Sounds and Battle

This week I took a look at introducing sound into the client. I found OgreAL a snap to use, it's API is modelled after the built-in Ogre managers such as material and resource manager, so not only was it familiar but also cleanly designed. Unfortunately, technical problems (crashes without any indication of the error - my favourite!) arose when I tried running the code, which I attributed to driver issues, as switching to "generic software" audio drivers - done by passing in a parameter during creation - solved the problem. This parameter is not available for Python-Ogre 1.1 which uses an older OgreAL API.

So all I had left to do were the sound effects.

As I mentioned, I found a program for generating ambient soundtracks last week. It's really a sine wave generator and I'm currently trying it out as a background track. I haven't thought much about what sort of music would be suitable for a game of Thousand Parsec, perhaps I will have the client play any .ogg files it finds in the directory, similar to how Oblivion does it. This way, the user can specify his own soundtrack, although it would be nice to have some original music of our own too.

I spent a while trying to create sounds for other parts of the client. Right now, I've put in a "engine rumble" and clicking sounds for buttons on the gui. Once again, I found a useful utility for these sounds, called sfxr. Most of the sounds produced are pretty lo-fi, but it's suitable for stuff like laser noises and the engine rumble was made from this too (plus some processing in audacity). Hm, there should be some way to embed sounds in blogs too...

I think that the background track does add a lot of atmosphere, but my taste in music is pretty much like that anyway (see Drone Zone on SomaFM) so hopefully it won't annoy others. The sound effects will require a bit of tweaking as well, as their volume varies based on the user's location (automatically handled by OpenAL) and they can sound too loud or too soft at times.

One of the primary motivations for adding sound was to supplement the Battle module, a standalone program for viewing BattleXML files.

Currently, it does not process the actual battle, but it does create and show the initial locations of the fleets. I'm still figuring out how to define weapon locations and attach them to the ships, which should be fun once it is done. Also, there seems to be some texturing issues with the models as well, hopefully I can fix them in Blender.

An additional windows installer script has been created as well, which actually just places the compiled client into your program files directory and create start menu shortcuts. The process of creating the installer actually exposed some bugs - although everything works, on shutdown the client outputs an error log, saying that some background threads had been forcefully shutdown, which made me realise that perhaps I hadn't been closing the client library threads properly, something that I have yet to look into.

Next week, I will be finishing up the battle module and tying up loose ends:
- the starmap could use a navigation bar for zooming and centering
- the title screen should have the TP logo
- using theora to display the intro movie
- a minimap for lost players
- writing up documentation
- packaging linux and mac binaries (big problem here)

Ship designs and order queues

After chatting with mithro this week, I found that the ship designer in the pywx client was an old part of the code (untouched in a year), and that ship design was not considered a priority (since only MTSec supports it). What I did instead was a viewer for ship designs in the game:

The design list on the left is colour coded by player, and the information pane is currently showing etower333's scout design. Wasn't that guy in a previous post as well? How long has that game been going on anyway?

Order queue management has also been added.

After selecting an order from the queue, you can use the delete button to remove it or the edit button which will bring up the arguments window to edit the existing values. The new button also serves to create a new order after selecting from the available orders list on it's left. This change led me to venture back into the rather untidy order handling code, which I have cleaned up a little.

A minor change is that double-clicking on an object will focus and zoom in on it.

One thing I have been looking into is introducing sound and battle scenes into the client.

Battle scenes in thousand parsec are defined by a BattleXML file, which is a file format detailing how many sides there are in a battle and the makeup of the individual fleets together with a turn-by-turn breakdown of how the battle went. A sample pygame viewer as well as documentation on the format can be gained from the battleviewer git repository, although I have not run the viewer yet. One problem with BattleXML is that currently it is only supported by tpserver-py and not tpserver-cpp, which is the more popular server. Another issue is that it has to be implemented by the ruleset specifically and requires a media definition file to map 3d models to ingame objects as well as any weapon effects. Perhaps there could be a random battle generator so that support can be easily added for all rulesets?

