Mana Games

[manutoo]

Back to normal ?

So it took longer than expected (™ ).

1st, the last month was kinda ok work-wise, not too great, but with most workers on holidays after the 1st week of August, the house has been quieter.

And now, almost all construction work is done; there are something like 3 or 4 days left of work to do, and it should be done for good.

Plus my older kid got back to school last week, so I finally have some decent time to work, or at least when the small one doesn't come to jump on me...

Anyway, I had to work on a big update during the beginning of August, to tune a bunch of gameplay elements and fix a series of annoying bugs, so I switched back to the controller icons later than expected.

And there I realized that Unity (the engine I'm using) although it pimps itself as being multiplatform & everything, didn't do anything about the consistency of the controls over the different platforms ; eg: the axis & button order of the XBox controller wasn't the same on Windows & Mac. Bummer...

So I made the jump : I bought and integrated Rewired. I had planned to do that for a while, because Unity doesn't handle well some exotic controllers, have some little bugs, and can't handle decently controller hot-plugging ; actually the newest Unity's Input library may be able to do all that, but I preferred to go the Rewired way as it looked a lot more battled-tested and polyvalent than the new Unity Input system.

So it was relatively easy to integrate it once I understood how to use Rewired as a platform-agnostic low-level input system (which is not really designed for, at least not in the documentation, as its goal is very high-level), and thus the controller icons followed shortly after, as you can see on this screenshot :

XBox Controller Setup

I also took the occasion to improve the menu navigation so it's somewhat decent to use a controller with them. I think the result is ok, but I'm really not sure Microsoft & Sony will agree and let me release TE4 with the menus in that state. So if you notice anything weird, please let me know..!

After that, I finally added the possibility to tune the World Tour player AI using the real-time coaching system created for TEM2. The trick has been that I also needed to handle that setting in the Training Club, so exporting the players to the Training Club wouldn't change their strategy, else it'd have been disappointed not to play against the real Federer or Nadal behavior when you just want to do a simple match.

So I ended up adding a couple of buttons to assign & clear the AI strategy in the Training Club.

Now, there's left the issue of having different strategies depending on the surface speed. I'll see if it's really needed to add the support for this or not.


Looking ahead

So now, I'm left with the outfit Modding that I hoped to finish at end of July...

I did a good check and I have likely a big week of work to do all that is required to make it possible to install the outift Mods without touching any existing .ini file and to have several different outfit Mods fitting together without doing anything special. (so the end-users will have an easier time to install Mods)

But I might get delayed : this morning, checking a Bug Report, I stumbled upon a big issue that could create desync, both online and when replaying the whole match. So of course, I had to fix that right away..!

And now, I have to build & upload all the new versions (ManaGames.com & Steam, Windows & Mac, TE4 & TEM2, demo for TE4) ; doing only the full version of TE4 already takes a big hour ; TEM2 is ~30 minutes more ; and ~30 more minutes for the TE4 demo. It's mostly waiting, but when the game is being built, I can't work, so I have to do that very early in the morning or in the evening, so it doesn't eat up my little available work time where I can attack the big things...

After the Modding outfit, I'm not sure what I'll be doing, which will be the 1st time for a long long while. I think I'm going to tackle a bit with the Motion Matching plugin I bought last year to see if it could help to give more natural moving animations to our tennis players. I have some doubt it'll work well, because the tennis movements are really not like in other games, so I'm not sure I'll get the settings to tune it to reach a good result.

I'm also hesitating a bit to give the commentaries some work, so they'd sound less random, but it feels like a titanic task, and maybe I should do other things 1st...

Anyway, see you next time to see all of this goes !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=275526#p275526

[manutoo]

End of cycle !

So I finally released the Modding & Outfit Modding SDKs for TE4 almost 2 weeks ago : topic29-33540.php .

The customization screen, showing the hidden eyebrow customization (may be officially available in the future)

This concludes the end of a cycle : rushing & rushing to complete the feature list missing from TE2013. Now, it still misses a few things for the Modding, but all the important ones and some more are there. For the animation & outfit, the drag'n drop installation is already done. It still misses for the sounds & courts, but these systems will be reworked for the game engine before I'll work on simplifying their Modding.

So after that, I wanted to take a little 1-week break, still working but at a cool pace. It was a "good" idea, because that previous week has been filled with surprise chores & obligations on the personal side, and Modding requests on the TE4 front...

It's now almost done, and thus I can look at the future a bit far ahead for the 1st time in a very long time, and thus without pressing crushing matters clouding my view..!

So now I see 2 important axes :
- a not too long to do but important thing : I should fix the CPU out of sync animation, when he's late to hit the ball ; this is likely the biggest visual issue now when playing offline ; it's possibly a big headache waiting for me, so I'll need to have a good energy level to tackle this one. Hopefully, it'll be close enough to what I did for the human player, even though it's not exactly the same philosophy.
- On the other side, I really need to test the Matching Motion system I bought, and start to draw conclusions on the final production of the animations, and start to see how and where I'll spend my budget to improve them ; I already spent all TE4 budget except the part for the animations, because I really lack visibility of what is the best path to follow...

Still on that 2nd axis, I should probably check how to add a stretching animation at end of the run, as its consequences will be important gameplay-wise and possibly for the animation production as well.

Also, I'd really like to put all the stadiums in the game, but this task is huge and gameplay-wise it has no consequences, it'd just be nice for the atmosphere...

So it's kinda exciting time with many possibilities, and many things a bit more interesting than what I have been (slowly ) doing these past months..!

So see you again in a few weeks to see what path I'll have taken and for what results !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=278713#p278713

[manutoo]

Super Sick !

