Nintendo

Nintendo

Stone Shire Patch 1.2, Ohayou! Beginner’s Japanese Release Dates!

November 9, 2016 by 1 Comment

stone_shire_water_mode_patch

Hello, Stone Shire players! Today, a patch has been released live to the European servers (and should come later this week for North America). 1.2 will be introducing the new water building feature, which will allow you to create your own bodies of water. In game, simply press the X button to switch back and forth between water building and normal building mode. Water no longer flows automatically, which increases the framerate of the game.

The game’s lag in editing the terrain has also been reduced, so you should expect greater response times and little disruption in play.

ohayou-beginner-japanese-title-wii-u
Our japanese teaching game Ohayou! Beginner’s Japanese finally has North America and European release dates. It will be coming out on November 17th in North America, and November 24th in Europe and other provinces.

For more details, visit the pages below. The EU Game Page has not been created yet by Nintendo. I will update this post when it comes in.

Nintendo NA Game Page
Official Game Page

Nintendo - Stone Shire - Unity

Ohayou! Beginner’s Japanese Completed, Stone Shire Patch 1.2, and Nintendo Switch

October 21, 2016 by 1 Comment

ohayou_beginners_japanese_shot

It has been a grueling five months of work, but we have finally completed Ohayou! Beginner’s Japanese for the Wii U. The game took a lot less time to make than Stone Shire, that’s for sure. We’re excited to finally have it done and are now waiting on approval for it from Nintendo. After that, we’ll be able to say a release date for it. We may release a patch in a month or two that will add vocabulary, based on how long it takes to implement. But with the Nintendo Switch now a thing, we may just delay it until then. We’ll talk about Nintendo’s new system in a moment.

In the meantime, the 1.2 patch of Stone Shire has also been completed, which took only a weekend. To improve frame rate, the water flowing process has been removed, and lighting updating has been optimized. Players should see a large difference once the patch is deployed. Its release shall come as soon as it’s done being approved.

nintendoswitch_hardware-0-0

Now, on to the big topic of the week: the Nintendo Switch! I’m happy they announced it, because it’s very significant for the future of Finger Gun Games’s development. Hearing that Unity will also be supporting the system, porting our current games to the new system is now possible. In addition, I’m very curious of the Switch’s specs. At the moment, Nintendo will not release any, but based on the hardware it’s based off, the Nvidia Shield, we can garner a clue to its construction. Based on a couple of studies, it could be that the system is using the Tegra X2 chip. To compare its performance, the hardware has been known to be able to play games at 1080 @ 30 to 60 fps, or 720 @ 45 to 60 fps. Apparently, it’s a 64-bit six-core chip, with two main cores that are considered the major haulers of performance. The Wii U had three based on tech studies, so the only thing we will have to see is if the version in the Nintendo Switch is as fast, if not faster.

I wasn’t disappointed by the GPU in the Wii U, so I’m sure it’ll be just as reasonable around this time. If anything, my only gripe about the Wii U was always the CPU, so it’s the one thing about the hardware I’m curious to see the full specs for as a programmer. I will say one thing: having a good GPU means having a large module with good cooling. The Switch looks a lot smaller and slimmer than the Wii U’s hardware. This has me skeptical of performance, mostly because we all know in the computing world, the more powerful a GPU is, the more heat it will generate, and thus the more cooling you will require. That’s why cellphones are like microwaves when you try to play app on your phone. You never felt any heat from the Wii U GamePad because it doesn’t harbor this kind of hardware, but this time around, the Nintendo Switch will. So the hardware is probably optimized to be as least disturbing as possible. I’m also curious if the docking mechanism actually has another GPU we aren’t aware of. If it’s meant to be a console hybrid, I’m assuming that having that component isn’t just to hook the tablet to a TV while charging it. I’m sure that thing holds a lot more inside it.

nintendo-switch-vent

As you can see above, there’s vents built into the top of the Switch handheld device, so Nintendo has prepared for that scenario where the thing is going to be running games that could cause quite the heat-up. If there’s anything to take from it, it’ll probably be no worse than the PS Vita. That handheld holds fine for playing good graphical games, so the Wii U probably won’t have too much of a problem. The size of the device seems to put it at bigger than a vita, so if anything, it’s probably better at its job, too. This is Nintendo, after all. I’m sure they already solved this problem.

So in summary, I am looking forward to the Switch. The only thing left is to see its specs and its touchscreen (which is rumored to be multi-touch), but it’s very likely Finger Gun Games will be continuing support for Nintendo’s next system.

-Cordero

Nintendo - Ohayou! Beginner's Japanese

Ohayou! Beginner’s Japanese

May 27, 2016 by 2 Comments

ohayou-beginner-japanese-title-wii-u

Hello, everyone. We at Finger Gun Games will like to introduce our new project: Ohayou! Beginner’s Japanese. It is an educational game that will teach you the basics of Japanese Hiragana and Katakana. For the Nintendo Wii U, the instructors Asuka and Kenji will give you teachings on the TV screen. The player will use the Wii U GamePad to navigate menus and turn around digital flash cards to give them more details on a chosen Japanese character, such as its romaji relation and a vocal pronunciation of it, all with just a touch of the finger. When you think you’re ready to test your knowledge, you can then participate in the memory games where you will use your finger like a sword to “cut” across the correct cards that match up with an indicated romaji or vocal sound. Score high in the various levels of the matching games and you will become a Hiragana Samurai and a Katakana Ninja!

Available now on Steam PC and Nintendo Wii U!