Sound support is already available in Python-Ogre via OpenAL, a cross-platform api for 3d sound. So it's really a matter of finding the right sound effects. I've found a program called song04 which generates ambient soundscapes, it sounds quite alright and I'll be trying it out as a background soundtrack next week.

In somewhat related news, my old computer is probably on it's last legs as it frequently hangs upon startup (or the kernel starts to panic), and it has no internet access as the network adapter refuses to connect despite using the same settings which worked before. I guess it's rather fortunate that I got a new PC recently.

This week in TP

This week, I finally figured out how to do proper camera rotation in 3d. The actual code turned out to be simple. At first, I wanted to use spherical coordinates to position the camera, as I had success with using polar coordinates for the radial menus. By storing the vertical and horizontal angles and treating radius as the zoom distance, I could convert them into 3d coordinates by applying some formulas. This worked only for rotations along the Z-axis (meaning that the world was "rolling", done by moving the mouse left and right). However, for rotations along the X-axis (pitch) it would refuse to rotate properly - upon reaching the horizon angle it would "bounce" back again.

In the end, I put the camera inside an OGRE scene node, and made it the child of another scene node which would act as the focus. Hopefully this tilted diagram isn't too confusing:

In the diagram, you can see the camera floating at a distance above the map, which contains several planets. The focus node is always level with the other map objects, while the camera node can zoom back and forth. As I mentioned, the camera node is a child of the focus node and by rotating the focus node directly, OGRE will apply any transformations to it's child nodes, causing the camera to rotate around the focus node.

Allowing the camera to look around freely posed a problem, mainly with the starry background as it was a flat field of stars. Here's a picture breaking the illusion:

Thankfully this was actually quite easy to fix. OGRE uses particle emitters, which spew out particles in various arrangements, and there was a Hollow Ellipsoid emitter which I could use to create a starfield surrounding the camera. The manual is not very clear on how to use the Hollow Ellipsoid, the inner_ parameters are actually numbers with a range from 0.0 to 1.0 specifying the percentage of inner volume which should be hollow.


There always seems to be a cluster of stars at roughly around the same location, I'm not sure why. Letting the camera roam also let a few more issues crop up, such as the planet rotation. Previously, they were facing the player who was looking from overhead, since otherwise all the player could see would be their polar caps so I had to rotate them back again. Another stickier problem is the panning of the camera. Since the camera can pan in any direction, it screws up the zoom if the player pans downwards or upwards.

Finally, the messages window layout has been changed to include a panel showing all the message headers. As I said in the previous post, the layout looks like it could do with some tweaking.
Next week, I will implement the ship design window, although I've not been able to create ship designs using the existing client yet, I should take a look at at least letting the player view the ship designs, or else he won't know how badass his fleets are. :)

Another thing will be the order queue management, which refers to deleting and editing existing orders.

There will be a turn update window, showing new events received upon a new turn.

Finally, I will create setup packages for Windows, Linux (with the help of fellow Thousand Parsec developers) and Mac (which I will be working with my mentor for - this may take longer due to issues with Python Ogre). Although not a real release yet, getting the build process done will be a load off my mind. No use working on a project if nobody can run it after all. :)

Animated camera

This week, added some animation to the camera movement to make it more smooth. When zooming in or out, it will move gradually instead of instant 'steps' like before. In addition, there will be animated panning when a system is double-clicked on the system list, or when pressing 'c' to center on the selected object, or when pressing "goto" in the message window. Since it will move in steps every frame, it is somewhat slow when the frame rate is low. This could be solved by having calculating the step size based on the frame rate. A harder problem is how to rotate a camera in a spherical manner around an object, which is probably a staple of most 3d games.

I also added some movement for the ships which will occur after a turn update. This allows you to roughly see where they are going, particularly for enemy fleets.

I guess this week's changes are mostly animation based, so it's a little hard to take screenshots.

