Vlad Dotsenko

Personal notes

[vlad-dotsenko-en]

Well… My three-month vacation almost gone. I must say, this was the biggest break in the work over the past 20 years! Mentally I'm already in new projects. And I no longer work in the Best Way. Details (how and what happened) is a separate story, which is still in progress. Now I’m waiting for a new workstation. All my previous computers were either cheaper or corporate (usually cheaper too). Now it will be exactly as I want. No compromise! )))

[vlad-dotsenko-en]

Perfect interface: this nasty combo box

One day I needed to set the folder with the game on Steam as a working packages folder. It's such a long path here:

C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Steam \ SteamApps \ common \ Battle of Empires 1914-1918

After restart game, I realized that I have specified wrong folder. Should add packages/ subfolder. I clicked on the drop-down list with the folder history

and select a previously entered option, and that's what I saw:

In the entry field gets trimmed path. The path is too long and it was cutted as well as in the list. Disorder!

After making corrections and enter the correct folder I found another issue: there are two identical-looking items in list

which can be distinguished only by hovering the mouse pointer on each and wait until hint with full path appears:

The path was cutted from the wrong side! Fixed.

Ideally? Well, not exactly...

Now I want to have auto-complete function, that already become a standard.

PS: During this “quest” I found and corrected one more bug. If you look closely, all the screenshots but the last place in the circumcision of text appears one point. And there should be two, not one)

[vlad-dotsenko-en]

Games make it hard, part 2

I am professional game developer for over 15 years.

During this period only 4 commercially successful games was made. It turns out about one game in four years.

How many games was not completed? About 10 by my count.

To be honest, the creation of games is an exciting process, but making them extremely difficult. I am talking about the games that you can sell. Even if you sell it for free.

Completed game has some important differences from the modifications. Most of them are easy to understand, but difficult to achieve. Modification may have one or more same properties, but it not necessarily.

1. The game should take place from the beginning to the end. At all levels of difficulty and in any legal actions of the player. Several  hours missions with a (relatively) free gamplay is necessary to test long and tedious. Sometimes it takes hundreds of hours. For every mission. And just playing is not enough, you have to play differently. It often happens that the results of the test had to substantially revise the mission. And then it all starts again. There are more bad news. In most cases mission developer is very poor candidate for testing. He knows how mission designed and therefore he will play a template.

2. Stability. The game should run smoothly. The task of ensuring stability in the largely falls on the shoulders of testing. It also required variety of computer hardware. And different operating systems. And various game settings, different languages.

Usially testing is monotonous and boring process, at least for a creative developer. However, it not simple. It is not enough just to identify the problem or bug. It is necessary to properly describe, find ways of reproduction. I assure you, it is not easy.

3. Steady content quality. Usually a lot of content in the game. Which were created by different developers with different skills. That game did not look like a patchwork quilt, you need to pull everything to some common level. This process is not creative and not very pleasant. It is bad for experienced developers because it is often necessary to make up for the newcomers. It is bad for the less experienced developers because they have repeatedly redo the same work. It is bad for managers and producer because the deadlines fails, because again is not done that for a long time it was considered done.

4. Play time. You can release a modification with one location. But the game is expected much more. For single game it is at least 10 or 20 hours of gameplay. And what if the creative ideas only lasted for 2 hours? Yes, these two hours was amazing. But where has least 8 hours? This is a serious problem. Make that anyhow? Then we break the previous item of steady quality. One way or another, but it will take a lot of hard work to "birth" 8 more hours.

5. Support. For example, the game has successfully passed all stages and found itself in the store. All fine? “Mission” completed? No! Players problems inevitably arise. Other players expected improvements, new features and new content. Creative developers have long thought in another project, and here it is necessary to refine the "old". It's a bunch of necessary but uninteresting work.

As you can see, at different stages of the development of the game requires a lot of motivation to perform work that does not want to perform.

PS: I would say that the game is usually 20% of the creative work and 80% are not very creative or not creative at all. And these 20% are in the beginning of the road, where a concept, prototype and early demo.

PPS: Before becoming a professional, I tried to make games as an amateur. I had enough self-motivation to complete text mode "Tetris." Everything else remains at the level of ideas and drafts.

[vlad-dotsenko-en]

Games make it easy, part 1

A long time ago, in 2004, Best Way released a demo version of the game "Soldiers: Heroes of World War II". It happened in May or so. The demo contained just one mission - "Officer". It should be noted, this demo was very popular. It was made about one hundred (!!!) community modifications. Most various modifications, including "Star Wars" and other elves.

