleep anymore).

Since last September, I don't have leisure time anymore, as I spent all my free time (or some more) taking care of my son, so he & my wife don't get (too) crazy.

So this month I thought it was time to put him in a nursery, or more exactly with a nanny, as there's no nursery near our home, as his language skills were good enough to tell me if he was not happy going there or anything else. Unfortunately, the couple of nannies around our home are fully booked, so I'm stuck in this situation till September, when he should start to go to school.

In average, I can currently put about 20 hours of work into TEM2 per week, but I'd really like to go up 25 hours, which is my normal rate, or even 30 hours, which is my normal rate in the months before the final release of a game. (and it could up to 80 hours during the couple of weeks before release )


Kid Interlude's over

So anyway I'm still there and still progressing, so let's look the next task : the animation system ! This one is a big chunk, somewhat complex, but hopefully not too complex nor too big, so I could get the basics done by end of the week.

I'll take this occasion to change a bit the foundation, so adding new anim to Mod the game will get easier : it won't be required to change the GameSys.ini anymore ; it'll be easier and faster to put new anim in the game, and this will allow combining a lot more easily animations from different sources.

BTW, it makes me think : the .anim files won't be compatible directly with TEM2/TE4. It'll be required to export the original .max file to .FBX, and before to do so, you'll have to do this (I note it here so I won't forget it ) :
- open your original anim file in Max (ie: the .max, not the .anim)
- select a player bone (eg: the skull)
- select the motion tab on top right
- click on "Figure mode" in the Biped zone (*)
- turn on "Triangle neck" in the Structure zone
- turn off "Figure mode" in the Biped zone
- save your file
And to export it to FBX :
- right-click on the play animation icon on the bottom right
- set the start time and end time so the timeline contains only the animation (eg: it shouldn't have a waiting time at the end after the animation)
- click on the Max icon on the top left (ie: the file menu) then click on Export
- select .FBX in the file dialog box, enter a name and click on Save
- in the exportation dialog, turn on "Animation" in the Animation zone, and click Ok
- your .FBX is ready to be imported into Unity, which will require a dedicated tutorial !


That's all for this time. Cu soon for an update full of working animations, or at least, I hope so !

EDIT May 2019:
(*) Turning on the Figure Mode messed up 1 of my animations (out of 150), by rotating the whole body. In such case, before to turn the Figure Mode on, you have to set all keys to free (instead of planted or sliding), turn on the Figure Mode, turn it off, and then activate "Move All Mode", and apply the correction rotation so the body is oriented back correctly (in my case, it was 70°), and then set back correctly all the planted & sliding keys (it's usually used for the feet).

[manutoo]

Got awfully sick

Sorry, not really a dev-update today, because nearly no dev happened for 10 days.

My son got sick the weekend 10 days ago, then I got sick like never before : I got both the flu and a nasty angina at the same time ! So I have never been sick for a so long time in my life (it's day 10 today). I'm almost not sick anymore now, so I guess within 2 days I'll be only a bit more tired than usual.

I hope I'll be able to work this weekend, even if I'll probably do some easy stuff, as my mind might still not be sharp enough.

catch-a-cold-3893262_640.jpg

Lil bit of dev

2 weeks ago, I did the animation basic basics (repetition intended ), so I have a good idea where I'm headed now : I'm going to decouple the game engine animation system from the Unity animation system. Like this, the game engine will be able to run without worrying about how the animations are actually displayed. It was actually more or less the current spirit, so I will just enforce that behavior a bit more.

The advantage would be that in some situation I could add more easily new animations without touching the game engine (although in important real case use, eg: sliding on clay, that would still require changes on the game engine part).

The disadvantage is that what will be on screen might not reflect exactly what's going on in the game engine, so some glitch or bug may be harder to catch. For now, it's not an issue because the TE animation system has been tried and tested a lot, but it might become an issue when adding new animation behavior (like the sliding on clay), as it'll require more work to be sure everything operates like wanted.

I hope I'll be able to get to work at a decent speed fast enough and get done with the new animation system soon, as I'd really like to be working on new stuff now instead of redoing old stuff in a new environment...

Cu soon enough for hopefully better news...

[manutoo]

Day 21

I'm still sick !
It's incredible how long my body needs to clear these viruses.
Since last Tuesday, it's mostly a common cold, although a nasty one, so since last Thursday I got most of my energy back and I was able to work, and...


Victory..!