Some additional minor fixes
Message window parses html messages now. This was largely thanks to Tim Ansell's suggestion to look at the htmllib and formatter library that comes with python, which saved me from having to strip out the tags manually. I still can't believe the breadth of python's built-in libraries sometimes. Batteries included indeed. One possible addition is to add additional formatting according to the html tags, right now I'm just stripping them out adding line breaks appropriately:



The keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out (the plus and minus key next to the backspace) is fixed now. Previously, it was stuck in 'icon view' all the time.

Some interface changes

This week, I have added some additional elements to the user interface in order to make it more user-friendly.


The first would be the turn counter in the top-left hand corner, which is handy for knowing how long the game has been progressing for someone who is joining in half-way, and for knowing the current 'phase' in rulesets like Reach for The Stars, where there are three phases and certain orders are possible depending on the phase. However, it does not actually show the phase - the user will currently have to calculate it on his own.

Another difference is the End of Turn timer in the bottom bar, showing how many seconds are left until the turn is over. The 'End' button next to it is used to tell the server that you are done with your current turn, although this step must usually be taken by the majority of players before the server actually finishes the turn.

Next, when the user hovers the mouse cursor over any object on the starmap, a popup will display with some information about that object such as their name and owner (if any). In addition for fleets, the composition of the fleet will be shown, while planets will display their resources and star systems will just show how many planets they contain. One thing I'm trying to figure out is how to dynamically resize the popup in accordance to the text contained, to prevent text overrun such as in this case:

etower333's home planet - In the minisec ruleset, the home planet of a player is defined by having "Home Planets" in their list of planetary resources.

Another change made is to tweak the icon view so that it colours the icons according to their owner:


This makes icon view a lot more useful, especially as I'm still working out how to show ownership of planets in 3d view without colouring the entire planet.

A common issue with network applications is having the server down, or providing incorrect credentials, so an error message will be displayed when this situation occurs.

I'll be looking out for more areas where I can put information or error messages, but I probably won't post about it again as it's quite minor in implementation (though important).

One suggestion was to have a way of selecting between objects that are clustered closely together when the view is zoomed out. In the wxwidgets client, clicking on a star system will cycle through all the objects in orbit around that system, so I have attempted to make something similar - when clicking multiple times on the same spot, the client will cycle through objects overlapping that area.

Issues encountered this week
A new version of python-ogre was recently released (1.2 RC2), and contains a huge amount of changes from RC1. After downloading the windows build, I found that it wraps versions of ogre that I had never even heard of! (1.7 in this case - the latest stable version is 1.4.9 and the next slated release is 1.6, codenamed Shoggoth. Talk about bleeding edge. :)) Needless to say, it brought a few interface-breaking changes with it and I was considering whether to port the project over or not. One desirable thing about RC2 is that it supports CEGUI 0.60 which comes with a brand new tree widget - something which I'm sure would be very useful. One course of action might be to compile a custom version of python-ogre with just the new stuff that I need - something quite easy to do on linux as I just have to change some version numbers in the build scripts. On the other hand, that would make it more difficult for people to just download the source and run it when they already have python-ogre installed. I think that for now, the client will continue to target the previous version of python-ogre (1.1 since 1.2 RC1 has disappeared) until I can wrap my head around all the new stuff that's just come in.

Things to come next week
I will be working on animating the camera view to make it smoother (for instance, zooming in and out should be gradual and not abrupt) while making it possible to rotate around an object.

Also, I want to revamp the messages window to implement the great suggestion of having a two-paned system, and to handle messages with html tags in them, although I'm not very sure how I'm going to do that at this point.

Thirdly, I want to squish all of the bugs I've found so far. :)

Progress bar and preferences

This week, I added a progress bar which will show the status of connecting and downloading objects from the server.



