Mana Games

[manutoo]

It can't be good

So yup, more than 2 months since the last post, it can't be good.

Once again, I got super busy on the personal side.

Let's start with some good news : during the Eastern holidays, I took 1 week off (more or less), coz anyway I didn't have a choice with both my boys at home, and it turned out I didn't feel that tired anymore after that. So I'm definitively not ill or burned out, I'm just f*cking tired from all the things I have to do and the little rest I can take...

Then a bit after I got a small medical operation that left me in more or less light pain for 3 weeks (I didn't expect it but it was kinda normal) ; and during that time, my wife went to visit her family for 2 weeks as it had been planned for a while. So I took care of my boys alone as well as myself, as my mum has been sick too for almost 2 months now.

Anyway, all that got me super busy & quite tired again.

But I'm still ok-ish...


This is not progress ?

Despite all that, I managed to work on the gameplay, mostly the doubles, and also fix a bunch of bugs, as well as integrating the ModIo plugin that allows downloading & installing the Mods from within the game, which should give the possibility of easily Modding the game on consoles.

I also gave some serious thoughts about the context-sensitive action button and will likely not implement it, mostly because it'd not be much useful ; check here for more details : topic15-34820.php .

But also because the complaints from the changes I did to the drop shot & the slice back in April made me realize that the game is already well enjoyed as it is now, so I shouldn't disrupt the gameplay. I should of course still tune it & fix the issues reported by the users, but I should really not make anything that would turn it upside down for a part of the player-base (or at least not without a very good reason).

For the same reason, I likely won't try to add a power bar for the serve. It's not really needed, and it'd bring some big confusion if done with the same existing rules : a service charged at 90% could end faster than a service charged at 100%. Of course, the average speed would be lower, though, but not necessarily over just a few serves, so it'd be very hard to understand what would be going on.

I'd still like to try my idea for adding a bit of timing to the service, which would influence its precision, though, but it might be quite hard to make it interesting & feel good. We'll see if I get to it in the next few weeks.


Incoming !

So I'm still focusing on the gameplay for 1 month, as well as fixing any reported issues, and trying to enhance the modding capabilities of the game.

I'd also still like to redo & add some sounds, although I'm not sure I'll have the time for that before a while.

xbox.png

Then I hope to start the Xbox port before the end of July. I recently discovered I was not up-to-date in the Microsoft program so I have some things to do 1st, but I hope they'll be done within a couple of weeks. I'm kinda impatient to see if the 1st steps will be fast enough or not (ie: getting the game to run on my Xbox devkit). The next ones will surely be longer, though, so I can't give any schedule, but I hope it'll be done by the end of 2023...


That's all for this time,
cu next time...

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=286910#p286910

[manutoo]

In need for big holidays ?

So I didn't do much since the last post in this mini-blog, 1 month and a half ago.

The main reason is that I got sick : bronchitis again, but nothing too bad at 1st ; it has gone south when I got a food intoxication on top of that, and I was super tired for 3 weeks. During the last one, I was on a small family vacation, for the 1st time in 5 years..! So it has been a good occasion to rest & change my mind a bit.

The big issue now is that I don't feel that motivated anymore to work on TE4. I still don't think it's a burnout; it's just I have been working on TEM2 & TE4 for nearly 7 years now, and that's an awfully long time, so I just got enough of it.

Actually, I'm still enthusiastic to add little stuff here & there but when I face a longer task (ie: a few days), I just don't feel having the energy & focus to get into it.

Maybe I just need more holidays and come back fresher to all that. In the past 10 days, I have relaxed way more than usual, and even read a book for the 1st time in 10 years (excluding the tennis player biographies I've read while working on TEM2).

I still managed to do a decent update 10 days ago, but that's only 1 in one month, where I should have output 2 if I didn't get sick & tired. (plus having the kids at home all the time doesn't help )

Moreover, my Xbox dev status validation process has been delayed a bit, so I still cannot work on porting the game to Xbox. There's a decent chance it'll get resolved this week, though.

However, I was able to consult the documentation. I cannot give any detail because I'm under NDA, but I guess it should be ok to do this broad & vague summary : there are way fewer constraints than I had expected to port the game to Xbox, and in the case of TE4 it could be basically summed up to "the game should work". This mainly means that I should handle better the crashes in the World Tour, which can prevent the GUI to work forever. I was already not happy with that for the PC version, so being forced to handle it more gracefully for Xbox will give me the occasion to do the fix I was thinking of : asking the user to load the last saved game or exit the game.