Pffffff, this time I outdone myself, or at least I thought so. I just re-read several posts of this mini-blog, and found out I get sick quite often, and constantly get sh*t on my doorstep...

So anyway, at end of October, I got badly sick again, while having personal issues (the latter likely helped the former to come ).



So as I have very few things to tell on the development side, I'll detail a bit what happened to me. Feel free to come back in a few weeks if you just want to read about dev updates... (it'll have a couple of dev related things, though, but more on a global scale than directly about TE4)

It turns out this mini-blog is a good way to remember what happens to me, so once again, I'll write for myself 1st, but I'll try to make this at least slightly entertaining for you...

So, as you may already know if you follow this mini-blog, I added a 2nd floor to my home these past months. The contractor decided to not finish the work (it only misses a handrail in the stairs, to fix a little something, and then to clean their mess) while significantly raising his final bill. We had a heated conversation about this, and we greatly disagreed about everything, which of course stressed me a lot for a while. When you stress, your immune system works less well, and thus you're easier to get sick : this is what happened to me a few days later. I got bronchitis (my new specialty ), and as I had to go out almost every day, it got worse. I even got otitis, which was a first for me since I was 12..!

The pain from the otitis woke me at night, making me cannot sleep, and thus the next day my body shut down : I spent 16 hours almost straight sleeping. I even fell asleep on my desk for the 1st time in my life ! (and I did my part of sleepless nights playing Civilization )

One little "funny" thing on the side : so I started to sleep in the afternoon, and my wife went outside for a couple of minutes, on the terrasse of our house. It's the time my baby decided to close all the shutters of the house (there's a dedicated button for that), so my wife got locked outside, in the cold..!

She banged the shutters for 2 hours. I heard the noise and in normal time I'd have got up quite quickly, but there I couldn't move. That's called the Murphy Law, and I guess it's the kind of thing that happens when you buy a house built on an Indian cemetery. (I'm kidding, am I ? )


[Spoiler] End of the Poltergeist movie, in which I learned I shouldn't buy a house built on an Indian cemetery [/Spoiler]

It really feels we're cursed...

So anyway, after that, I lost my appetite for days and thus several kilograms as well, while being stuck in bed for the best part of the day.

After 3 weeks of being sick, my health finally started to get better, but 2 weeks & a half after (ie: right now), I'm still a bit tired, although I'm nearly ok (coz I'm always tired anyway ).

However, I got a big scare : after a few days when I started to get better, I couldn't focus as usual. When developing video games, it's important to be able to focus a lot to think about a multitude of little things, as when you touch something in the code, it's always related to other things, which in turn are also related to other things and so on. So if you can't reach a focus level where you have all of this in your mind more or less at once (or at least can skip from one to another quickly), then you're doomed, it's not possible to work anymore. And it's what it felt like for me for a few days, and I was very concerned it would last a long time, or even forever. Fortunately, I got better and it passed, so this last week I was able to do some debugging on the dynamic animation system (which is especially demanding as all of this is quite complex ), but I guess it might be how I will end to work, one day. Hopefully, it'll be in a long time, when I'm in my sixties, and not before...

The positive of my lower focusing ability was that it gave me time to spend on my personal issues, which was to prepare all the stuff to go to see the judge and get that problem with the contractor solved. Hopefully, the judge will agree with me and not with him. We'll know in a few weeks, I guess.

That's about all for this time. I hope to get closer to full speed on dev next week, but I still have some stuff to prepare for the judge (and meet my lawyer), so I'm not sure how it'll go. It'd feel surely good to get some stuff done on TE4, coz seeing 1 month passing by and getting nothing except some bug fixes is not very satisfying...

Cu in a few weeks to see if luck will finally come back a bit on my side..!


A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=279156#p279156

[manutoo]

Back on track !

Ouch, this has been nearly 2 months since the last post in this mini-blog..!

This is because I like to do a post once I did some sensible update, and I just released the v0.48 which features the sliding, a feature that has been regularly requested for likely more than a decade..!

It works pretty well, and required a good amount of work in the past month. There are 6 new animations : 1H & 2H normal strikes, and the slice, for both the forehand & the backhand. All blends naturally in-game and provide a bit of extra reach. Gameplay-wise, they trigger automatically when you run fast enough and are at the correct distance of the ball, but they'll come a tiny bit late if you don't press a strike button, so skills will matter to get the most out of them.

They'll be more frequent on clay & grass than on other surfaces.

Sliding on Clay

Before creating the sliding, I thought it would be mainly a way to stretch to reach unreachable balls otherwise. And actually, after having studied a lot of Djokovic slides, I realized that sliding is firstly meant to be a way to stop quickly to run, in a manner to recover as fast as possible and run in the opposite direction, as well as avoid hitting the ball on the run (and losing time stopping to run after the strike). This came a bit as a shock to me, but then it made sense. You still get a bit of extra reach, but most of the time, running at full speed is the way to reach that current far ball, but if sliding is possible, then it's better to reach the next ball on the other side..!

Anyway, I took the occasion to polish a bit the existing double-handed forehand and create a 2nd one, more smooth. It's a pretty rare strike, but having a choice is (almost) always good and the new one looks better.

A bit of personal life

Before working on the slide, right after that last post, I spent 1 week preparing stuff for the judge, which was longer than expected. There's no progress except that on the process to go to the judge, and I'm not sure how long the whole thing will take. But once I was finished preparing my big file with a ton of explanations & documents, I was relieved and didn't lose too much time thinking about all that anymore. According to the law & my lawyer, I'm super right, but the whole thing could get a bit costly, so maybe it'll come back worrying me in the future, depending on how things evolve...