Having a progress bar is crucial as users will not be expected to look at console output to determine what is going on. This was implemented by using Ogre's built-in progress bar and tweaking the code as well as colours to match with the current gui scheme. The progress bar shows up when connecting to a new game, and also when updating objects in-game. The background is blanked out to prevent sending orders during updates, however it looks very empty right now, so I'm thinking of putting up some of the thousand-parsec art as the loading screens.

One bad point about the client is that it runs slowly on systems without a 3d card, although I'm not decided on what minimum requirements I should be targeting. One suggestion made was to make the icon view (the map with abstract icons) dependent on frames per second, meaning that when the performance gets too low, the client should switch to icon view. I tried this out and it gave me some issues, specifically with how to switch the client back into 3d mode. Since switching to icon mode speeds up the rendering time, the client will keep switching back and forth between the two modes making the user feel nauseous. As a compromise, I made a preferences window for users to set the zoom level at which the client will switch to icon view. The window is summoned by clicking the "Config" button on the Login screen.


The thousand-parsec project has kindly provided us with some hosting space, so I will be putting up windows binaries in order to get some feedback. I have been messing around with tools like Inno Setup, but for now it is simply a self-extracting file.

My objective for the coming evaluation is to make the client as playable with the Reach for the Stars ruleset as I can, and at first I wanted to focus on the ship design component, until I learnt that RFTS does not require the user to create their own designs, which leaves MTSec as the sole ruleset with player-designable ships. I feel there is scope for adding some cool stuff here - ship design has always been a favourite of many 4x games.

Currently, I have the following issues to fix:
Select objects which are very close to each other - It is hard to click on objects, especially when they are clustered together, so clicking on a cluster of objects should bring up a menu to choose from.

No good way to indicate which planets are yours, the enemy's, or neutral - Perhaps have a coloured rectangle somewhere around it to serve as a flag.

Having a turn counter, to keep track of the current phase in rulesets like RFTS. Related features to this also include an End-of-Turn counter keeping track of the time before the turn updates.

I will be working on these issues tomorrow, as soon as I compile the latest version.

P.S. (ugly personal confession) - I guess I should have seen it coming, but this week saw a lot of distractions due to my powerful new system and it's ability to play the latest games, not to mention the Euro 08 tournament. Am I allowed to call playing Sins of a Solar Empire as doing research? Really sorry... I will make up for lost time next week somehow.

Status Report

This one is a little late, but anyway here is a recap of what I did last week.

Fixed the goto button for the messages window thanks to lots of help from mithro and greywhind in irc. Now clicking on it will cycle through all the objects specified in the message. Still not too ideal though. There was also a suggestion to make the message window into a two-pane reader similar to e-mail clients like Thunderbird. I really like the idea and it's definitely on my list of goals.

Fixed the move order in TP's Reach for the Stars (RFTS) ruleset. The problem was that move orders are implemented differently in Minisec and RFTS, one uses absolute coordinates while the other uses object ids. Order parameters are something I will be talking more about later.

Display a radial menu using CEGUI widgets. The circular background is a static image, while the buttons are created in code and arranged in a circular pattern around the center. The menu is currently toggled with the spacebar, and I shall have to find a way to activate it via the mouse. Also, it does not follow the object when the screen is moved around, which is something I actually intended but looks a little weird in practice.

Handling order parameters when sending new orders was pretty much the focus of the latter part of my week. Thousand Parsec has quite a few order parameter types, and rulesets can mix and match them up however they like, so parameters have to be handled in as generic a way as possible. Thus far, I have handled the following order parameters:

• Time
• Object
• List
• Absolute coordinates
• String

I haven't done the rest because I've not been able to find orders which use those parameters yet. Anyway, to implement these parameters, I had to create a new widget for each new parameter I found. I first drew up the widget layout to act as a template and hid the widget upon runtime. Then, I made a copy of the widget as needed and placed them inside a ScrollablePane, a useful CEGUI widget which allows it's content to be scrolled.

