A short one this time. Between two Norwegian national holidays and my own brain, I’ve been struggling with focus. Progress has slowly continued on the fog of war. I’ve written the compute shader, but I still need to do some plumbing, so I’ve nothing gif-worthy yet.

Ree’s work on the creature controller is wrapping up, so that will ship soon. There are a slew of fixes, and the work includes the bulk of the work for creature scaling. So once the first update has shipped (hopefully early next week), I’ll jump tasks to implement the sync and persistence for scaling.

The art team has also been working away, so you can expect a new asset update soon!

I’m going to spend the rest of today around the community, so if you are around, seeya there.

Hi folks, another day of slow but steady progress on the fog of war. What I did today was hook up the code that queues up mesher jobs when the underlying fog data changes. I can now select a region, press a key, and the fog volume data for all the zones in the region is updated. The presentation for those zones then enqueues a job that reads the volume data and generates a minecraft-style mesh that will (in time) be used for fog. As, in this test, the selection tools work with cuboids, the fog only follows that shape, but we can see that the resulting mesh is reasonable (lower poly compared to the worst case), and I can see that the jobs are being run in parallel. So far, so good.

Now, this is done I can write the code that takes the cubemaps captured from the line-of-sight system that handles hiding creatures, and passes them to a new compute-shader which will make an update mask of what areas are visible. I’ll be doing this on the GPU as:

• The data I need is already on the GPU which means no having to shift it around
• The approach I’ll be trying is trivial to parallelize without divergence and so should be very suited to running there.

From the CPU side, we will then wait on a GPU-fence (which tells us when the compute-shader has finished), read the result from the compute-buffer, and apply it to the fog data in the zone. This change will then trigger the code we wrote today and we should see the new mesh which will hopefully have removed all parts that were in view. It will absolutely be rough, to begin with, but with the full round trip written, we can move onto playing with it and making it better.

I’ll go into more detail on the approach once I’ve got it working as it should be pretty simple.

Alright, seeya around.

Hi folks, today I’ve been poking around with fog of war and working out how the updates are going to be spread over multiple frames. I’m going to keep working on this so I can select areas and apply fog to them. For now, the mesh generated will just be a big, grey, minecraft-looking mesh as we don’t need to worry about the visuals for a while yet.

Ree’s been working on business things today, and his work on the creature-controller has gone well too. There are still some things to work out with creature scaling over various framerates, but it’s getting closer.

Back soon with more!

Nothing substantial today, I’m afraid. That last day or so, I’ve had something like writer’s block for coding, so I’ve moved my weekend a bit sooner.

I had started looking into fog-of-war, but I’ve got nothing new to report yet.

When I’m rested up, I’ll dig back into a few tile related bugs that have been reported this week, and then I’ll get back to the fog of war.

Have a good one folks.

Heya folks,

After shipping the update yesterday, I reviewed all the usages of the data from the boardAsset files in TaleSpire. There were clear patterns in the usage that will allow us to pick better data layouts and divide the data that is needed in jobs from the data, which isn’t. This description is pretty vague, but basically, it’s good news :)

I’m going to play a little with non-burst-compiled jobs in Unity as they are going to be useful in the future when I need to do simple processing on non-blittable types, but don’t want to have to introduce a sync point.

I’ve also started looking back into a bug, which forced me to hold off from fog-of-war before the beta release. I had a case where rendering to a cubemap would result in the top and bottom faces being flipped. I didn’t report it at the time (which was dumb on my part), so I spent the first part of today reproducing the issue and submitting the issue to Unity for review.

You can find the repro that shows the issue here. Luckily it seems this issue does not occur when using a different RenderTexture constructor as reported by this lovely person here. With this knowledge, I can dig back into this and see if I can make more progress on fog-of-war again.

I can also give an update that the last bug we reported to Unity has been successfully reproduced internally, so odds are good that we will see progress on that in the future.

That’s all for now. I’ll probably make a more detailed post on the fog of war implementation once I have some more news.

Peace

I’ve been a little quiet today, but I’ve been around. I’ve mainly been testing and re-checking the code that handles board format upgrades. I didn’t push out an update today as, during testing, I saw some cases where GM-blocks showed up incorrectly. I’m pretty sure these are pre-existing bugs, but it’s better to delay the release and fix them, rather than take the risk.

Tomorrow I’ll carry on testing the board format upgrading and then put out the release. Initially, the release was to add fog control to atmospheres but it now also includes:

• A fix which means that when you return to boards, it (finally) remembers where your camera was and where it was facing
• A fix for one instance of an error where, on rejoining a board that failed to load, you got a ‘failed to correctly assign internal id’ error.

And of course the above gm-block fixes.

After this, I’m aiming to focus on updating the asset format used by TaleSpire. I’ve been talking about doing this for about a year, but other things were always more important. The big goals are to improve load times and to make the asset data accessible to the job system. This will be huge for me as there is far too much complexity and inefficiency in the asset code due to constantly having to repack data in structures amenable to the job system.

Of course, some community projects have started consuming some of this data and, even though use of that data is not supported, I’d rather not break those. What I think we’ll do is make a portion of the data available as a separate json file. TaleSpire itself won’t use that file, but it’ll be handy for others. I’ll keep you posted on these changes.

Have a great evening folks,

Peace.

Yesterday didn’t bring too much new from me. I submitted the potential bug to Unity, pushed out our release, and then spent most of the day catching up with social media and discord posts.

Today I’m going to try staring at the ‘delete tiles coming back on reload/copy’ bug and see if I can make any headway on it. It’s a real nightmare of a bug as it’s hard to reproduce, and it seems to be about something that isn’t happening. It’s not throwing any apparent errors and doesn’t show up until way after the presumed event. I’m not expecting to find it today, but maybe I can rule out some potential causes.

I hope you have a good day folks!

p.s. A note to people thinking of doing the indy game thing. Do not underestimate the amount of time it takes to write updates, handle support tickets, keep up to date with your community, and do the business stuff. It’s a privilege to have these ‘problems,’ but writing updates will take you longer than coding some features :p The less of you there are, the more time you’ll each be spending. Shout-out to Ree & Dwarf who’ve handled all the support tickets and business-ness while doing all their other jobs too.

Ah, it’s a been a day that reminds you that rarely in programming can you ‘just’ do something.

On Saturday, I wanted to push a patch that fixed a bunch of bugs, one of which was related to an SSE4 requirement in the current build.

The fix should have been simple, SSE2 support has been added in later versions of the Burst compiler, we can just upgrade the package and rebuild.

The package is still in preview, and so there can be bugs. However, sometimes that kind of tradeoff is worth it, especially given that we are still in Beta. If it passed our tests, I’d have been happy.

Alas, we quickly saw issues which only occurred in the Burst compiled jobs. Time to get testing :)

As expected, the commit that caused the issue was the one where we upgraded the packages. We then tested each version of Burst and Unity.Collections to track down the first version, which caused the error.

In the release notes for the earliest problematic version we saw that one change was:

Improve codegen for structs with explicit layout and overlapping fields.

This was a great candidate as we had a type that is essentially a c# union. You can write such structs in c# like this:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit)]
public struct Test
{
    [FieldOffset(0)] public int A;
    [FieldOffset(4)] public Bar B;
    [FieldOffset(4)] public Baz C;
}

I took our structs and removed parts until I had a simple case that showed the issue. I then moved it to a separate project, re-confirmed the packages and pulled other Unity versions to make sure it was still an issue.

I’ve made a repo for the test, and tomorrow I’ll report this as a potential issue to Unity.

Now the take-away from this is not to shit on Unity. This is an under-development build of the package explicitly available for finding these kinds of issues. This is just development.

However, it’s a fun example of how ‘just download it’ is almost never really the case in any significant project.

Hope this finds you well, sorry I’ve not been around the community today, constantly recompiling does not make one that sociable :p

Hi folks. Recently, all the dev updates have been patch release notes, so I thought I’d drop in to say hi.

Bug fixing has been intense, and we’ve covered a lot of ground. Over 100 tickets are closed on github, and we have no worries about being able to tackle plenty more. After seemingly fixing one of the significant connection issues the other day, I’ve felt pretty sluggish. Feels like my body telling me to take it easy, so I’ve tried to do that for the last two days.

This evening I started pulling exception logs to see what easy wins I could find there. Where possible, we push the first exception we find to the server, and that can be quite a goldmine. It went pretty well, and the next update is going to have a bunch of random fixes in it.

The more exceptions we can remove, the less spurious or random bugs we will see reported. Some times a bug we find is just the side-effect of some earlier thing breaking. Kind of like if your car flips off the road, it might have had something to do with the wheel that fell off just before :P

The fixes had stuff like:

• selections still trying to highlight tiles while switching boards
• A state-machine for board sync hadn’t registered one of its failure states
• UI trying to access stuff that had been disposed while transitioning to the main menu.

Yeah, a real mix.

Ree has (amongst other things) been looking into a GPU instancing library and Unity’s new ECS. No conclusions reached yet, but we’ll let ya know once there is news there.

We’ve also switched to using some Unity packages, which are still in preview. This is a risk, as they are still finding bugs, but we’ve done it for a couple of reasons:

1. It allows us to dig into the ECS stuff mentioned above
2. The preview version of their Burst compiler now seemingly supports fallback to SSE2 instead of requiring SSE4 (which has caused some users issues)

The next patch will have these changes so we can see if that helps.

Alright, it’s rather late, so I’m going to get some sleep.

Peace

Good-evening once again from the north, it’s been a good day.

I will be pushing a patch tomorrow that seems to fix the bug, which caused certain boards to break with HardAssert errors. I have also tested some of the broken boards, and 6 of the 7 I tested were able to load again.

Let’s start with caveats. This will not fix all broken boards, tomorrow’s patch only addresses this specific bug, and we don’t yet know if all boards which had the issues are recoverable. If your issue manifested as something other than lots of HardAssert errors in the logs, then this fix won’t recover your board. However, once this is out, I will start going after other bugs so we will see what can be fixed.

Ok, now the meat.

Many folks were stuck, not being able to get into their boards because of a bug which put this error in the logs:

HardAssertFailure: HandleAddLayout: layout.AssetCount != _dequeuedAssetData.

An assert is a check that must be true for the program to continue. In this case, the presentation for a zone (see yesterday’s dev-log for the details on what those things are) had been told it had to spawn a certain number of assets. However, there was not enough asset data in the queue to satisfy that request. Given that there was no sensible thing to do at that point, it threw an exception.

The first part of the work was what I did yesterday. Removing an optimization that I was concerned could have been hiding the issue due to its complexity. This did work, and this morning, I was able to open a previously broken board.

However, that fix, whilst required, was only part of the issue. The root cause was still there.

TaleSpire has to store a lot of asset info. Each kind of asset has a GUID that identifies it. A GUID is a 16-byte value, which is pretty large and so we don’t want to store more than we have to. One simple thing to do is to group assets of the same kind together; then, we only need one GUID for all of them.

There are other values that can be treated similarly, and so we put these together in a struct called an AssetLayout. Each AssetLayout also has an ID (a uint in this case), which uniquely identifies it in the Zone.

An issue that was occurring was that, when a player deleted some assets that they did not place (or if they were from a freshly loaded board) and then pressed undo, the layouts that were restored were not given new unique Ids. This meant the Zone potentially contained multiple layouts with the same id.

This goes unnoticed at first, but on load of a board, we have to spawn all the assets. The information is sent off to the presentation, and that’s where we hit the issue of layouts not matching the expected numbers of assets, all because our booking had been messed up.

Luckily the undo portion was relatively easy to fix. But we still have broken boards. What we needed was for something to go and clean up the ids of the layouts.

Let’s take a slight diversion. Whenever a place places assets, we add a layout and the asset-data for whatever was just made. Over time, this will result in a lot of small layouts for the same kind of tile. We have to keep them separate at first due to how undo/redo works, but once they are out of the players undo/redo history (for instance, when we save the board), we have an opportunity to defragment this data.

I had not had time to implement this before release, but as luck would have it, this operation is exactly what we need to clean up the layout information in the broken boards.

So an afternoon of code later that is working. For now, I’m running this on load, rather than on save as this will hopefully fix some of the broken boards. However, once the patch has been out for a while, I’ll change it to happen on save instead.

So that’s that! I will review the patch tomorrow, test it with some more boards, and then I’ll get it out to you all via Steam.

Huge thanks to Skye, lollypopunk, Al McWhiggin, Shmuky, and Mercer for sharing their broken boards with me so I could do better testing.

Have a good one folks