I get occasional questions via email, I thought I would share some of those questions and the answers here. Anything here is just my current thoughts, game development is adaptive, so don't be surprised if things are different in the game. Thanks to those who sent me these great questions. Keep them coming.

You mention on mmorts.com that units and buildings disappear after 30 seconds. How do you handle situations where, say, an opponent of mine logs off and I build a whole bunch of cheap buildings where their buildings were? What would happen when they log back on and the spaces their buildings occupied are now blocked?

While I haven't implemented this yet, the plan is to allow the player to either quickly rebuild their bases at new locations, or if their previous locations are unoccupied, to place buildings where they were.

I was not at my sharpest yesterday so I decided to tackle something I thought would be easy and pretty helpful: Windowed Fullscreen. Windowed Fullscreen is a window rendered on the regular Windows desktop but with no window decorations and on top of the Windows Taskbar. It looks just like Fullscreen, but it avoids the screen flashing it takes to get into Windows' real Fullscreen mode (which I also have since it allows you to set the resolution and color depth independent of the Windows desktop.) Windowed Fullscreen doesn't work as well as Fullscreen if you have multiple monitors since there is nothing to constrain the mouse to the game window.

Since warning messages bug me, I took another crack at finding a solution to this warning message today. I'm building with the Windows 7.0A SDK which has a defective mt.exe.

..\compatibility.manifest : manifest authoring warning 81010002: Unrecognized Element "compatibility" in namespace "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1".

Microsoft's official instructions are to install the Windows 7.1 SDK, but it wouldn't install for me because I already had the 8.0 SDK. Apparently this is a pretty common problem with a really messy workaround.

This week I built a single file downloadable installer for Miranda. This had been on my wishlist for awhile. I had planned to use a regular Windows installer, but I had the patcher built so I thought I'd see what else was needed to make it into a full installer. It turned out to be easy to install the files, and kind of challenging to hook it into Windows. It was the first time I've built a Windows dialog in 8 years!

Something I think is really important in shipping a product is getting the number of bugs down to zero. The fewer bugs you have, the less people will need to rely on support, and the more time I can spend adding features. I used this theory on a previous product with considerable success.

So before I send the game out for people to play I thought it would be good to have web-based crash reporting in place.

I've never been happy with the look of the in-game map. This week it occurred to me that maybe a topographical map would be a more in the theme of the game and a military-strategy-friendly way to go.

The Miranda map is made with WorldMachine. A little Googling led me to discover that WorldMachine can generate topographical maps of the terrain it renders. This seemed a whole lot easier than writing a topographical map generator into the world importer I wrote for Miranda, so off I went.

I brought the image into Gimp, inverted it (since the terrain in WorldMachine is flipped on the Y axis in Miranda) and got this:



Originally I looked at old maps and experimented with using a tea-stained paper background, but that didn't really go with the hi-tech nature of a future spacefaring society, so I used Google image search to search for "cool topological map" and found this neat old source of inspiration (12MB).

Next I took the image from WorldMachine, added a transparent layer, then used Gimp's select color to delete the black, then select color again and bucket fill with "Fill Whole Selection" checked, to change the white to blue. I pieced together a background and cleaned it up with the stamp tool and a soft brush, then I added a grid with Filters|Render|Pattern|Grid. Then I added a legend, making up some lore-consistent details, and the final map looks like this:




The map covers the entire 20x20km test area I'm currently running.

I was looking at Twitter today and realized I haven't posted anything about The Imperial Realm :: Miranda since the beginning of May. Still here! Working hard. Well except last week.

Since around March I've been working pretty consistently on the trailer for the game. I worked out a script, did the voiceover recording, put together a roughcut using beautiful hand-drawn storyboards like the one below, hunted down some music, and started showing it to people looking for feedback. Since then I've been building all the features into the game that I wanted to show in the trailer. This is not going to be a prerendered scandal like Crysis 2's trailer, I'm using almost 100% in-game graphics.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

If you want to contact press (or anybody) that you don't have an existing relationship with about your game, you have until July 1. Canada's new anti-spam law will come into effect on that date and the implications for anyone with a commercial message are huge.

Did this screenshot a while back for a magazine but it didn't end up being used. The game looks a lot different now but I really like this shot so I thought I'd share it. I'll be showing off the new look in the Reveal Trailer in a few short weeks.




"In Search of Prey" gives a hint of the scope of Miranda's single 90,000 square kilometre environment. Anything in the screenshot can be driven to without any loading screens. The area they are searching is known as The Wasteland and it is the most inhospitable part of Miranda. The only life there are a few hardy insects and some curious flowers.

If you're not happy with the quality of your screen capture, just write out the frames as bitmaps then put them together after with a video tool.

Half day coding this up, tried it, crashed, then I did the math. 30FPS * 1920 * 1080 * 3 bytes per pixel = 178MB/s. That's a lot more than the 40MB/s my disk drive can do. Tried a few different things. The best I could do is about 15 seconds of video using PNG with fastest compression and 512K chunk disk writes before it runs out of memory and crashes.

Oh well, at least the game can take its own screenshots now. And I have a shiny new "crash the game" button.

Looks like libavcodec is the way to go with this.