After that, I needed a big week to get back all my work rhythm & energy, and then it was X-mas holidays, so I spent some time with the kids, although I managed to still work decently.

I also found out a 2 or 3-year old bug in the saving/loading of the World Tour, that was preventing adding players without losing your saved game (a novelty of the TEM2-TE4 engine). As it had pretty complicated intrications, it took me several updates to fix all the cases (or at least I hope they are all fixed now ). Hopefully, you'll appreciate this feature (now that it's working ), as it'll let you add players to your current saved game which can be nice if you want to incorporate a new famous player (or not so famous !).

I also updated the Hall-of-Fame and career score shown at the end of your career in the World Tour. I hadn't done that for a while, for a simple reason : Djokovic is now #1, and put Federer at #2, which is kinda heartbreaking for me.
I know that Djoko is great and the best by overall numbers, but for the quality & beauty of the game, Federer will likely forever be my personal GOAT.
Funnily, when I created that scoring system for the Hall of Fame at 1st, for Tennis Elbow Manager 1 back in ~2007, I skewed the category weights (for weeks being number 1, Grand Slam titles, etc.), so Sampras would keep his #1 for as long as possible against Federer, and now he's gone... (at least Nadal is still #3 )

What's next ?

So my next goal is to finally try that motion matching system to see if it'll improve the animations of the players when moving & running around.

However, before doing that, I'd like to work a bit on the sound system. Indeed, I got Paulie & Bob Madden who provided for TE4 their recorded score announcements, so I took the occasion to create a special filter to make them sound like an umpire in a big stadium, and it's working pretty well, so I'd like everybody to enjoy these new announcements (I'll redo mine as well, so you'll still get that umpire with his sweet French accent, if you wish so ). After a bit of checking, it means I should put the new sound selection system in place. The current one is based on numbers, because its roots are nearly 30 years old : I had created it for the 1st Tennis Elbow, in 1994. So the new version will use text instead, which is much easier to Mod, as well as sub-folders to easily add selectable sounds by the user (eg: the Grunts & the Umpire announcements).

So normally, expect an update with all that by the end of the week... (except bad surprises, as usually )

That's all for today.

I wish all of you a Happy New Year 2022, and I surely hope it'll be better for all of us than 2021..!

And cu sooner next time ! (for real this time ? )

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=279156#p279156

[manutoo]

Milestone

I just released the v0.50 of TE4 yesterday..!

This is kinda a milestone, even if there wasn't a really special content associated with that number : the increment was due to adding the high & low volley animations, which are a nice addition (hopefully ).

This is the occasion to clarify what this versioning is based on : it's about the content enjoyable by the end-user, and not the work involved to put it into the game. So actually, already more than 50% of my work is done to reach the v1.0 of TE4, but many contents need to be added ; let's try to list them :
- 10 stadiums => +0.10
- Commentaries => +0.05
- Gameplay tuning, balancing & enhancing => +0.15
- Single tournament mode, service training, ball-thrower mode => +0.05
- Animation improvements => +0.05 (more improvements might come after the v1.0, though)
- Other many little things => +0.10

The next step will be to try to add stretching animations into the game, and then I'll be done with the animations that influence the gameplay, which means I could start thinking how to balance the service (if it's still needed) and stuff like that.

Although I might jump on adding the Stadiums before doing gameplay stuff.

Motion Matching Test

So I did the Motion Matching test.

The good news is that it produces some very nice result, and it's great to see the player moving with motion captured animations :


The bad news is that the animation set provided with that system doesn't include sidesteps. This is not really surprising as it's something very specific, but I was still hoping to see some...

And overall, the running animations aren't best for a tennis game as well, and the racket holding is incorrect.

So all in all, it means it's necessary to produce by myself a complete animation set with a good tennis player. And then make all these animations game-ready (eg: clean the misorientation of the feet that often happen with motion capture, and stuff like that). This is a very big task. I won't do it before the v1.0 of TE4. I'll very likely need to pay an animator artist to do the animation cleaning and it might get costly. But hopefully, we'll get there someday.

Anyway, this shows great promise and it's a system I have been dreaming of for nearly 20 years : you just have to tell the Motion Matching system where the player goes and then it'll find the best matching motion by itself.

To completely validate the system, I should create my own movement script. In that video, I just used the demo bundled with the package, and it feels a bit unresponsive, but it might be because the running acceleration is a bit low, and the inertia is a bit too high. I didn't test more because I won't be able to get the correct animations before a while, so it doesn't make sense to invest more time in it right now.

Tiring Times

On a more personal side, I'm kinda tired these last few days : after a few nice weeks around January, trouble found its way again. Mostly this has been my kids getting badly sick, and thus needing extra care & attention. They're alright now, but there's always a little something coming here or there.
I'm starting to be quite impatient that the 2nd one goes to school next September, but on the other hand, he's quite an adorable baby when he doesn't destroy our house, so it's tearing coz I'm not that hurry to not see him like this anymore...


That's all for today, cu again in a few weeks.

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=280620#p280620

[manutoo]

Another Milestone

So this milestone is less symbolic than the last one : the v0.52 was just released, with the next stretch animations for the forehand & backhand rally strikes, which means I'm done with adding animations to the game (or at least for a long while). They might require a bit of debugging and/or tuning, though.

After, I'm going to move to add the remaining stadiums, and 1st I'm going to create a menu to select comfortably the Stadium & the surface, which will be even more needed for Mods packed with 2D courts. For these, the game will add them to the selection menu without the need to touch the menu scripts, and their listing will be name based instead of num based, like other new modding parts (eg: the outfits), so it'll be easier to combine many courts into your Mods folder.

Forehand Stretching Anim right after hit

On the personal side, my sons are sick, so it has been quite a tiring week, so hopefully they'll be fully healed within a couple of days...


