Kanji Adventure

Tomires · November 27, 2017, 9:39pm

Every nook and cranny

Just a quick update on the state of our current build. We have finally managed to fix our interface, so the game now displays correctly on resolutions other than 1920x1080. The battle system received a minor update in the form of enemy queues, the camera now also follows enemies during their turn. Probably the biggest change on the surface is the addition of a dedicated map interface that displays the entire game area along with points of interest. Highlighting an icon will display a tooltip that includes more information. Anyway, that’s it for the moment. Please enjoy a screenshot of the new map. Look closely and you might just notice what’s next!

Tomires · December 30, 2017, 4:23pm

In the field

Remember that monotonous grassy area where you used to wage war against all bunnykind over and over again? Boring, wasn’t it? You will be happy to hear that the battles now take place in the same in-game area as the exploration portion of the game! Whenever you commence combat within the game, we will draw a boundary around your character that limits where you (and the enemies) are able to move. The game will also feature items that increase (or decrease) the size of the battlefield.

Oleg_The_Evangelist · January 16, 2018, 12:16pm

so I wanted to share your game with fellow Kingsters, but could not find a web build. Any chance you’re making a HTML5 version soon? I bet it could be a good reason to update your community page https://www.defold.com/community/projects/21328/

Tomires · January 16, 2018, 1:54pm

I will make a web build! Last time I tried I had issues with resource management, but everything seems to be working now. The current build is kind of rough around the edges, the new harvesting system for instance does not function properly if the number of phrases in the player’s encyclopedia is lower than 4 and the query interface is in the process of redesign (it will be a lot juicier!).

(some of the stuff we need to address)

By the way, the version on our website is super old, we expect to have a proper new build ready by mid- to end of February, complete with the second in-game area, basic whisking support between the areas, final harvesting and crafting interfaces, an update to the query interface, new character animations (we are in the process of redesigning the main character) and a bucket load of bug fixes. We might throw in some new spells as well if we have time. Just have to tackle the exams first.

Oleg_The_Evangelist · January 16, 2018, 2:16pm

cool. Can’t wait for a new build And thanks for the update.

Tomires · January 17, 2018, 11:19am

Uploaded the WIP build to https://www.defold.com/community/projects/21328/ & http://adventure.tomires.eu

I am getting abysmal performance in Chrome, which I believe is related to Render script's bad performance slows time

When tested in Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari, the performance was better, although Firefox refused to save my progress. Edge especially is getting fairly close to desktop builds in terms of performance, although I needed to allocate 2.5-3.0x more memory resources to the game when compared with native builds.

By the way, it would be awesome to have an option to run the game in full screen on the community pages. The default canvas is quite small for certain UI elements in our game.

Oleg_The_Evangelist · January 17, 2018, 11:55am

thanks! That’s your university project, right? When are you delivering it?

Tomires · January 17, 2018, 12:05pm

The game has been the focus of my (and my friend’s) undergraduate thesis ( https://github.com/Tomires/thesis/releases/download/final/bp.pdf ), which I have successfully defended back in June. It has since became a project that we work on in our free time with an aim to release it commercially someday (next year I guess?)

Oleg_The_Evangelist · January 19, 2018, 9:40am

so cool! Also it is in english. Awesome that you’re allowed to do the thesis in english, rather than a state language.

Also can we tweet your paper and github repo from Defold acc? May be you’ll get some interest from global community, Japanese folks and alike.

Tomires · January 19, 2018, 11:38am

I would be honored! Although linking to the community page / kanjiadventure.github.io would be preferable as the repo contains an outdated build and won’t be updated for another month or so. I have updated the website to include the web build for now. Feel free to also mention our profile handle at https://twitter.com/kanjiadventure which we intend to use going forward for updates and such (in addition to the blog and this forum).