I only quickly surveyed the Xbox guidelines, so I may have missed a few things here & there, but right now, I'm relatively confident the port could be done by the end of the year. It might take a couple of months to be able to release it after that, though (ie: Microsoft will have to check the build, and I'll have to see how to publish it on the Xbox store).

Else, right now, I still have some little goals though, even though I'm on half-holidays :
- I'd like to make TEM2 work within TE4 ; if there's no bad surprise, it should take only a couple of days to do it
- I'd also like to make it possible to have grunts triggering before the ball hit, so it'd be more realistic ; with the hit prediction being now in a decent state, it should work correctly 99% of the time, although it might get a bit weird sometimes, so I'm sure of the result...

So cu next time to see if I'll get my mojo back or not...

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=287963#p287963

[manutoo]

Business as usual ?

So finally I took 2 weeks of half-vacations, and then 2 weeks of nearly full vacations, which were much needed, especially with France being hit by a big heatwave during that time.

I kinda feel fresher, but as I'm less tired I sleep less, so I'm kinda tired again...

Anyway, I went back to work last week and did a long-promised feature : the possibility of playing TEM2 within TE4 ! This allows us to enjoy the improved 3D visuals and the many stadiums from TE4 while having a deep enough management & coaching experience.

To activate TEM2 within TE4, you need to have bought both games. You have a 40% off link for TEM2 in your TE4 License Key email if you have bought the game from ManaGames.com, and a 30% off bundle on Steam (also including TEM1 & TE2013). TEM2 is also currently 25% off on ManaGames.com (with a free Steam key) : http://www.managames.com/buy.php?g=TEM2 .

2023-09 - TE4 - TEM2 within TE4.jpg

Except that I did some gameplay tuning from user feedback, and added about 200 lines of commentaries for special cases on serve. It proved to be not too difficult but not too easy either to dive back into all the variables for commentary formulas. It made me feel I couldn't have done what I hoped last year : do a little bit every day ; it'd have just felt like a never-ending task, which is very demotivating. There, for the 200 lines, I needed almost 3 low-intensity days, which already felt long enough. I have another listing for the end of set & match with ~650 commentaries and I'll try to do it in the future, but I'm not sure when I'll get the time.


To Infinity and Beyond

I'm still waiting for my Xbox contract to be counter-signed ; it has already taken 2 months longer than announced...

I hope it'll be done soon so I can start the Xbox port.

Meanwhile, in the next few days, I may be working on other things than TE4.

I lately realized that I didn't do much gameplay-wise. I even didn't try the new service gameplay to influence its precision. I didn't have much in the mood for that. I rather stick to more technical stuff. Maybe it'll change in the future and I'll give it a try. I'm still on board for tuning & checking, though.

I didn't have the energy nor the time to improve the grunt system, but it's still in the corner of my head as well.

So cu next time, hopefully for slow but noticeable progress, especially on the Xbox side.

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=288534#p288534

[manutoo]

Unity Gigantic Clursterfuck

2 days ago, Unity (the engine I've been using to create my games since The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians) introduced a new fee ;

09-12-23_RuntimeFee_Revised_2.png

In very short, if TE4 earns much money and gets installed many times, then I'll own $0.20 per install to Unity.

If you're not computer savvy, it might not look too bad, especially as the Unity Pro limits are pretty high before I have to pay for the installs.

But there are several absolutely idiotic things in there :
- It's not possible to reliably track the number of installs, especially without breaking European & Californian law
- 1 install doesn't mean 1 sale, as 1 sale can lead to many installs, and demos are free
- It's not possible to differentiate between the different kinds of installs (as they pretended in an official explanation to diffuse the situation) : demo, charity, and especially pirate
- They don't want to divulge how they count the installs exactly
- They don't specify how they'll know the revenue for each game
- It goes against a previous TOS (Terms of Service) that specifically specified the TOS couldn't change without a change of version, and they tried to hide their tracks (fortunately, there's https://web.archive.org/ )
- There are a good bunch of other ones, but that's the main ones ; it's just completely retard from the beginning to the end (and as you know, you should never go full retard)


So what does it means for TE4 ?