"Money, that's what I want"

Reminder : you probably already aware of it, but I'm not into Indie Game business for the money (if you think it's a good way to get rich, it's not ), but paying the bills & affording a decent life to my family & myself is important too...

So let's settle a tradition and look at how much each game contributed in 2021 to my total earning.

I did it for the 1st time with my 2020 income here : viewtopic.php?p=274236#p274236 .

So let's compare the evolution with the release of TE4 in 2021.

But before that, let's point out something : a couple of months after the official final release of TEM2 on Steam last May, its sales totally plummeted. It got ridiculously low now.

I think there are 3 reasons for that :
1) The main one is likely the release of a concurrent tennis manager game on Steam, the 1st one ever ; so far, TEM never got any noticeable concurrence
2) Actually, it seems that a bunch of people were buying TEM2 because it was the latest Elbow game in the series ; now these people buy TE4 instead
3) Despite being flagged as Early Access, TEM2 was more or less done since 2 years before its final release, so it already has done most of its normal sale ; seeing the sale rate (actually guessing it by checking its review number growth), it seems the concurrent game follows a kinda similar cycle

Once again it covers the period from December 2020 to November 2021, as I get paid 1 month later by Steam, it's what counts for the money coming into my bank account for the 2021 year.
TE4 : 47% (up from 13% in 2020)
TEM2 : 27% (down from 43% in 2020)
TE2013 : 14% (down from 30% in 2020)
Dungeon Guardians : 11% (down from 13% in 2020)
TEM1 : 1%

Unfortunately, despite the final release of TEM2 and the Early Access release of TE4 on Steam, the total income of 2021 isn't that much above the one of 2020. It's still quite decent but it looks like I won't be able to buy a tropical island right away...

But the main lesson here is that TE4 sales account for nearly half of my total income, which means if I hadn't released it in Early Access, I would have been in a quite difficult financial position, so it was a good decision, even if the game felt a bit too unpolished to be released at that time (it's much better now, I hope most of you will agree )

It does that despite somewhat disappointing sales : it's on par with TEM2 sale, while I was expecting the doubles at least. TEM1 sold very little compared to TE2013 ; I knew the ratio would lower between TEM2 & TE4, but being equal is quite the surprise. I hope in the long term TE4 will get significantly above TEM2 (even if it may need to wait for the console releases), else financially it won't be great.

There's another important thing, but these numbers don't show it : the trend of 2022 will likely be something like 75% for TE4 (or more if its sales finally pick up), which means my income will be highly dependent on only 1 game, which hadn't happened since the release of Dungeon Guardians in 2015 (TE2013 got released in 2015 on Steam as well). It's not too bad, but it's always more comfortable not to have all one's eggs in the same basket...

Cu soon for more dev news !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=281266#p281266

PS: Woohohho, a new mini-blog post less than 1 month after the previous one..!

[manutoo]

Pfffff (™)

Almost 2 months since the last post in this mini-blog !

Spoiler Alter : jump to the next title to avoid not-much-work-related personal stuff...

This means 2 thing :
- tough personal time (again)
- working hard on the game

For the personal side, my elder boy stayed more or less sick 1 more week, which was the start of 2 weeks of illness for me : like my whole family, a kind of bad cold with a sore throat that got me so tired I couldn't work...

Once again, a few days before getting sick, I was getting quite tired already and thought I should take a break, but I wanted to finish the previous big update 1st and some fixes and other little stuff afterward, and once again, I got sick before I could finish everything... It makes me think I should really change a bit of work rhythm, by either taking 1 (near) full rest day per week, or by taking holidays sometimes instead of waiting to get sick before doing so...

Anyway, it's not going to happen right now because my wife is doing training for a couple of months on one side, and another side, my mum is quite tired and thus I take care often of our baby. This is kinda nice coz so far I didn't spend that much time with him (unlike my 1st born son), and in September he'll go to school so it's my last chance to enjoy my baby, but on the other end, it doesn't help to focus on TE4...

So I had to jungle with all that, but all in all, it wasn't too bad work-wise because I wasn't that far from a normal work rhythm (the dad-work-rhythm, not the single-life-forever-work-rhythm from my long-gone past ).

This was even more true as we are just out of the 2-week easter holiday of my elder, where I took care of him more than usual, or even the 2 boys at the same time. (working is quite resting compared to that..! )

And TE4 in all that ?!?

So I released the v0.57 of TE4 a couple days ago, with 3 new stadiums, and the v0.54 a couple weeks ago with 1 new stadium : so I can confirm I can do 2 stadiums per week when I'm not taken by other things. I still hope to do the 7 remaining stadiums by end of May, but with the busy family life, it's going to be quite a challenge..!

In the last version, I also fixed a big animation bug that was giving some weird hips movement when the ball was far ; I feel that now in the common stretching case, it looks quite nice ; however, there are still some jerkiness when running slightly backward to catch a ball.

Before integrating the new stadiums, I worked on a new menu to select the stadium to play with in the Training Club. It took me longer than expected because I wanted to be sure that modding-wise this would stand the test of time, to avoid future incompatibility or need to redo many things for the Modders. I think the result is clean & efficient : the surfaces & the stadiums are now completely separate entities and thus it's easier to handle overall while removing a bunch of grunt work when the same surface is used amongst different stadiums.

This required some changes in the World Tour engine and lead to a series of annoying little bugs in TEM2 that cost me a couple of headaches to solve...

Monte-Carlo Stadium

TE4 FTW !

Yesterday, on Sunday May the 1st, for the 1st time ever, the tennis game on Steam with the highest peak players was... TE4..!