Steam Page

Nintendo NA Game Page
Nintendo UK Game Page

Videos

Finger Gun Games Youtube Channel

Images

Nintendo - Stone Shire

Stone Shire – Post Development Thoughts & New Project

April 17, 2016 by 0 Comments

First of all, I will like to thank the players of the community for supporting Stone Shire. This game came out May 21st of last year, and was the first of its kind on this console. It was meant to bring a block-building experience similar to Minecraft to the Wii U. It was also meant to be transformed into something more like Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, a lot of these features I was unable to include in the game, both due to the limitations of the system (and the Unity engine) and me simply being a one man team, which led to a slow development time. I apologize that I was not able to give you the full experience that you expected. The lag of the game is something I did not want to occur, and it seems introducing the lighting and water mechanics unfortunately brought a lot of bad performance.

Unity is a great engine to work in, but it’s also not optimized for procedural generation. Because the Unity APi is not allowed to be touched both in code and by multithreading, a lot of the optimization I did was mostly C# related, aka based on all the operations I did outside Unity. The way Unity works is that it has a main thread that it processes all its processes through. While beneath the hood it is multithreaded, unfortunately, I as a programmer cannot touch anything there. For instance, in Stone Shire, if I could make mesh construction, the rendering step done by the CPU, be broken up into smaller steps, I could have made the game a whole lot less laggy. It’s not a problem when it’s just one or three chunks of meshes being built up, but when there’s multiple ones constantly being updated due to light and water, unfortunately, there’s a freeze I cannot get pass due to the mesh construction process sharing the same thread as everything else. This had led me to unfortunately passing a lot of inputs into fixed update, which is not a good thing in practice but was necessary to have the game run smoother on the Wii U. Of course, I had the algorithms for light calculations and mesh vertices building done in a different thread, since it was all c# related, so the pre processing step was actually pretty fast. However, to build the mesh, you have to pass the data to the main thread to have the mesh actually applied, and that led to the slowdowns that the game constantly experienced.

In addition, I used the Greedy Meshing technique to reduce the amount of faces on the collision mesh of the chunks, as this was taking a good portion of the mesh building time when the mesh was applied. With this made, the mesh building time became a whole lot faster than it was during alpha builds on the Wii U. Unfortunately, if I did this with the rendering part (the mesh you actually can see that has textures), this would make me have to create a texture material for each type of block in the game, and that would have led to some devious overlord of the game. Therefore, in the worse case scenario where each block is a different object compared to its adjacent neighbor, this would actually be a worse scenario technical wise since now you have to deal with both maximum face count and an abundance of sub materials.

I will strive in the future to bring a better experience to this genre, hopefully on Nintendo’s next console. However, I am bringing a pause to the post development of Stone Shire for the moment as I work on a new smaller project, which I will give details to in the next coming weeks. I enjoy working on Stone Shire, but I must also continue to create more games to put out on the Wii U. I will work on smaller patches to bring the game to a more stable quality, but a lot of features like monsters, animals, and the weather system I wanted to implement would have to wait until a future iteration of the game.

Thank you for following along on my adventure and I hope you stay for the next chapter in Finger Gun Games life.

From,

Cordero

Nintendo - Stone Shire - Unity

Stone Shire 1.1 10/20/2015 Progress

October 20, 2015 by 0 Comments

stone-shire-off-tv-mode
Things have been going well on the development of this upcoming patch for the game. Been making a lot of quality of life changes to the game. For instance, players will be able to play solely on the Wii U GamePad for those who like the comfy life of lying on the bed or couch with their handheld in their hands. And they can also play with a Classic or Pro Controller. So you can just place your GamePad on its dock and play it like a second TV or play it on your TV. The GamePad is still used as an inventory peripheral, so you still have to use it. I have a non-GamePad feature of navigating the inventory currently in development, but it probably won’t make it until multiplayer is implemented.

The jumping has been improved, so now the player can make more precise jumps. The problem on the live build is that when you make a jump, you’re committed to it, not able to change its direction mid flight. Now you can, which should make jumping on places you want a whole lot easier.

There is one issue I am dealing with right now, and that involves the speed of updating a chunk after mining a block. On my PC with a Intel Core i7 4790K, the block update process takes only 200 ms. This includes light propagation and generation of the procedural mesh. However, on the Wii U, whose CPU is not as good, the time to process is a whopping 5000 ms! That’s a 25x difference. And the process that takes the most chunk of this time is the mesh generation process around 2500 ms, where as the remainder is held by the light process, which is composed of two module processes. This is with limiting the processing to only a set amount of space around the block. Because light propagation requires multiple chunks to be updated due to the possibility of how light radiates, multiple chunks are updated at each cycle (which is limited again by a variable to keep the game at a steady enough frame rate). This may sound easy to optimize on paper, but I am using Unity for this project, and unfortunately, Unity has to build its meshes on the main thread. This means whenever a number of game objects with procedural building processes are active, the game essentially stops until they are done, resulting in chopping gameplay. This problem is solved by brute force with a better CPU, but with the Wii U, this is going to require some heavy ingenuity or cutting some corners. Obviously, these processes are put in their own threads, but the slowdown mostly comes from chunks being rebuilt. And the process itself in general creates a short time where the player mined the block, but the terrain doesn’t update until it has processed it.

There’s still a few more solutions I can try to get this up to better speed, such as further queuing the chunks that are rebuilt. I have a main queue of chunks that immediately have to be updated, for when the player removes or places a block for immediate feedback. So I can make a second queue of not so important chunks. It’ll mean that light and water will be updated slower visually, but it may be the price to pay to make this all stable. I have to be careful with this, of course, because the bigger the queues are, the more ram this can take. My game however doesn’t go above half a gig most of the time, so I should be fairly alright. There’s still the bug that the game crashes when in extended play reported by players, so I’m going to have to find that memory leakage that’s happening somewhere.