Normally nothing, except if some people hate me enough to fake installs and Unity decides that TE4 did more than $1 million in 1 year (which is very unlikely to happen).

In such a case, I'll have to lawyer up and I'll lose time & energy for nothing... (but I'll win, coz of the illegal TOS change)

However, there's one good news : I won't have to pay for Unity Pro (I'm on Plus right now, and I have to upgrade to Pro to port the game to Xbox) because they removed the Plus tier and offer the upgrade ; I'm not sure how long will last the free upgrade, but it's still some bucks saved...


And what does it means for the future ?

Except if Unity buries this awful stupidity _AND_ the Unity CEO and his team is fired, then my next game won't be done with Unity.

As Unity shown they can change the TOS on a whim, with total nonsense and not care for the disastrous consequences for many businesses, and act as predator to their faithful customers, they just completely lost my trust, and the one of many other Unity devs, so they're likely engaged on a very dark path.

Unity Vader.jpg

[manutoo]

To Unity and Beyond (I made a little pun in reference to my reference in the post before the one about Unity )

So Unity backed off noticeably but not completely, after a bunch of lies and disdain.

Now, their changes should mostly concern Unity 2023 & onward. I'm currently using Unity 2021 and should likely not have to update to 2023 (although I'm still not very enlightened about MS & Sony policies about that).

As they didn't fire the CEO & exec team, nor change the board, I still have 0 trust left in Unity, so my next game might be with another engine, but for now, I should be out of danger for a couple of years : I think they might try a new stunt like that sooner or later, because most devs will stick to Unity 2022 and not upgrade to 2023, most of the big studios will leave to other engines, so currently Unity will see only marginal income increase from this change. The rumor says they also plan to significantly raise their subscription, so this might impact me next year.

There's still good news : except if they cancel it, it should still have the promotion to upgrade to the Pro version for free, which will save me ~$1500, which is nice enough. I have to wait for October 16th to get it, though, so meanwhile I cannot access the Xbox build option for Unity. It's not too much of an issue as I can still work on the controller integration and other similar Xbox requirements that don't need to be tested on the Xbox. I will read them all carefully this time and note down everything that needs to be done.

I already took care of the World Tour crash and the menu crash, so the game can exit gracefully if it happens. (which is hopefully rare or never if no mod is enabled)

The last update, done last week, also contains a new controller selection screen, that allows you to easily assign your controller to a player ; it might prove useful in case 2 controllers or more are active at the same time, which was getting confusing without this selection :

2023-10 - TE4 - Controller Selection.jpg

As a bonus, it allows you to easily switch a player from CPU to Human, which was a recurring challenge for newcomers to the TE world.

If you have suggestions to make the menus more controller-friendly, head there : topic15-35035.php (1st, read carefully the 2nd post, written by me, so you'll know where I currently stand )

A few more things

Oh, I almost forgot. Microsoft just counter-signed my publishing contract last week, so I'm all set on that side, just need to wait for the Unity Pro discount, now..!

Another little good news : The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians was finally released on GOG after nearly 8 years of back & forth with them ! I won't get rich with that, but it's basically a bit of free extra money, in a year that hasn't been too great so far, so I can't complain...

Another thing I almost forgot : a bit more than 1 year ago, I complained about the high refund rate of TE4 on Steam, which was 25%. I found a way to see the refund rate at any time, so I can tell you that after the change I did 1 year ago (mostly the Tutorial & dynamic animation system polishing), the refund has been at 21%, in a very stable average over time. That means that after these changes, the other improvements didn't play a noticeable role in the refund rate.

From the notes left by the people asking for a refund, the main issues seem to be :
- production value (including the animations) : this one, I cannot make it go away ; TE4 is not and won't be a AAA game ; apparently, too many people buy the game without checking carefully the video & the screenshots on the Steam store page
- weird animations : people don't understand that if their player is mispositioned, he cannot hit the ball normally (despite the warning at the beginning of the match)
- gameplay (usually labeled as "too complicated") : I'll take a wild guess and say these people just can't accept playing a tennis game where you don't have to press & release the button to simulate the stroke, like in most other tennis games ; the realistic player inertia, might be hard to handle as well (maybe I should turn the Footwork booster on by default )
- controller issues : I hope I smashed most of them since last year, but some issues are actually from Steam Input and I don't think I can do anything about that

Anyway, all my games' refund rates have significantly raised over the last few years : I think it just means that people now have gotten used to buying & quickly refunding games on Steam. So 21% isn't too bad. It could likely be a bit under though, something like 18%, but it might be tricky to find the default settings that please the most people.