It came out a bit as a surprise to me, even if the game is more and more played. The main concurrent of TE4 is AO2 (TE2013 is still number 1 overall ), and now counting the managames.com version, TE4 is more played than AO2. Hopefully, it'll go on like that.

TE4 is number 1 for peak players on May 1st !

BTW, this is a good occasion to send a big thanks to the whole XK Team that is creating a quite nice Mod which is shaping very well : topic15-33852.php . The 1st version has been released in mid-march which matches a noticeable bump in the TE4 played rate.

Yesterday's feat would have surely not been accomplished without their help..!

That's all for this time. Hopefully cu end of this month for the release of the version with all the 3D stadiums. That'd be a big milestone passed as well.

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=281377#p281377

[manutoo]

Another milestone done !

Woohoo, I just released the v0.64 yesterday, which is a very big milestone : all the 20 planned stadiums are now in the game.

Actually, only 19 were planned, the TET500 stadium is already a bonus : the 3D artist did a little conceptual mistake when creating the TET250 one as he put too many seats, and instead of trashing his work, I recycled it..!

Anyway, at this point, everything that matters the most for TE4 is already in the game (except maybe some animation improvements, but these ones are much harder to tackle with, as explained in previous posts).

Everything I'll do now will be a bonus, a welcome bonus (or at least I hope so ), but still a bonus. This kinda lowers the pressure on me, which is welcome. (ie: if I die or something similar, you are left with a not too bad game )

So for bonus, about the stadiums, at some point in a more or less distant future, I plan to :
- add a Training Court stadium, which is actually already in-game next to the newly added Side Court, so it'll be only a matter of moving the camera and switching the props & possibly the NPCs (and likely add the possibility to remove everyone, including the chair umpire, so it'll feel like playing at your local tennis club )
- add night session, and possibly different times for the sun positioning
- hire back the 3D artist to create 2 very small stadiums (or more like tennis club courts) for the Future tournaments, 1 outdoor & 1 indoor ; I'll do this only if the game earnings allow it

Training Courts, still not available in the game, next to the Side Court from v0.64

1-year-on-Steam anniversary

In 5 days, it'll be 1 year since the Early Access release on Steam. Overall, the result is somewhat disappointing : the sales are about 50% of the minimum I was hoping for, and 33% of what I thought it could be..!

Ok, I can't complain too much, coz it's actually still enough money to pay the bills & everything, but it's saddening. I guess the concurrence from the AA tennis games released in the past few years has made more impact than what I had expected. In the distant past, Top Spin releases never influenced my sales, but after the 2nd opus, they were not released on PC anymore, and more importantly, TE sales back in these times were much lower, so it was really only from tennis aficionados and thus more casual tennis players were stirring away from it anyway, Top Spin or not. It's only once TE got released on Steam in 2015, without any serious concurrence, that it became a choice for some casual tennis gamers as well.

So now I hope that on one side it'll be possible to release the game on consoles as planned & it'll be successful enough, and on the other one that the long trail of sales will be somewhat constant, but only time will tell...


Incoming Stuff

I'm going to focus on adding :
- material Mod support for the stadiums (this will allow changing the textures, their colors, and the surfaces)
- then add the possibility to load easily any player from the World Tour in the Training Club
- remove the pre-determined saving slots for the player in the Training Club, so you'll enter the name for each saved player, allowing unlimited slots
- and then add the long-requested single tournament mode

I hope all that will be done by end of June, but I'm actually not sure how much work is all this...

Anyway, cu soon for more news ! Meanwhile, enjoy the best season for tennis, either on TV or on a real court ! (if you're on the North hemisphere, of course )

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=282459#p282459

[manutoo]

"Not a flu"

So after the previous mini-blog post, my son got sick for a couple of days while I still had to take care of my baby, so all in all, June started on stand-by.

After that, I got back to work and did the things I had planned in the previous post : Modding for the Stadium, but with more stuff than planned as Mystery & XK requested a few more things for their XKT Patch, the World Tour player importation into the Training Club and the player saving slots.

All was well ; it took a tad more than expected between the sickness of my son and the extra stuff done, but I still had 1 week left before the end of June and I was confident I could do the Unique Tournament mode in 1 week or just a bit more than that.

And then it hit us, the whole family. It started with my son throwing up his dinner on the floor, and being terribly sick for a few days, then it got my wife, then me, then finally our baby. After 2 years and a half, the COVID-19 finally got us, for real this time.

Another Roadblock - The one too many

For me, the disease itself was actually not that bad ; I wasn't sick anymore after 3 or 4 days, but it left me really tired and completely destroyed my mood : less than 1 month after the previous roadblock, I got another one and I was really fed up to get so much sh*t in my life all the time, and thus my motivation, almost never affected in the past 6 years despite everything, took a strong hit. So I needed 2 more weeks of slow work to get back to normal. All in all, I lost about 3 weeks of work. Pfff....

Unfortunately, these 2 weeks were on the Unique Tournament. And I was 50% right to think it would be fast : in less than 3 small days of work, it was up and running. But I was 50% super wrong to think it would be fast : then I added the player selection. I had to jump through old & very old intricated code, that even if I remembered the structure, I couldn't remember all the little details and interactions and I f*cking suffered as every time I changed 1 thing here it broke 2 other things there. It was nightmarish, and it was the very last time I was doing a deep change in the World Tour system. Changing the New Game creation process was also painful, but at least it had been done quickly enough and with way fewer bugs.

Unique Tournament - Player Selection

On a brighter note, for my global mood for the year, it was nice to take half a break. Just I hope the next time it will happen without needing me to get sick 1st...


Brighter future ?

