Mana Games

[manutoo]

TEM2 v1.0b !

Pfff, this is a big one done here ! I feel more heart lighted already !

Indeed, now TEM2 can be seen as complete, although I'll likely continue to improve it over the years, alongside TE4.

And the main things done in the v1.0b are also for TE4, and the 1st one is even more important in TE4 than in TEM2 : now, when starting on the Junior Tour, it'll be much easier to win your first matches, and then your 1st tournament. Before it could take years !

Also, the fictional players will have a better variety in their generated names as I added an additional player name base for that only purpose.

As expected, making the game handles the old Tour bases & new ones at the same time proved to be a nest of bugs, but apparently not as bad as I had expected, as after a couple of updates, the v1.0b seems stable enough. The most tricky part was to handle the Load/Save screen to show or not the "Invalid" state ; it now involves detecting & caching some specific details for each Tour base and thus requires to load them depending on the exact configuration : men/women, new/old bases, modded/unmodded, game in progress bases / saved game bases.

But it's a really good thing done, because now I won't have to hesitate so much if I feel the Tour bases should be updated, as the users won't lose their current saved games anymore.

It'll create a few additional headaches though : some users will be stuck with old bugs from the old bases, as long as they don't start a new career. For example, there were a lot of players not playing in the year 1992, making a few draws with missing players. So these users might report thing that are long fixed, but I'll have to check every time if they use the new bases or the old ones.



TE4 all the way !

This means now I can focus nearly 100% on TE4, and hopefully the pace will be pick up a bit. Nothing too crazy as I still have a young boy plus a baby at home, who eat up a lot of my time.

The next step is to finally finish the integration of the female customizations (mostly the hairs). It should be done by the end of the week (I feel I have already written this 2 months ago ).

The male production should be nearly done soon as well.

Then I'll focus on the gameplay, to iron out the little issues that keep being reported. Once done, the game may be ready for the Early Access tag, and gets a demo shortly afterward.

So cu soon enough to see how all this will go. (likely horribly, as usually )

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => viewtopic.php?p=267029#p267029

[manutoo]

Dev Update

So I didn't do much in the past 4 weeks...

I just finished a few days ago the customization of the female player. It's all done, but there are still a few glitches in the 3D model so I have to wait for the 3D artist to send me the corrected version. He's quite slow lately, so it's unnerving, especially when he sends me a new version with "everything fixed", but actually less than half is done.

Also, it still misses a few face modifications, but there again, on my side it's more or less alright already.

I had to do a little script to automatically add 2-sided polygons where it was needed, because for the shirt he did the polygons only on 1 side of the collar, which obviously looks bad in some direction. At 1st, I just put a double-sided shader on the whole thing, but in terms of optimization it was really bad.

I also did the shader to display the damaged grass, by combining the grass texture with a dirt texture. It works pretty well, and it's better than having only 1 texture, as it allows high details for close up cameras without having too gigantic textures nor detailed geometry.

And I had to fix a few bad bugs on TEM2 ; but don't worry, it was needed for TE4, as it was mostly about the new possibility to switch between Tour bases, which will allow me to update TEM2 & TE4 Tour bases if the need arises, without invalidating your current saved games, as they will just keep on using the previous Tour bases.

The 3D male player should be almost done by the 3D artist ; I got an intermediary version a couple of weeks ago and it looks like this :

GTA V has a tennis game, TE4 has a mafioso ! (don't worry, you have other outfit choices ;-) )

And this morning, I studied how to make a patch system. The game installer is already nearly 1GB big, and it'll likely grow to 2GB, if not more. I can't ask you to re-download the whole thing every time I'll change 2 lines of code to tune the gameplay, or fix a bug, especially when you'll be a lot of people playing the game, as it'd crush my server and you'll need forever to get the updated version. So I have to create a patch much smaller than that. It's not easy to do, especially on Mac, so I guess it'll be only for Windows, at least for a while. I think I'm just going to use a plugging for the NSis installer I'm using. I'll test it soon and hopefully it'll do the job.

So overall, as you can see, I took things slow. My son still can't go back to school, so he's eating my time & my energy way more than I'd have wished, even if his grandmother takes care of him often. This means I'm almost always tired, so I do what I can do.

Cu right away in the next post for some surprising fact !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => topic15-31540.php

[manutoo]

What is the most played paid tennis game on PC in the whole PC history ?

By "most played", I mean the cumulated hours ; eg : the sum of all played hours by all players of that tennis game. It's not the number of people who have played the game.

So think a bit about it...

You might have guessed, else I'd have not talked about it, but it's very likely TE2013 (or more exactly TE3 as TE2009/11/13)..!

I always check what is the most played tennis game on Steam with this : https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346470,1072 ... ,758410#6m .

But it's only recently I realized this chat meant that TE2013 was the most played tennis game in the history of Steam, which gave him a chance at being the most played on PC. At 1st, I thought it was a silly idea, but then I did some math.

1st, the number of total players of TE2013 isn't what you see on this graph. You likely have to double these numbers to include the ones playing with the Mana Games version. I don't have exact numbers for the ones playing offline, as I only have the "checking for a new version" stat for these users, but for the online, it multiplies by 2 or more, without counting the demo players. Offline numbers are compatible with that (actually it's more like x3, but I don't know how much people check for a new version more often or less often than the automatic every 7 days). A recent new stats from Steam helped me to confirm that : they now show the average daily users on the past 7 days, which is a stat I can approximate as well from the new-version checking. Lastly, about these numbers, I consider that players on Mana Games play as much the game as Steam players, but actually they might play a bit more in average because more of them tried the demo before buying the game, so they are more likely to enjoy the game than Steam players.

All the games in the charts above are Steam exclusive (except for TE2013), this means they don't have more players than shown there.

So these charts give cumulated players for each month (it's proportional to the total played hours, not the total players), so it's easy to do a grand total :
- TE2013 : 2462, since March 2015
- AOT1 : 493, since May 2018
- TWT : 361, since June 2018
- AOT2 : 391, since January 2020 ; TE2013 beats it in the past 30 days, so if this tendency doesn't change, this game won't beat TE2013's total, even without invoking MG players

There's also Virtua Tennis 4, which hasn't been sold on PC for many years : 934, since July 2012
VT4 has been sold on Microsoft platform, but likely way less than on Steam, as its total sales on PC are estimated at 40k units by VgChartz : https://www.vgchartz.com/game/52501/vir ... region=All .

So the 2 big missing games are Top Spin 1 & Top Spin 2 ; VgChartz doesn't have sale numbers for their PC version (actually they show "17" for Top Spin 2 on PC, but it seems a bit low ), but checking the sale estimates for the consoles and the ratio console/pc for Virtua Tennis, it doesn't seem possible that Topspin sold enough units to beat TE2013 Steam score, and even less for TE2013 Steam + MG, and even less for TE3 (you likely can multiply TE2013 Steam score by 3 to approximate it), or its players should have played the game like crazy.

So I very likely created the most played paid tennis game in the History of PC.

Fuck yeah !

So thanks for all your help, without all your feedback and without you playing the hell out of TE3 it'd not have been possible !

And let's see if you can help TE4 to take the title on consoles as well ! It might be harder, but while there's life there's hope !


Cu next time with hopefully a new version and some gameplay improvements !

A comment, cheer or question about this mini-blog ? => topic15-31540.php