On the personal side, September went well enough, and I'm noticeably less tired than since last December (when I started to get several small & bigger health/fatigue issues ). I just hope it'll go on like this when the cold hits us next month...

That's all for this time, but let's all take note that I just wrote my 3rd post here in less than 1 month ! I think it hasn't happened since the TEM2 mini-blog, if ever..!

So cya next time, hopefully still in a not too long time.
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=288836#p288836

[manutoo]

I'm a Xbox Indie Dev !

TE4 launched & ran on the Xbox DevKit for the 1st time 2 days ago !

I got the Unity Xbox build option on October 18th, but then I had a bunch of issues setting up everything : I had several bugs in the Unity Editor with the Xbox platform activated, and crashes when trying to launch the game on the DevKit, due to things working a bit differently on Xbox.

Finally, it's now almost all working, except Unity crashes when I activate the shadows. I hope a Unity dev will be able to help fix that issue on my side or fix the Unity engine.

Anyway, here is how it looks right now :

2023-11 - TE4 - Xbox Start !.jpg

The DevKit is equivalent to an Xbox One S, and the game runs around 60 fps on the default camera with everything on the max, except without SSAO & Antialiasing ; with these, it drops slightly under 55 fps. In this screenshot, SSAO & FSAA are disabled, but I slightly zoomed out the default camera and the FPS dropped to 57.

I guess it's good enough but I might need to fiddle with the settings to make the game run at 60 fps on the Xbox One (ie: non-S) ; on the Xbox One X, it might be able to easily run at 120 fps @ 1080p, and hopefully 60 fps @ 4K.


Port Schedule

Now, I've read carefully the Microsoft requirements ; if I don't comply with them, it'll prevent the game from being released, so it's quite important to understand & implement them.

I think I'll need around 3 months to do all of them, maybe a bit more as several things might be tedious.

My 1st concern is that there's a limit of 256 MB of saved data per user, and normally, only 1 saved career in TE4 can take up to 50 MB. So I'll have to do many things to handle that issue, beginning by compressing the saved games. I'll also have to do some kind of menu where you can easily delete your old saved games from any profile (ie: not only the saved games from the current profile as it's currently shown). As I'm not a console player, I'm not sure what is the best philosophy to handle all that. I guess usually console games just manage to never hit that 256MB limit and thus the average user might really not be comfortable with doing such kind of maintenance.

The 2nd big thing is user management : on PC, there are only controllers ; there, the controllers belong to users, and I should handle gracefully different things about all that. It's kinda confusing and I still didn't look into the details. There's an example from Unity, so I hope it'll be clear enough for me to adapt it to my needs.

The last important section is about online play, like showing who is on Xbox and who is not, the possibility to invite an Xbox friend to play, and stuff like that, which are relatively common. I hope it's not too hard to take care of these, but it'll take some time to implement them all as there's a bunch of them.

There are also the achievements, but these should be relatively straightforward with some grunt work to register them on the Xbox website.


Me, Myself & I (and my kids)

On the personal side, I have slept 1 hour more per day since the cold arrived and I'm still a bit more tired than during September...

Kids are relatively easier to handle now that the little one is 4, but they still regularly fight & hurt together, or just spam me with endless questions if the mood hits them, so a noticeable part of my time & energy still goes to them, but in a more manageable way than 6 months ago.

Overall, in terms of motivation, I really want to see through with the console ports and hopefully the motion capture for the animations, but for the other sizeable things (eg: HawkEye, commentaries, sound rehauling), I'm not sure I'll have enough steam...

Right now, I start to really feel like working on a new game, to change my mind. 7 years on TEM2+TE4 is quite long, especially at it's still not done...

We'll see how it goes in the next few months. Maybe things will be a bit easier now. (spoiler alert, they usually don't )

Cya next time,
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=289057#p289057

[manutoo]

Porting Nightmare

Pffff, it's not that easy to do a console port, even on Xbox..!

1st, I have to read many things : the Microsoft docs, the Unity docs, the Microsoft & Unity forums, and finally the Rewired (it's the plugin I'm using for the controllers) & ModIO docs ; then I have to synthesize all that, try to not forget where I read what, but I still forget, so I have to create tons of bookmarks and notes.

Anyway, I just finished the 1st requirement milestone : handling the Xbox user & their controller. It seems actually relatively simple when I'm looking at it with the code all done, but jeez, the path has been long & hazardous, with a lot more roadblocks than I could have expected.

I'm under NDA, so I have to be careful about what I say and thus cannot give exact specifics, but let's say that the configuration of everything is very complicated and the Xbox dev world has roots in the Xbox 360 but it's moving to the Series X/S, while I'm aiming in the middle with the Xbox One.

Anyhow, I'm finding my pace, but it's all terribly boring so I don't go fast, but I should avoid going too slow because else I'm going to forget stuff, so it's a bit of a conundrum, like when you're a kid and you have to eat your broccolis : slowly and it lasts forever, quickly and you want to throw up...

Also, I found a way to bypass the crash from the shadows, so now there's no known issue for the game on Xbox.

2023-11 - TE4 - Porting Nightmare.jpg

And now for a series of bad news (or possible bad news)

1) Except for a big surprise, it won't have Cross-Platform Online support on the Xbox : Microsoft forbids P2P without a relay server. I didn't get many details, but it's likely for security reasons ; however P2P for Xbox-only play is allowed, so all that doesn't make much sense. Plus TE has been using P2P since 2006, with tens of thousands of players, and more than 3 million online matches, and nothing noticeable happened security-wise, so this stance is really puzzling...

2) ModIO may give some issues ; I'll know more later on. Hopefully, it'll be ok, because for this I have 1 good news : it should be possible to use the modded animations on the Xbox ! I had to find a little trick to make it work and I have a bit more testing to do, but normally, it should be ok.

3) I tested TE4 on the Xbox One X in 4K, and the game runs only at ~45 fps. This is not enough to be enjoyable. I'll have to investigate more to see if it's possible to get a better framerate, but from my initial tests, lowering the details doesn't help much : right now, it just seems to be too many pixels to handle for the Xbox X ; but it doesn't make sense, because if it was the real bottleneck, it'd mean barely any game could run at 4K with it : TE4 shaders are the Unity standard ones, although they are physically correct and thus require more processing power per pixel than the legacy shaders everybody was using more than 10 years ago.


Next goal

Now I'm going to focus on reworking the save system to handle the 256MB-per-user limit, as explained in my previous post.

It's the biggest part of all the requirements I have to do. I'm not sure how long it's going to take me. I guess it could be done in 3 weeks if I don't die of boredom in the middle of it, so let's see how much I'm going to miss that mark..!


Cya next time,
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=289127#p289127

[manutoo]

Grinding my way

Pffff, the saving system is updated for the Xbox !

Actually, it didn't take me too long, but as expected, it was boring as hell.

I got delayed because :
- I got the COVID for the 2nd time in my life on the 1st week of December, and was left tired for the following couple of weeks
- I worked a bit on fixing small issues and adding stuff for Modders and thus published 2 small updates for the game

So now, on Xbox, you'll be presented with this menu if you run out of space to save your career :

2024-01 - TE4 - Xbox - Deleting some Stuff.jpg

It's the loading screen with a few added info & functionalities. It probably looks quite complicated on 1st sight and I guess that's why all console games have a few limited saving slots so they never have to show something like this to their users. There's no way to simplify that without losing the functionalities of the PC version, so I'll keep it like this and see how it goes...

There were many little cases to handle and it was terribly mind-numbing to take care of all of them. I hope I didn't forget any important edge cases...

Anyway, it's more or less done, so now I'm going to do the achievements. I hope it'll be done before the end of the next week.

Then I'll move to the last big part : the online mode & all its little or a bit bigger things required for the Xbox port.

Now, I'm confident I'll send the 1st release candidate to Microsoft before the end of February, or possibly even before, except if some sh*t comes to wreck my life again...

I'll likely do QoL improvements while waiting for Microsoft to check the game for its requirements (these improvements are not required by MS ) . The back-and-forth might take up to a couple of months.