This event can be considered the beginning of the era of the MOW-modgaming. That lasts to this day.

Open resources, simple and expressive text formats, universal mechanics allowed a small group or even one enthusiast to quickly create their own games. The result was a kind of “Game constructor”. It was not planned. The community meet this feature very positive, so it was decided to keep modding traditions in the following games.

As there is no light without darkness, so there is no good without the bad. For each exсellent are sure something terrifying. Game constructor has laid a vast challenge for its creators. Which is not immediately apparent.

In December 2007, the company released "Brothers in Arms" (only for russian) - addon to the "Faces of War". It mentioned as “addon” in the marketing materials only. In fact, it was an new game with 10 full-size single player missions, new units, new interface, new features done, new behavior, new network mode, another gameplay.

For the first time there was a discontented grumbling. Saying that nothing new in the game there, it's just an another mod, again WWII, etc. After all, the community already has many great mods!.. Including modern military conflicts. And there is a lot of new models, weapons, settings ... and yet they are absolutely free! But only Best Way trying to sell ... sell almost the same as last time ... and why is it so expensive?

Then it seemed strange. Even more annoying. Or even offensive.

I would like to write that we have become accustomed. Very much. But no, we don’t accustomed ...

It turned out that the games make it easy. Easy for all. Except to the creators of the series ...

To be continued...

[vlad-dotsenko-en]

Evolution of Gem2

Recently there has been an increased activity in game development of “Men of War” series and many people ask which engine is used within the different games. The question is not simple to answer, and requires a brief summary of it’s history.

In 2006, the world saw a new game "Face of War". This can be considered as a first appearance of Gem2, version 2.0. There is a certain conventionality in the version number, because classification of engine versions, as the very same name Gem2, came many years later.

In 2008 a new game, called "Men of War" was released. This game is based on  Gem2 engine version 2.1. The main changes from the previous version included:

Game interface improvements.

Improved AI.

A number of new game features (such as the setting barbed wire and sandbags, carrying corpses and so on).

Then came a long pause. Which lasted for 6 years. A lot of things happened. The most dreadful -  Gamespy service, which was used for hosting multiplayer games, ceased to exist.

In autumn 2014 Best Way decided to resume the development of Gem2. The indie project "Battle of Empires 1914-1918" triggered it’s next iteration. The release of this game took place in May 2015, the game at this time used a Gem2 version 2.2.

This version contains a number of significant differences from the previous version (2.1 from 2008):

Full integration of Steam-services: matchmaking, transport, achievements, cloud, trading cards, workshop, clan chat, vac.

Autojoin and rankings for multiplayer games.

Use a free sound library OpenAL Soft instead of commercial Miles Sound System (MSS).

Powerful package system with automatic adjustment, full localization support, dependencies, integrity checking, built-in hash versions.

Support for Unicode UTF-8 format.

Support for partial localization.

Tools for creating scenario multiplayer games.

Tools for creating games against AI bots, both single and multiplayer.

Optimized work with large maps and lots of units.

Full support for the working folder, important for those who make mods.

New sky technology.

Selective game content privacy protection.

Ceased support for multiplayer games via LAN, which greatly saddened hamachi pirates.

Steam DRM and some of our own invention, which complicate the life of torrent pirates.

In addition, the "Battle of the Empires 1914-1918" received a number of their own features: horses, field telephone, gas masks, gas and shrapnel ammunition, cutting barbed wire...

And worth noting that this is only a part of the major changes that can be considered remarkable. But that's not all. For 8 months Gem2 2.2 has received a lot of useful modifications and improvements from its descendant - Gem3.

But the story does not end here. Since the summer of 2015 Best Way is working on a new version Gem2 2.3. This version will be the base platform for upcoming games, such as Gates of Hell.

The work is far from complete, but some features are ready and they are worth mentioning:

HDR, LUT, gamma-correction.

Scene depth, which is the basis for the implementation of various post-processes: depth of field, contours, glow, screen space ambient occlusion.

Composite materials (such as bump-specular) supported in stamps and decals.

New material bump-specular-lightmap.

The new game interface.

We’re also working on porting Gem2 to Linux and OSX, and possibly a more extensive list of platforms, which will be featured in the previously stated, version 2.3.

I hope you've read bravely up until the end.