Finally, handling list parameters is a little different from the other parameters. This is because while other parameters can take in a generic set of values, lists only take in values from a limited set of options which are defined by the type of object selected. This requires creating the order first using some default parameters and sending it to the server. After that, the server will return the order populated with the options, which I can then use to show the user. After selection, the order with the user's selections is sent to the server to "overwrite" the initial order. This has the habit of creating "phantom" orders filled with default options when the client updates while the user is still filling in the order.

Now it's time for the strange problems section. :)


Some messages use html tags which are not supported at the moment. There's also a unwelcome gradient in the horizontal scrollbar now that I look at it.

RFTS is still not playable yet. The problem is mainly with the lack of ship design support, which RFTS requires to build even your first fleet, but there are also some usability issues such as not showing which turn it is as RFTS allows different kinds of orders depending on the current turn.

Still no nice way to colour the fleets and indicate which planets are your own. I might go with some kind of overlay over the objects containing the player's name.

Code structure. Under the hood, the code contains a lot of method calls which violate the Law of Demeter, in other words many classes have intimate knowledge of the structure of other classes and "reach through" them to get the things they need. I'm not sure if this is actually something particularly bad, but it is an eyesore. Also, there is a small amount of duplicated code which I have to remove as well.

Some updates

Here are the changes I have made to the thousand parsec client this week.

Movement orders possible by selecting a fleet and right-clicking the destination. Finding out how to send orders in thousand parsec was an important milestone for me.


Movement paths are indicated by a line. However, this does not remain when the turn updates. In addition, changing the destination will leave the old line behind. :( I will be getting to that shortly...


Able to delete messages. I would like the "Goto" button to center the map on the source of the event. For instance, a battle report message would go to the combat location. However I could not find any information in the message object passed by the server that might help. Currently, the message object has id, slot, type, subject, body, turn number and references as it's attributes, and clearly "references" would be a good place to look, but I found it empty no matter what the message. So, "goto" is still in progress. Also, I think a message count in the window title would be useful.

Able to exit to the login screen and re-enter the same game. This was done by clearing all the resources and loading them upon re-entry. However, tpserver logs do not report a client disconnect, so I have find out how to do that before entering another game.

Some bugs I have encountered:

The mouse cursor is hovering over what is called a "CEGUI listbox" object. Since I am using it to show available orders for the selected object, it required removing the list and repopulating it whenever a new object was selected. However I found that it would segfault immediately upon removal of an object. Finally saw a method called "setAutoDeleted(boolean)" for listbox items in the api, which deletes the item automatically when it is removed from a list. After setting it to False I could then remove items without crashing. Hope that this helps other python-ogre cegui users out there, since the setting is on by default. My unqualified guess is that python's gc does not like objects deleting themselves automatically.

What's next
I have been giving some thought to improving the look of the client. I think it should be pretty clear that the current 3d models are all placeholder objects. I've found Vega Strike to be a rich source of 3d models, although I have only played the game a couple of times. Ideally, I would like to have different models for each ship class, but this might become ruleset-specific. So right now I would assign a ship model type to each player, so "Player 1" would always get a certain model and so on.

Planet models should have a texture to them as well, but I'm wondering how to distinguish planets from one another. For instance, some planets could be "Terran" type, "Arid" type, "Acid" type and so on. In rulesets which don't supply such information, I would apply a generic planet type to prevent confusion.

For stars, they ought to have a glow in addition to their texture. Actually mithro, who created the client, has already put in "glow" billboards, but they are not visible as I think I forgot to resize them.

Currently it's not clear which ships and planets belong to each player, so they have to be differentiated somehow. I guess I could change the material settings for each fleet to colour them, but colouring planets would be weird. Perhaps I could change the colour of their text label, but I've already found some colours to be barely visible against the background. A better way would be to surround the planet with a coloured halo, because at least the player won't have to read it.

The skybox currently being used for the background has to go as well. I will try a particle system of white dots with billboarded nebulae. Hope it looks better than it sounds. :)