Tomires · January 19, 2018, 11:40am

Anniversary update

A belated Happy New Years to everyone! It has been one year since we’ve started our journey and to celebrate, we are releasing an up-to-date web build that contains the latest and greatest. You can access it on a special website we have set up for the occasion. We are also establishing our media presence by setting up a Twitter feed, which will include behind the scenes tidbits about the development process, as well as a page on Defold Community, an online hub dedicated to games made in the development tool we are using.

anniv_icons

As for the game itself, we have a ton of stuff to get excited about, namely the addition of a second in-game area, completion of our harvesting and crafting interfaces, significant redesign of our main character, new spells and more! Enjoy the fresh new build and feel free to tell us what you think by reaching out to us in the Twitterverse! Stay tuned for more.

Tomires · January 23, 2018, 10:25pm

The biggest hurdle with designing our new spell interface seems to be coming up with the names for all those new spells.

Tomires · January 31, 2018, 10:08am

We have optimized the font used within the game by removing all unused characters. Here are some statistics:

font file size decreased from 6.1 MB to 110 kB
the game’s memory footprint decreased from 320 MB to 64 MB (native versions)
similarly, HTML builds went from using up 900 MB of RAM down to 200 MB
sizes of binaries decreased by 20 MB

Pkeod · January 31, 2018, 1:10pm

I thought glyphs were dynamically streamed into memory as they were needed and not loaded all at once.

@sven is it just the nature of HTML5 builds since they need to keep more data in memory?

Seems to suggest entire glyphset is being loaded.

Set this to constrain the width of the glyph cache bitmap. When the engine renders text, it looks on the cache bitmap for a glyph. If it does not exist there, it will be added to the cache before rendering. If the cache bitmap is too small to contain all the glyphs the engine is asked to render, an error (ERROR:RENDER: Out of available cache cells! Consider increasing cache_width or cache_height for the font.) is signalled. If this value is 0 then the cache size is set automatically.

@Tomires could you post the defold font files as a config sample of its settings?

Tomires · January 31, 2018, 1:21pm

Here you go:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/Tomires/c0cd06f1f86781a584c658fd393ab9c5

query_kanji.font

font: "/shared/fonts/Yasashi.ttf"
material: "/builtins/fonts/font.material"
size: 150
outline_width: 20.0
all_chars: true

I am guessing it might have something to do with the “all_chars” property? It is disabled by default (and unused as far as my other fonts go), however I had to enable it in order for the kanji characters to render at all.

Mathias_Westerdahl · January 31, 2018, 1:40pm

You can read about all_chars and extra_characters here

Pkeod · January 31, 2018, 1:43pm

This isn’t really clear because it seems to be talking about output when bundling and not how they cause interactions at runtime. Do they force load more glyphs at runtime than what has been requested by all components / nodes using glyphs from fonts?

Mathias_Westerdahl · January 31, 2018, 1:47pm

The font will contain the glyphs you specify. These will affect the bundle size, and it will be loaded in memory as long as the collection is loaded.
Next the texture used for rendering will be updated with at most X number of glyphs, that will fit the texture size cache_width/cache_height. This is to avoid having a texture that holds all glyphs at the same time.

Pkeod · January 31, 2018, 1:51pm

I had assumed the font data was streamed from disk and not loaded into memory. Pretty sure I asked about this a long time and the answers lead me to that conclusion… So you stream glyphs into an extra texture from texture pages for rendering effiency, but the larger your font the worse your memory usage.

@Tomires did you already test extra_characters it would be easier to use than editing the actual font file if it works properly for you.

Tomires · January 31, 2018, 4:16pm

Cool, I didn’t pay any attention to the extra_characters property. Nonetheless, I think physically removing characters is the way to go as I also had issues with editor performance when I used the original font file - when I opened the .font file in GUI mode, it sometimes led to the editor freezing up. Additionally, the editor routinely consumed about 4 GB of RAM on build and held onto that memory until I exited the editor (no idea how garbage collection works in Java, maybe it is a configuration issue on my part? The only thing that I have changed was the -Xmx parameter.). The original font file was massive though, it contained about 10k kanji/Chinese characters alone. Take a look: