Accounts are Coming

It has always been my plan to implement an account system for Catastrophe X, and over the past few days I have gotten started on this large undertaking. The account system, once in place, should add much a much-needed element of longevity to the game. Battles will have more significance because you will be ranked against other players, and as a result there should be more incentive to develop strategically effective detachments.

I intend to deploy the kernel of the account system next week, and then add to it in phases.

Phase 1 (next week)
Basic account registration and sign-in capabilities. No actual account functionality other than reserving a username.

Phase 2
Ability to save custom detachments to your account and use them in battle.

Phase 3
Basic player profiles.

Phase 4
Record battle history and display battle stats in your headquarters and on player profiles.

Phase 5
Devise a good rating system to rank player performance.

There will be more to add once these features are in place, but I won't get ahead of myself. More soon!

Craft Orientation Changes

A while back I added an arrow to indicate the current direction of a craft when choosing a deployment or move target. However, for a few craft these arrows pointed in the wrong direction. This occurred for craft that did not have the usual 3 o'clock default orientation, and instead faced 12 o'clock in order to obtain different craft shapes. For example, the Falconcraft had a 12 o'clock orientation so that its shape could be long and skinny:

I have decided to change the craft with the 12 o'clock orientation to use the 3 o'clock orientation (there were only three to change: the Falconcraft, Twin Turrets, and Gatling Fighter). In my opinion, it is difficult enough to try and form strategy when thinking about six distinct directions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 o'clock), without having another class of craft that using six more distinct directions (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 o'clock). As a side benefit, this change also fixed the incorrect arrow directions for these units.

Pictured below is the Falconcraft in its new 3 o'clock configuration:

More soon!

Hex Tile Improvements

As mentioned in my last post, the new HTML5 canvas-based graphics system had a few issues that still needed to be resolved. In particular, the seams between hex tiles were sloppy, as you can see below.

Before:

I have spent the last couple of days tightening up the tiling system, and the tiles now render seamlessly down to the pixel:

After:

In making these improvements, I have also resolved most of the tile "artifacts" that would show up as the tiles were re-drawn when you moved your mouse around the screen.

For those who are curious, the problem was due to the fact that a hexagon has a height-to-width ratio of 1.1547... (many decimal places, maybe going on forever). This means that you can't generally have a true hexagon with both an integer height and an integer width, which is a problem when you want your hexagonal tiles to line up perfectly pixel-by-pixel. I solved the problem by displaying near-hexagons that are ever so slightly squished, and taking this squish into proper account when calculating all pixel coordinates.

Change in Graphics Technology (SVG to Canvas)

Back in September I invested a chunk of time into building a faster graphics system for Catastrophe X. However, there are still some situations where the graphics get sluggish, particularly in Firefox. The fundamental bottleneck was the underlying graphics technology (SVG/VML via Raphael.js), which was not designed to cope with the large number of shapes needed to fill the viewport with map tiles, craft, actions, etc.

I have spent the past few days creating a component that displays graphics using a technology that is better suited to games like Catastrophe X (HTML5 canvas).  In older browsers that do not support this technology (including Internet Explorer up to version 8), the previous graphics component is automatically used as a fallback.

The new graphics system is really, really fast. Once the map has been loaded there is no longer any lag whatsoever when scrolling. This speed opens up new possibilities for future craft complexity and visual effects. And I haven't even fully tweaked the new component yet.

Having just implemented the new system, I am starting to see a few kinks. In particular, there are some artifacts that fade in and out as the canvas is repainted, and the hexagonal tile rounding system needs some work. Fortunately, these issues should not be too difficult to correct.

More soon!

Blog Downtime

As you may have noticed, the Catastrophe X blog has been unavailable for nearly the past week. Apparently Google's robots wrongly detected it as a spam blog and shut it down without question. I immediately filed an appeal and jumped through all the text message and image recognition hoops to prove that I am, indeed, mostly human. However, an actual person at Google had to review the blog before it could be brought back online, and that only happened today.

Now, I understand the trade-off between false positives and false negatives when detecting spam, and I don't take it personally that this blog was marked as spam. However, it is completely unacceptable for the blog to have been immediately shut down, and for my appeal to have taken six days to process. Owners of blogs detected as spam should have their blogs read-only locked, and should have a couple of days to prove that they are human and file an appeal before the blog is taken offline. And when somebody does the human verification and files an appeal, it should be reviewed within hours, before the blog is taken offline. Just my two cents.

Bad, Google.

Forums

With Catastrophe X being a real-time game, there has been no way for players to communicate with each other without being online at the same time. Not exactly ideal, especially given the relatively small number of players that the game has right now. So I have created a third-party forum to provide a place for discussion of Catastrophe X. Consider this a temporary venue, as I intend to integrate forums into the game itself once an account system is in place.

Drop by and introduce yourself -- let's get the discussion going.

Catastrophe X Forums

UI Improvements

Today I implemented a few user interface updates that have been on my list for a while.

• When you are in the process of deploying or moving a unit, there is now an arrow indicator showing which direction your craft will face. This removes any potential confusion about which side of a craft is the front.
• When you are in the process of performing an action, the box reading “please select a target (cancel)” is now tucked away at the top of the screen. This box would occasionally obstruct players' choice of targets.
• Ticks are no longer printed to the chat console, as these notices often pushed more important information off the screen.

I have also updated the generator craft, which now gives a bonus +3 energy per tick when placed on a colored energy tile (for example +3 blue per tick when placed on a blue tile). This should give players more reason to fight for control of the map when using the introductory pre-built detachments.

More soon!

Game Promotion Progress

I've spent the past few days promoting Catastrophe X. The best results came from making an update post on reddit, where people seemed to be pretty enthusiastic about the game. After posting on Saturday, I spent most of the weekend playing against the redditors that came online. At one point there were nearly ten players online with multiple battles going on, including a three-player battle for the first time -- exciting! Things have now died down a bit, but I have reserved a sponsored link on reddit's /r/gaming for later this week that should help generate some more buzz.

This week I will continue to focus on promotion. It's time-consuming, but there is no point focusing solely on features until more players are around to use them. To make the game playable despite the lack of opponents, I have set up an alarm on my computer that alerts me when a new player signs on. When anybody comes online during the day (in North America), I should usually be online within a few moments for a match.

Expect new features to be deployed over the next few days – more soon!