I might also order the Playstation Dev kits soon. I think my goal now is to release on consoles : I'm really tired of working on the game, so it's better to release in the current state, which is quite fine (except for the movement animations), than not release at all. Like this, I'll also have a better vision of how much additional investment I can put into the new movement animations. If the game tanks on both consoles, I couldn't really put too much more money into them... (I already saved a significant amount though, as explained in an older post).


#1
So in 2023, the most played tennis game on PC has been... TE4 !

Unfortunately, the victory isn't total : if counting only the Steam users (ie: not the players from managames.com), then AO2 is #1, by a small marging. Also, overall, TE2013 is now #3, a bit behind AO2.

Also a bit disappointing : the online mode, after a good progression till around last September, has seen its number of online matches lower (when comparing each month to the same month 1 year earlier). Without a good bunch of demo players, it's much harder for it to get enough dynamism.

Anyway, that's all for today.

Cya next time,
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=289540#p289540

[manutoo]

Achievements : unlocked !

So it took a bit longer than expected to add the achievements for 2 reasons :
- my 2nd son got sick and I had to take care more of him for a couple of days
- there was no tutorial nor example showing how to implement them, so there was a lot more guesswork to do than expected, especially as some stuff is weirdly designed !

Anyway, it's all done now, alongside some debugging and little Modding enhancements for the PC version, and also some debugging for the Xbox version.

I also added the On-Screen-Keyboard handling, which was relatively easy.

This means now it misses only 3 things to do for the Xbox port :
- everything required for the online mode ; this is quite a big chunk, but except bad surprise, it shouldn't be too long nor horrible, just somewhat boring
- some polishing ; eg: there's still the shortcut screen, but I should remove it as there's no keyboard on consoles, and instead I might need to add a button to send a Bug Report or something like that
- prepare the store pages (it should be mostly copy/paste and grunt stuff over half day of work)

I hope all that will take me a couple of weeks and thus the 1st submission to Microsoft should done before the end of February.

2024-01 - TE4 - Xbox - Achievements.jpg

2023 Sales

Let's go on with the now-traditional sale contribution for each game to my 2023 income :

TE4 : 70% (up from 68% in 2022)
Dungeon Guardians : 11% (up from 10% in 2022)
TEM2 : 11% (stable from 2022)
TE2013 : 7% (down from 9% in 2022)
TEM1 : less than 1%

Note : as usual, it's for the sales from December 2022 to November 2023, as I get paid the following month.

Last year, in this post viewtopic.php?p=286899#p286899 , I noted that my sales were down by 30% for the beginning of the year ! Fortunately, this trend has been broken in July, to my big surprise : usually, June leads, but for the 1st time ever (AFAIR), July got more income than June..!

Aynway, I ended the year with an income that lowered by about 20% compared to 2022, so it's really not great ; fortunately, I had fewer expenses as well (especially on the personal side, I was very careful ), so I'm still ok money-wise.

I hope TE4 will sell decently on consoles this year, so I can party all year long in 2025... (spoiler alert : I'm not actually a party guy )

Cya next time,
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=289624#p289624

[manutoo]

Good news ! (for once)

It's not required anymore to have a relay server for P2P between Xbox & non-Xbox devices, so cross-platform online is back, baby !

Yeah Baby!.jpg

[manutoo]

Almost there !

just a quick dev update : I'm almost done with the Xbox requirements.

In the past month, both my kids got sick and thus I spent a bunch of time taking care of them, but I managed to work decently well anyway.

There were a bunch of little things and some were as usual more complicated to implement than expected (and needed ), but I think everything should be in order now.

I only have the invitation system to finish but the basics are already there so it's just a matter of opening the correct menu with the correct info.

Xbox Logo.png

After that, I'll have to look if I allow the quick-chat sentences and the chat. I think I finally found an elegant way to do that a few days ago : I'll display an in-game menu showing all the quick-chat sentences and allowing to open the chat. It's quite simple and hopefully it'll be fast enough to use it.

If the winds are with me, I might be done end of this week and could submit the game next week (I'll have to run some tests locally 1st).

I also still have to do some polishing and the store page, but both can be done while the game is in review by Microsoft, so it'll speed up the process.


Cya next time,
A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=290052#p290052

[manutoo]

TE4 (almost) passed the Xbox certification !