I'm not sure how it'll go till the end of summer : with the kids home, it's kinda hard to work anyway. Fortunately, my mum still takes the big one quite frequently. Also, I'd like to spend some quality time with them, so I'll likely take a few days off here & there.

So now, I'm still not 100% sure, but I think I'd like to do these things :
- the Training Court stadium
- tickle a bit the commentary system, to see if I could settle the basics down

Also, the refund rate of TE4 is too high : around 25% since its release on Steam 1 year ago. For comparison, TE3 is 12% since release (but probably a bit higher than that lately), and TEM2 one is 15%.

So I guess it can be hard for some newcomers to learn the game, and with an easier time at 1st, the refund rate could hopefully lower to 15%.

To reach that objective, I think I will also soon add :
- a new helper : to move a bit more quickly on the 1st running steps ; this will help people with low reflexes, and give a closer TE3 feel for the TE3 fans, helping them to make the jump
- a tutorial ; it probably won't be complete, but at least it should have the basics : move, strike the ball, aim, serve

The new stadium should come pretty fast : it's almost all done as it's next to the Side Court as shown in the previous post, so it's just a matter of doing a little system to select different NPCs, moving the stadium scene around, and disabling the crowd & umpire sounds ; but for the other tasks, I'm really not sure how long it could get...

Anyway, I'll try to keep you updated on this mini-blog faster than every 2 months, so hopefully cu soon...

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=282567#p282567

[manutoo]

Onward

Woh, it took me only a couple of weeks to do a good bunch of things ; 1st, and as expected, I added the Training court pretty quickly and it's a nice addition to the game.

The Footwork Booster came shortly after. I got nearly 0 feedback on it, so I'm not sure how helpful it is. If no one ever again tells me the players are too slow compared to TE4, I guess I'll consider it a win...

Then I thought about how to create the tutorial. I quickly came to the conclusion that I'd need the programmable Ball Thrower to do it, in order to have all the kinds of exercises required to teach the gameplay. So I did that. In the momentum, I also added the many times requested Service Training. I made it so it can also serve (pun intended) as a return of serve training (by taking control of the 2nd player), and even as a serve & volley training (which is quite useful coz it's kinda hard to get the hang on it when playing a match, even if it's an exhibition).

And I did all that in just a bit more than 2 weeks, without too much hassle, so it was invigorating for once...

The new Ball Thrower programing

A breeze of fresh air

I've now started to fully work on TE4 more than 3 years ago. That's a lot, especially as the game is still far from being done. I had spent something like 2 years and a half on TEM2, and 3 years on Dungeon Guardians. I had worked less than 2 years on TE3 (not counting the long support after the release of TE2011 in 2010). So TE4 will be the game I'll have spent the most years on, even if I work a bit fewer hours per week now that I'm a dad.

And now for the 1st time in 3 years, I feel I'm getting close to the release. Still not too close : I'm not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can smell a bit of fresh air in the deepness of my cave, so I must be crawling in the right direction...
Indeed, there's now only 1 feature left in the "Medium-term features" section of the Roadmap, besides working on the gameplay : topic15-33253.php .
The other features are flagged as "probably but not 100% sure". So I think I'd need about 2 weeks for the tutorial basics, then 1 month on the commentary system. All this could leave me around mid-October wide in the open about what to work on for TE4..!

So it's kinda a nice feeling, and I'm getting confident the v1.0 could be there for June 2023, if there's no major sh*t coming my way.

Another bright side : the refund rate dropped to less than 19% in the past 30 days. I'm not sure how relevant it is, because Steam shows only the past 30 days or whole life stats, so I cannot know if the refund rate dropped that low before, nor if it was common. The global refund rate also dropped under 24%, so I'd say it was a significant drop overall.

My best guess to that drop is not the newly added Footwork Boost, though. I think it's most probably due to the recent fixes to the dynamic animation system : now, there's no silly animation anymore as soon as you're a bit misplaced or run. There is still a lot of bending when required, but overall it feels more natural and less buggy, and it ought to make a better 1st impression on at least a significant part of the users. So hopefully, the rate won't rise again, and it'll go noticeably down once the tutorial basics will have been done.


Cu soon, except if the tutorial creation turns into a development hell (also I might take the next week off, more or less )

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[manutoo]

Tough time again (but not super bad )

Pffff, that past month has been quite tiring.

1st, I had to take care of my 2 sons for 2 weeks at the end of August (coz my mum was away), and it's 10 times more tiring than working... (they spent their time running, yelling, fighting & hurting themselves and each other )

Then it was the end of the holidays and time for them to go back to school, which led to many little & bigger things to take care of my family & home, like usual. And all that left me really exhausted.

However I managed to do the Tutorial, but it took a bit longer than expected. The result is quite nice, I got good feedback, and I think it'll help many newcomers to get into the game, especially once the game will be on consoles where no one ever read a manual (on PC, it's not really common either, I guess )

Tutorial lesson in the Tennis School

And after that I took 1 week off more or less (ie: I was swamped with personal chores & errands ).

Then I got a bit better and I decided to add the Time of Day so all the tennis stadiums could enjoy different shadowing depending on the selected hour, before jumping on the commentaries' mountain. I thought it'd be fast & straightforward to do. Once again, I was wrong...

The basics were indeed quite simple : the sun was positioned and moving during the match quite quickly. However, drastically changing the lighting on the stadiums led to many small & big visibility issues. I had to change the rendering of all the helpers, but more complicated, I had to retune the different lighting elements so everything would be visible even when there's no sun at all on the court (on a real TV match, the camera let us see the court quite clearly in such a case). Unfortunately, the result isn't perfect as it's quite hard to get something consistent between the players, the NPCs, the crowd & the stadium...