2019-04 - TEM2 - Unity New Anim System.jpg

As you can see on the screen above, the new animation system for Unity is in place !
It's working well enough, and it should be a bit more smooth than the legacy engine, although it still may have issues in a few special cases.

I have been haunted in the past 2 months about how I would implement all this, and funnily, the system logic behind it is only 200 lines of code. Plus there are about 300 lines for the technical stuff to handle Unity animations. I count 500 lines for a day of work for the 1.0 version, and 250 lines a day when accounting for the maintenance, the long term debugging, and the possible extensions. So actually, in some way, it has been quite easy to do, except I needed 2 months of brainstorming and maturing to get over it.

There's 1 catch though : as explained in the previous post, this new system is decoupled from the gameplay, which means if I don't run it, there's no animation, unlike the old system which had all the info to rebuild the animations at any time. It's not an issue in the normal case, as the game needs to run this new animation system to display the players correctly, but in 1 case, it might be painful : when using the skip to next point/game/set, the animations are off to save some CPU power and make the skipping faster. So if the user wants to see the replay once the skipping is over, then right now it won't work. Except if the skipping speed isn't noticeably slower, I'll have to implement an additional recording so the animations can be recreated when replaying the point. It shouldn't be too hard, but it's still more work to do.


What's next ?

So now that the hardest and most unsure part is out of the way, the sky seems to be more blue.
There are still a lot of things to do, some painful, but nothing too complicated nor with unclear plans, except for the stadium crowd which might require some special work, but nothing near the scale of the new anim system.

So tomorrow, I think I'll work on the new replay system. Hopefully, it shouldn't take long for the normal mode (ie: without the special skipping handling).

After that, I'm not sure what I will do, but I guess I should take care of the stadium and the NPCs, as they are the most obvious parts missing right now.

I should also put back in place the strike selection, but it requires a lot of grunt work to reimport all the animations, so I'll do it bit by bit when I'm too tired to work on more creative stuff.

Cu soon to see how everything will pan out.

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=255397#p255397

[manutoo]

Cruising Again

During the past 10 days, I got back to a decent work pace, so I was able to do the replay system rehaul, and even make it work after a skipped point. I did a little test and playing animations (to save their results) was making skipping points 50% slower, so it wasn't acceptable. Instead, I did a new system to save only the animation commands and use them to play the animations during the replay. This works well, but it prevents to rewind the replay after a skipped point. I think it's an acceptable trade-off, but if some people miss the rewind, I could improve the system even more by preprocessing the animations, so it'd be possible to rewind again.


The Stadium is back

This one has been actually easy and the result looks nice. With self-shadowing and ambient occlusion, it looks noticeably better than in the old engine, despite still using old basic textures :

2019-04 - TEM2 - Stadium 1st Test.jpg

Now I have to import the Indoor stadium, which should be easy as well, and then do the selection between the 2, which should be actually the hardest step, as I'll have to use a Unity function I never used so far.

So right now, it feels we're getting very close to the end of the port to Unity, as only a few things are missing : the NPCs around the stadium, the crowd, the motion blur on the ball, the 2D courts, and the strike animation selection. If luck is on my side, in a couple of weeks, it might be more or less done..!

So cu soon for hopefully more significant progress !

PS: I guess I'm not sick anymore, although I still have running nose a bit, so official sickness length record is 22 days ; I hope it won't be broken too soon

[manutoo]

Getting there

Another decent week of work done !

Now, both stadiums & their skins are in place, and all the Stadium NPCs are there & working (eg: the Chair Umpire looks at the ball).

Everything went more or less like expected, requiring as much time as planned (or even a bit less!), so for once, there's nothing much to say...

There's a couple of exceptions though :
- for the indoor stadium I had to learn a bit more how Unity lighting system work, as it was the 1st time I did some advanced indoor lighting with it ; I had to do several tests to bake the lighting and it took a couple of hours as some baking could take up to 45 minutes ; I optimized everything and the result is nice enough, with more realistic light effect on the court ; however, I still use only 1 directional light to avoid performance issue, so the shadows are still not realistic
- time & speed board text is much clearer and nicer that before

So now we're left with the crowd, the strike animation selection and the 2D courts. If the winds are still with us, all will be done in 2 weeks, and the Unity port will be done..!

Cu soon for more (good?) news.

[manutoo]

Choice Matters

So I did the strike selection as planned. It went relatively smoothly, with 1 big exception.