It took a long time, it has been painful, but normally TE4 should pass the Xbox certification today or tomorrow. Its last fail was only because I had forgotten to remove the button to select the type of controller (on Xbox, it should be only Xbox controllers, obviously ).

Before that, it took me a couple of weeks to make the online mode work on the Microsoft test network. I guess that because of the NDA I cannot give details, so just let's say it was a pretty unconventional setup. The good news is that it gave me the occasion to fix a bug that should allow a few people with an exotic setup to host on PC as well.

5817342671_edc0a17313_c.jpg

Plus in the middle, I got another nasty bronchitis-flu that left me energy-less for about 10 days, plus another round of gigantic personal issues (that is unfortunately on-going for at least several weeks, if not months or years)...

Now, I should take care of the Xbox store page, and wonder if I should spend some time on a somewhat decent trailer instead of only putting a CPU vs CPU match ; if you have an opinion, you can vote here => topic15-35349.php .

Then, I should incorporate the QoL improvements for the controller and if everything goes without bad surprises, the game could be released around May 1st. If not, I guess I'll wait for the French Open at end of May.

Quickly, I should also get into the Playstation port, but I think the September goal for its release has passed, as I'm 1 month later than expected for the end of the Xbox port.

That's all for today !

Cya next time,
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[manutoo]

Well, that's done

Pffff, nearly 2 months since the last post !

If you follow the forum, you already know it's because TE4 has finally been released on Xbox: https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/ ... fwhqkgc6p0 .

It has been a struggle before : to get the Microsoft certification as explained in the previous post, then I spent a couple of weeks polishing the game and finally 1 additional week optimizing the memory usage and fixing some memory leaks, especially with the Mods.
Also after : there were a bunch of annoying bugs that needed quick fixes (mostly linked to the Mod usage and memory leaks I had missed before ), but Microsoft required a few more verifications before letting me publish the updates faster, so I stressed for a few days seeing the Bug Reports coming in while I couldn't do anything to prevent them but wait for the updates to be published.

Moreover, my personal issues kinda escalated and took most of my free time and a lot of my energy...

It's better now, but it'll come back in the future for sure, as the core issue isn't solved.

So all in all, I got quite busy in the past few weeks.


Official release on Steam ?

So in the end, despite that I was planning to do the official release on Steam yesterday, I didn't do it. For several reasons : the lesser ones are because I still didn't have the time to do the official TE4 documentation nor a decent trailer for the release.

The bigger one is that yesterday morning I watched this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkmAqBvUBOw . Before it, I was thinking that Early Access games were getting significantly less visibility on the Steam store than fully released game. It turns out that it's not the case, and there are no significant differences : the biggest one is that some users can opt out of seeing Early Access games, and I guess these users wouldn't be much interested in TE4 anyway.

There's also a "new & trending" tab where newly fully released games appear, but I'd rather keep that extra visibility for when the game will be at its best ; ie: after getting motion-captured running animations, if it's doable.

So I changed my mind and will do the official release once these animations are done or I'm sure I can't do them, which I'll get to once the PlayStation port is done.


Am I Sisyphus ?

Or at least, it feels like it.

LE-ROCHER-DE-SISYPHE.png

Next week I should likely start to port the game to PlayStation. So far, I only checked 5% of the Requirements but none of these applied to TE4, so it felt like a good start...

Sony already pointed out some Modding requirements applying to the game, and they match the ones from Microsoft, so I hope a lot will be like that and the workload will be bearable.

The other rock is the gameplay tuning : I just found out last week there was an error in the acceleration speed handicaps, so I corrected them but it kinda killed the online aggressive play, at least on clay (especially at a high level), so I have to rebalance all that once more over the next few weeks.

So hopefully, I have to bring my rock to the top 3 more times (Playstation + Animations + gameplay tuning) and the Gods will free me from my current task...


cya next time to see how everything will go horribly bad on the Playstation port...

Meanwhile, enjoy Roland Garros and TE4..!

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[manutoo]

Onward to Playstation

1st, let's say I planned to do this post 10 days ago, but my whole family got sick and I was turned off for most of last week...

So I've read the requirements for the Playstation : it's actually not that bad, and I think I'll need something like 2 months to take care of all of them. Like on Xbox, the most important ones are basically : "it should work".