If you read this blog 3 years ago, maybe you remember the HDRP rendering : it was meant to solve this kind of situation, but unfortunately, I had to give up using it because it was too slow. So these last few days, I direly missed it...

Anyway, the result with the sun is really nice, and seeing the shadows evolve over the hours is quite atmospheric, noticeably more than what I thought before working on that feature. The only issue is once the sun doesn't touch the court or its immediate surroundings, at 19.00 or 20.00.

Shadows at 1.00 on the French Slam Stadium

Hopefully, it'll be easier to set up the night sessions (I'll likely do them once the commentary 1st big pass will be done).

That's all for now. I'm going to focus on the commentary starting new week (except if some surprise comes up), and hopefully I'll have most bases done within 1 month. But it'll need more time to integrate the 10'000+ lines, and if you want to give a hand, I'll likely very welcome it : I'm going to create a little script system so anyone motivated could do it. (I'll tell you more once it'll be up & running)

Cu next time for more news !

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[manutoo]

Ouch

(skip to the next header if you don't want to read me complaining about my life )

Pfff, so that's more than 2 months since the last post in this mini-blog. I think it's the longest or 2nd longest time ever between 2 posts (including the TEM2 mini-blog).

Since September, my wife has been in training ; thus, I had to take care of the kids more than usual. With the little one going to school, at 1st it was somewhat manageable, but quickly he got sick, then good, then sick again ; nothing too bad (just badly coughing), but it means he had to stay at home, and I could barely do any work for several weeks, especially as I had so many little & medium things to take care of outside of work.

The main one outside of the kid is that the contractor who did my 2nd-floor last year finally started to sue me, which of course shocked me a bit, especially as his initial request to the judge is full of lies. The whole process is going to take months at best, so maybe it'll have a judgment around the beginning of next spring. I'm relatively confident I'll win, but I'm not sure if it'll be an 80, 90 or 100% win.

Also, my little one is now 3 years old and he's very difficult, he very often doesn't obey or follow any directions ; moreover, with his big brother they often fight and make mischief, which means I have to police them all the time, and it's quite tiring...

Fortunately, it already started to get a bit better, and my wife's training is finished today, so I hope the hardest is behind us now...


My Vietnam ?


The hill depicted in the movie "Hambuger Hill"

All this was topped by my current goal : integrate the commentaries done by Darren Kilfara. He did an incredible job, with more than 10'000 commentaries recorded, labeled, organized in a sensible system to be all replayed in good context. However, it means it's an awful lot of work for me as well to put them in the game.

So far, I worked on the generic set of ~1000 lines. 1st I can convert around 10 context descriptions per hour ; they were about 2 lines per context, so it took me ~50 hours to convert the contexts for the generic set. It took more than a couple of weeks as on one side I didn't have much available time, and on another one, it's a very tiring and tedious work, as it requests to focus a lot, constantly remembering the variables I already created to evaluate the contexts and pondering which ones to create when they are needed, and how to do that in a clean & efficient way.

Once that was done, I was left with the generic set using 275 variables for its context evaluations. Around 70 were already existing in the engine (mostly the stats & the skills you can see here & there, and a few other stuff). So I had to code into the engine more than 200 new variables.

Overall, I needed a bit more than 5 minutes per variable to add them all. The longest ones took between 30 and 75 minutes, and fortunately many took only a couple of minutes. This is also very energy-draining work : constantly jumping to a new thing every few minutes is hard on the brain (at least mine ), and I was glad to go back to more normal coding once I was done with that part.

Anyway, this is a titanic work to incorporate the remaining commentaries. So I think I'm not going to do it now as it's not the hill I want to die on. Or I'll try to do little bit by little bit every day when I have a bit of free time, but then it might take months.

At 1st, I was hoping it'd be possible to ask for help from the community to do that, but it's actually tough coder work, and not everybody can do it. Moreover, you can't just throw 20 minutes and be done to give me a bit of help. You cannot do that without having a least a rough idea of what are the ~300 existing variables and what you can do with them. If you want a quick peek at the very basics, head there : topic15-34390.php .


Incoming goals

So next I'm going to try to integrate the ~1000 comments made to present each match of the World Tour. These ones are very easy on the coding side. There's a trick though : to play them, I need to create a little cutscene at the beginning of each match, to show the stadium with likely the players warming up, as it'd feel weird to hear the commentator talking on a static screen with nothing going on in there.

I hope it'll take me 1 week.

Once it's done, I'll do the night session for all the stadiums and then move to work mostly on the gameplay for a couple of months.

So hopefully cu sooner for the next post in this mini-blog..!

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[manutoo]

This is progress

So it took me nearly 2 weeks instead of the hoped 1, but 2 days ago I released the v0.76 featuring almost 1000 commentary intros by Darren Kilfara for each round of each TET level & above tournament, which means you can play 1 year at the top level and never hear twice the same intro !

There are also a few intros for the Future & Challenger tournaments, as well as for the qualies, but these ones will repeat randomly over a few choices.

Overall, I think it really improves the atmosphere of the game (which once again, I didn't really expect ), and I hope most of you will agree..!

This version 0.76 also features a flyby camera during the intros, which means the basics for the possible future cutscenes are mostly done.

All that took a bit more time than excepted in part because a few intros had special conditions ; after scratching my head a bit, I finally just used the same system as for the main commentaries, as it's pretty efficient, robust & easy to use.


Looking to the future

These last few months, I changed my mind a bit about the future, mostly about the console ports.

I think it should be my main goal as soon as the main work on the gameplay will be done, which should hopefully happen by next March. This could mean the XBox version being released a few months later, depending on how hard the whole port will be, and how exigent are the Microsoft guidelines.

