Sunlight

Recently we managed to reduce the number of network errors in Awesomenauts by 10% by improving our throttling algorithm. While automatic throttling by a router is killing, smart throttling by the game itself can be a good tool to make the game work better on crappy internet connections. Today I would like to explain what throttling is and how we approached this topic. (Note that the throttling improvements were in Awesomenauts patch 2.5.3 . This post is unrelated to the bandwidth optimisations in patch 2.5.4 that are currently being tested in beta.) The basic idea of throttling is that if you detect that an internet connection cannot handle as much as you are sending, then you start sending less. This can happen on the side of the game, or on the side of the connection itself (by the modem or router, for example). If we keep sending more than the connection can handle, then either we lose a lot of packets or, even worse, the internet connection is lost altogether, causing a network e...

In Swords & Soldiers 2 we are stepping up the quality of everything compared to the original. Level art is one of the areas where we are improving the game a lot. With our improved tools we can make them look a lot more detailed and varied. We also approach level art in a very different way now. Today I would like to discuss how the approaches in both games differ and why we switched to different techniques. In the original Swords & Soldiers the levels were mostly procedurally generated. The only parts that were placed by hand were the ground itself and the small props on it, like grass and flowers. The foreground and background layers were randomly filled with objects. Since this is essentially a 1D game I simply wrote an algorithm that placed mountains (or trees, or houses) at varying distances from each other. Each layer had a bunch of different textures and settings for how densely it should be filled with objects. There are many arguments in favour of procedurally placing...

An important question in code structure is whether to make classes work together through composition or inheritance. The "has a" relationship versus the "is a" relationship. For example: a seat has a cushion and a seat is a piece of furniture. While in this example the difference is really obvious, there are in practice many cases where both could make sense. Does a character in a game have a collision box, or is it a collidable object? These are not the same, but each can be used as the main structure for collision handling (or even both together) and it is not always clear which is better. In my experience intuition often favours inheritance, but it gives so many problems that in many cases composition is better. Let's first have a look at an example of how the same problem can often be solved in both ways. In Awesomenauts we have a separate class that handles the 'physics' of a character. This class handles things like gravity, knockback, sliding...