To handle the separate strike & leg animations, at 1st I had put everything in the same Unity animator controller, and as it wasn't possible to customize the way the animations were stitched together, I changed that setup to use 2 separate animator controllers, the main one for the legs, and a layered one for the strike, and I stitched them manually. The trick is that when there's no need for a separate leg animation, then the strike animation is played on the main controller

And so when I did the strike selection, I changed the animation only on the main controller. It worked well when we didn't run and thus the strike animation played on the main controller, but it gave some strange result when running, as the strike animation was playing on the layered controller and thus it was the base strike playing, except I didn't notice that. I only noticed the strike was playing too early and I spent a couple of hours to check the whole timing handling in the TE engine and in the Unity engine...

After suspecting a Unity bug for a while, I finally found the real reason for the issue and I changed the strike animations also on the layered controller and everything went back to normal..!

It was rather annoying, but there's 1 good thing from this though : I re-learned how some things work in the TE animation system, and mainly that the CPU never rechecks his strike timing, and thus it explains why sometimes he completely mishits the ball in TE2013. As the timing calculation is much more accurate in TEM2 than in TE2013, it should happen less often, but it might still happen sometimes and so I'll have to add the possibility for the CPU to retime his strike when he's chasing behind the ball.


Getting Crowded

After that, I started to work on the Crowd. As expected, it's a bit complex, but not too much and my plan to handle them is going as expected, at least so far. The main thing was to check how to animate all crowd characters without taking too much CPU time. To do so, I used the same technic than in my legacy engine : I animate only a few people, and then use the results on a lot of crowd characters. To be sure it was a good tactic with Unity, I had to check 1st it was actually faster than animating separately everybody, and now I can tell you it is : it takes a very little bit of CPU to do my technic, while animating 5000 characters was taking a noticeable hit on the game framerate.

2019-05 - TEM2 - Crowd.jpg

So now I have to handle the switch between the idle & applauding animations, and optimize some more the crowd when it's not applauding to not impact much the framerate during the rallies.

Hopefully, it'll be done this weekend, and I'll be left with the 2D courts to end the Unity port..! (plus a few little things, like putting back the VSync option, adding the Unity Quality & Ambient Occlusion options in the video menu, etc.)

Cu soon for more news..!

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=260887#p260887

[manutoo]

Unity Port : Done !



After 4 months of hard work, the Unity port is finally done..!

So I finished the crowd as expected, and then I switched to the 2D court. It has been a bit hard, especially as I dug into the mess the camera init was, and cleaned some of it (but not all ), and now it doesn't only work nicely, I also noticeably improved it as I changed the 2D court texture from this :

2019-05 - TEM2 - Legacy 2D Court.jpg

to this :

2019-05 - TEM2 - New 2D Court.jpg

As a point of comparison, here the standard 3D court :

2019-05 - TEM2 - 3D Court.jpg

As you can see, the new 2D court is nearly identical to the 3D court, as it's just a rendered image of it, with the NPCs still being rendered in 3D on top of it.

So now the 2D court format is 2.35:1 instead of 16:10, so even if you have an extra-wide screen, the court will still fill it, and you'll be able to see your player all the time, even when completely on the side.

It was important to still support 2D courts as many people are playing TE with an old PC that might not handle well too much 3D stuff at once.

Someone asked me why I was porting the TE engine to Unity. I'm going to paste it my answer, as some of you might wonder as well about that.

Unity is good, or even indispensable, for :

• Getting modern visuals ; even with the old TE2013 textures, TEM2 looks a bit better with Unity lighting, shaders & shadows
• Porting to Mac & Linux (with finally the online support for Mac)
• Porting TE4 to consoles
• Porting TEM2 to tablets (very unlikely to happen, but still, it's now a possibility )
• Its more modern animation system
• Its editor : it helps to create, prepare, organize, test & tune all the game data
• Getting access to many, many, many assets and things to ease the development (eg: the new rendering for the speed & match time boards ; the new bug reporting system ; etc.)
• Avoiding some of the issues specific to some hardware ; ie: as I couldn't test my own engine on a lot of PCs, it didn't work well on a few PCs (eg: the infamous jerking rendering issue) ; with Unity, this kind of case can still happen, but they should be more rare, as Unity has been tested and used on dozen of millions of PCs

Looking back on the past year

So now, all the legacy engine features are supported in the new Unity engine.

It takes us back to last November, when I polished TEM2 Beta before starting the Unity port, and even 1 year ago, when I planned the end of TEM2 development.