I think it's a reasonable thing to do now that all the main features are done. The only important thing left out might be to rework the sounds (eg: having small crowd sounds would make sense for the small stadiums). Maybe I'll start that at some point in the middle ; eg: maybe porting the game will be horribly tedious and I'll need a break...

For now, I'm going to assess a bit the rest of the commentaries, to check if I can do a bit of them every day like hoped (there are nearly 4000 commentaries left, which probably means something like 1 or 2 thousands of conditional formulas to write). Then I'll add the night sessions, while very likely taking a few days off during the Xmas holidays to enjoy some quality time with my sons. Or at least try to, they're often terrible and hurt each other a good part of the time...

I hope to be done with the night sessions in 2 weeks.


The night session, but without the lights
(this is just a stupid little joke coz I didn't know what picture to put to illustrate the new commentaries in the previous section )


I wish you all some nice Xmas holidays,
Cu next time !

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[manutoo]

Neverending Story

Ouch, 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).

Shanghai's Lights & Light Probes (the yellow balls, and all the purple lines' intersections)

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...

Night Session at the US Open

You can also see the light icons for Shanghai on the 1st screenshot.

I hope you'll enjoy these fixes & additions !


Other things & Personal management

In 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 !

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[manutoo]

Burn out ?

>> Skip to the next section if you just want dev news, instead of me complaining about my life... <<

Pffff, a bit more than 2 months since the last post in the mini-blog...

The main reason is that I'm damn tired since around mid-January and it didn't get any better, at least not for more than a couple of days, and I'm afraid it might be still going on, although it got noticeably better since 1 week.

On some days, I was feeling completely exhausted at 17.00 or 18.00, even though I didn't work much that day. Often, after 20 minutes or 1 hour, I felt empty. And other stuff like that.

I think my little one (who is 3 years and a half now) is really sucking the energy out of my soul as he still can get super annoying quite frequently and very often fight with his big brother (who can be painful at times as well).

During the February school holidays, my 1st son got ill for almost the 2 weeks, which didn't help either...

And it's not all on the personal side : the latest addition is a broken pipe under my house, which seems super complicated to repair...

There are other painful things as well going on but it'd too long to explain.

Anyway, I got so tired I started to worry I had some serious health issue (more exactly the thyroid as it's running badly in my family), and did complete blood tests : apparently, I'm fine.

I read a bit about burnout as well, and my mood & motivation to work when I get up in the morning are alright, so it's unlikely that as well.

Maybe I just miss taking some significant holidays...

So I try to relax a bit more, but actually, I don't have much free time, even when I don't work that much, I'm always taken by many little things (2 of them being running & screaming boys ).


Moving on

But still, I work, and thus some progress is made, which is definitively better than nothing.

I fixed a few animation bugs, including this one :

Hey Doc, I think I cracked my back a tad too much

I think it was the last very bad one. So now, there's still a bit of jerking sometimes when missing the ball, or some movement a tad too abrupt. It'll be hard to make them better without having manually created animations, though.

After that, I started to work on the gameplay, which was welcome as it's more forgiving when I cannot work long hours : it's more important to have good ideas and analytic methods, and these come when taking my time.

Although, I noticed I had to raise the maximum backspin to make it more realistic for modern tennis and changing it has been chaotic as it has many implications hard to spot without playing the game a lot. Thanks to the feedback of many players I think it's under control now and playable again. If not, I hope some players will let me know...

It's nice to work on the gameplay, it's less repetitive and thus less boring than production work, and I'm glad I could finally put into the game things I was talking about years ago : for example, the Counter Puncher had no advantages compared to the other player styles, as it has been designed for the AI in TEM2 ; finally now, it's an interesting choice as he has a smaller handicap when doing an acceleration on a raising ball, leading to a different tennis strategy.

So in the next couple of months, I'll go on working on the gameplay (and probably a couple of other things), and then once it'll have enough new stuff and be stabilized enough, I'll move to port the game to the XBox (hopefully in July).


2022 Sales

To end this post, let's have a look at how much each game contributed to my 2022 income. Last year, I had noted TE4 could reach 75% of the total for 2022.

TE4 : 68% (up from 47% in 2021)
TEM2 : 13% (down from 27% in 2021)
TE2013 : 9% (down from 14% in 2021)
Dungeon Guardians : 10% (down from 11% in 2021)
TEM1 : less than 1%

Overall, my income lowered by ~10% compared to 2021, and it'd have been a bit worse if the Euro didn't fall against the USD.

So the other games than TE4 resisted a bit better than what early 2022 let me thought, but also TE4 underperformed (as I explained in a previous post). Nothing too bad so far, as I can still pay the bills (despite the inflation ) and put some money on the side.

However, the beginning of 2023 is very bad, with a near drop of 30% of my income compared to the beginning of 2022 ; so the console releases will start to be really needed within 1 year ; fortunately, I still have some decent reserves right now, so I don't have to worry about that for a while.


Who is #1 ?

Oops, I almost forgot... Since last September, TE4 is still the most-played tennis game on Steam, despite a big fight from AO2 which is close to taking the upper hand (its user base is likely 6 or 7 times bigger, if not more).

But since January, TE4 is now the most-played tennis game on PC and by a decent margin, even more against AO2..! This means it finally dethroned TE2013.

I'm #1 so why try harder.jpg (43.4 KiB) Viewed 7671 times

And I'm still #2 ! (with TE2013)

Side note: I put this picture now, because maybe in the future it won't be the case anymore, especially for having both 1st & 2nd places at the same time !

Yeepee ! (let me enjoy it while it lasts )


That's all for this time,
cu next time, which may or may not be sooner...

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