There are also more specific stuff, but a good bunch of them are close to Xbox ones, so overall, there's no daunting task. I noted 30 points to handle, so it's not nothing, but it should be manageable.

Right now, I already ran the game on my PS4 DevKit :

2024-06 - TE4 - 1st pic on Playstation 4 !.jpg

The rendering & gameplay seem to be fine, so I'll just have to check the other slightly more complicated stuff : online & Mod management.

However, there are some bad framerate drops during the rallies. It seems to happen only when the Aiming Preview is visible (ie: when there are calculations to know where the ball will go) ; I hope it's because I'm using the debug mode, but I'll have to dig more into that because it's really suspicious.

Although the game was running 4K, so maybe it was a bit too much performance-wise...

There's also the product configuration which is a tad complicated. It's almost done (I hope) and this time I'm going to try to get the store page up as soon as possible to build a decent wishlist for the game before its release. I should have done that for the Xbox release, which was slightly disappointing (I'll give more details in the next post, once I'll have the full financial report for May from Microsoft).

Maybe I'll do a half-decent trailer as well for this occasion.

Also, I'll take at least 1 week of holiday during the summer, maybe 2 or even 3, coz I really need a break after the last months of hard work & personal troubles I have had.

Anyway, the goal to release the Playstation in October seems possible. At worst, it should be November, I guess. Before getting sick, I was even hoping for a September release..!

That's all for this time,
cya soon to (maybe) see how everything will actually go wrong for the PS4 port,

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[manutoo]

Going on on the Playstation

Pfffff, I think I'm hitting my lowest point in motivation since probably 14 years ago (when I was burned out a couple of months after the release of TE2011).

I'm still not burnt out right now, though, but jeez I'd like to take a huge break.

I can't, so I'm trying to take some little breaks, when my kids, wife, mother & whatnot let me have them.

So I didn't work that much in the past month.

I still made some notable progress, beginning by setting up the PlayStation store page for TE4 : https://store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/10011758 . I hope it looks better on PS5 than on the Web, coz there, there's no video or screenshots, and the incoming game list isn't available on PS4 (and I don't have a PS5, they still cost more than 500€ !)...

Anyway, the game was already wishlisted by dozens of people in less than 3 weeks, with 0 advertising whatsoever. It's the 1st time I'm publishing the store link, so overall, it's encouraging for the potential sales power of the PlayStation.

I hope it'll be better than the Xbox. I got the report for May, and overall it wasn't bad, but it was under my goal : get as much money as I got for the 1st month of release on Steam, back in June 2021. In one way, it was really not that high of a goal, because the game is a lot better now than it was 3 years ago, but on the other side, June is usually a better month for sales (due to the French Open). But June hasn't been great for the Xbox sale either... It's not too bad though, but it's still nearly 30% under Steam sale (I'll know for sure next month when I get the Microsoft sale report).

I guess it'd have been better to set up the Xbox Store page much earlier to build a decent wishlist before the release date (like I did on Steam). That's why I have already done the PlayStation one.

Anyway, the extra income for the Xbox release is greatly appreciated and I'm more serene about my financial status for a while.

Playstation 4 Slim.jpg

Porting Progress ?

So I didn't work on porting the game, but I just finished the 2nd step : I re-read all the requirements and checked carefully each of them. I also started to list the things I have to do for the game to work on PlayStation (most of them can be adapted from the Xbox port), and I did some of the basics already (eg: the loading screen with the possibility to reset your settings or start without Mods), and also made all the easiest requirements.

I have one issue though : the PS docs are often quite unclear. It feels like they were written in Japanese and then translated into English by a non-native speaker. The result gives complicated sentences that I read & re-read 10 times, but I'm still unsure about their meaning. The global organization doesn't help either because they often explain too much in the details or not enough. Fortunately, I can find on the forums most of my questions have already been answered.

On Xbox, there were decently made Unity docs & samples so I based a lot of my work on them, but on PlayStation Unity has a very small doc and the samples are not very practical. They are a decent base though and will likely save me a bunch of time.

For example, Unity is actually taking care of some of the requirements, but their docs nor their samples don't state that so I had to dig into the Forums to discover I had nothing to do...

My next goal is to make the career saves correctly on PlayStation and then it'll depend on my mood...

Cya next time, and enjoy your holidays if you have some.

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