In April last year, I set up the Steam page store for TEM2, and put the release date on June 2019. It felt way more than the time I'd need to finish the game. And here we go, June is coming and the v1.0 might be just done around that time. So I set the status of TEM2 on Steam to Early Status, to give me time to polish things a bit before a more official release, likely in July.

This past year has been tough, as you may know if you have followed this mini-blog, especially on the baby side as things had been pretty intense with him all along, but also on the development side with all the small and bigger hiccups met, which is relatively classic in game development...

Back to the Future

So now is also a good time to look a bit more ahead than usually.

1st, the immediate future : getting TEM2 from Beta to v1.0. It still misses the new 3D Coach Center, the new Focus skill and updating the player bases to end of 2018. Hopefully, all will be done in 1 week. Then it'll need a few tuning and a series of users requested features for the following couple of weeks, and finally the achievements for the Steam version.

After all that will be done, I'll officially start to work on TE4, even if I may still add small features to TEM2 (especially the ones applying to TE4 as well), as I have noted down a couple of dozen of interesting ones.

For TE4, I'll start by the menu skin (eg: changing the color theme plus a few images), and set at least one 3D stadium. And we'll have a the prototype, hopefully for end of June.

I didn't find any decent looking placeholder to replace the TE2013 3D players, so they'll stay there a bit more, but I'll look for an artist in June and hopefully get new players within a couple of months.

Then I'll do the required stuff for the TE4 career mode : it'll be similar to the TE2013 one, so it requires a few changes from TEM2 ; and then a few other little things and more 3D stadiums, and we'll get an Alpha, hopefully on end of July or not long after.

After that, I'm not sure where we'll go, but I have the time to figure that out...

Cu soon for more updates !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=261256#p261256

[manutoo]

Coach Center, done & improved

It took me more time than hoped, but here the new 3D Coach Center, with 2 new buildings, 7 new courts, and 3 upgrades (represented by yellow stars) :

2019-05 - TEM2 - 3D Coach Center.jpg

Right now, there's little incitement to build all courts, so maybe I'll limit the number of coachable players to the number of courts ; eg: the top players will ask you to have 1.5 tennis courts per coached player, else they'll refuse to be coached by you.

So in the past 10 days, I had to spend some time on the bug reporter : I was afraid it was bugged as I was receiving almost no bug report, but it turned out it was actually my web server which was refusing too big files. I raised its limits and now it's fine, but I still don't get much bug reports. Actually, the game is already stable enough..!

I also had to do a bit of stuff to prepare the Steam release. It's going to be on Early Access as it'll be still missing the Achievements and little requested features that I'll implement within the next couples of week. It'll also give me a taste of handling Early Access, as I'm still not sure if I should release TE4 in Early Access on Steam, and if yes, at what point of its development.

The home straight

So now we're getting very close to the v1.0 of TEM2.

Today I started to update the Men Player base, and it's mostly done, except for checking a couple of glitches : some players are seen as enjoying doubles more than they should.

Then I'll update the Women base, and I'll do a series of little things I had postponed, waiting for a change of saved games format, which is now done from the changes in the player bases. (so next version won't be able to load your saved games)

Hopefully, all this will be done at end of this week, and after I'll spend 1 or 2 weeks doing user requests and the game will be on v1.0..!

Cu soon to see how it goes...

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=261538#p261538

[manutoo]

Steam Early Access Release !

10 days ago, I released TEM2 in Early Access on Steam, and the past 2 weeks have been a big bug hunt. I got several crash & bug reports every day, and it was hard to keep the pace to solve them all before new ones arrived.

Earlier this week, the flow of crash reports lowered, and the one of bug reports also lowered at the end of the week ; and this morning was the 1st morning since a long time where I didn't have any bug to hunt & fix..!

TEM2 had been played & tested before the Steam release, but only by a few players, and thus having more players lead to finding more bugs : a few big obvious ones, and a good bunch of rare ones, as well as many little glitches.

So except fixing bugs, I have been able to do only very little bit since last post in this min-blog : some marketing & preparation the Steam release (eg: updating the Steam Store page), and a few simple new features.

I still have a lot of user-requested features to do, and I should update the documentation, which is right now mostly for TEM1, before to be able to switch to full TE4 development ; so I guess it won't start before 1 week, and thus the TE4 prototype won't be there before mid-July at best.

2019-06 - TEM2 - Textual Match.jpg

And now for something completely different

This is my garden bin :

2019-06-15 006_p.jpg

Before yesterday, it didn't have any hole in it, except the ones that have been here by design.

Yesterday, ice balls fell from the sky, up to 4cm in diameter (and probably bigger in other parts of my city), and it destroyed my garden, cracked in several places my car's windshield, made little holes everywhere in its bodywork, and waterflood came to the door of my office, as the fallen tree leaves blocked the water evacuation. Oh, and the bin cover was open when it happened, so the angle was pretty steep, it forced us to close our shutters to protect our windows..!

I never had seen something like that in my life, not that strong. My mum said the same thing. My neighbor as well.

So it has been quite stressful. The insurance will cover a good part of the cost, but I'm going to lose a couple of hours to put back the garden in order, throw all the leaves that were torn off during the storm, and to take care of fixing my car.


GoT Spoiler

Lastly, a couple of weeks ago my son finally got ready to sleep at my mum's, which freed my Saturday nights, and for the 1st time since last September I got some time for myself, which I used watching the last season of Game of Thrones, and I just finished to watch it last night (maybe it was not the best thing to watch right after the sky had fallen on my head )

So here the spoiler (select the text to read it) ==> the ending sucks !

That's all for this time !

Hopefully, the next post will come sooner, and with better news !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=261256#p261256

[manutoo]

1.0 in sight !

Ok, this time the flow of crash & bug reports has almost dried up, so I finally had the time to work a bit more on the last needed features :
- the 3D cups for the victory screen, as you can see below
- the achievements for the Steam version

2019-06 - TEM2 - 3D Cup.jpg

So with a couple of additional user-requested features, and an up-to-date documentation, the game should finally deserve the 1.0 versioning, even if it won't mark the end of the development, and I'll still add things to it in the weeks, months & likely years to come.

However, overall, it hasn't been a productive past week. Dealing with the hail aftermatch, and mostly about my mum not having a car really took a toll on my time and more importantly on my focus. In part because I had to drive in the morning and evening traffic and I f*cking hate this, even if the one we got in our small city is nothing compared to big cities like Paris. In the morning my mind is in the mode "compute video game --- compute video game --- repeat..." and being behind a car wheel can quickly become pretty dangerous if I can't phase out of it... And in the evening, I'm just plainly tired, like most people working...

So I had to take care of my kid more than usual, and it's really tiring in addition to being time-consuming... (but if I don't see him for the whole day, I miss him )

Last Tuesday I brought my car to the insurance expert, who checked it carefully, and he budgetized the repair cost to ~8900 Euros..!
Fortunately, my insurance will pay that, but the repair might take 1 week and my insurance won't cover the car renting, so I might end up without a car for 1 week, which is really not convenient...


TE4 Planning Updated

Anyway, once the v1.0 of TEM2 will be released, maybe at end of this week or beginning of next week (if there are no additional bad surprises), then I will finally be able to switch to TE4 ! It'll have been 3 weeks later than what I hoped a bit more than 1 month ago !

So for the people waiting for the TE4 Prototype, it should come before the end of July, the 1st Alpha before end of August, and the online is pushed far back, at best for end of December, but it's not sure for the moment.

And a little reminder to the TE4 fans but not TEM2 fans : nearly 90% of what I have done in TEM2 since last December was required for TE4 as well..!


Pablito Forever

But in this flow of bad luck and hard times that started years ago, I got a new good thing happening last week. Domingo, a popular French Twitcher & Youtuber has turned out to be a real tennis fan who streamed several episodes of TEM2, in a communicated cheerful way : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... jy8GLtG1qw ; and this lead to boost the TEM2 sales on Steam in a noticeable way ! In short, I don't have to worry about using my reserve to pay bills until the end of this year, and it's good because sales always decline after June till December.

And this leads to TEM2 beating TE2013 in the maximal number of players for 2 days !

2019-06 - TEM2 vs TE2013 on Steam - 3 months.jpg

2019-06 - TEM2 vs TE2013 on Steam - 7 days.png

It's what I thought would happen for TEM1 vs TE2006 in 2007, but it didn't as TEM1 was at best 50% as popular as TE2006, and TE2009, released at end of 2008, was very noticeably more successful than TEM.

I wonder if it'll last or not, but if it does, it'll mean that the thing lacking in TEM1 was a convincing real-time match engine...


That's all for today, see you soon for hopefully a 1.0 announcement !

[manutoo]

This is the end...

As the v1.0 of TEM2 has been released last Wednesday, this is the end of this TEM2 mini dev blog !

But keep your tissue paper away, and rejoice as it's also the birth of the TE4 mini dev blog here : topic15-31541.php !

So cu there !