erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-08-21T21:26:58

Whew - time is just passing too fast. So, I was all enthusiastic that Traces of Illumination is working fine on mobile devices from the performance perspective but there was a little caveat: The GUI I had created just doesn't work for mobile devices ... so here's the full story ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-04-14T14:36:23

The mobile versions of Traces of Illumination are coming along quite nicely. Currently, I'm doing some optimizations for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play which has a real game controller perfectly suitable for my game. My iPad 2 testing device should arrive tomorrow - but today, I'd like to talk about the Amazon Appstore for Android and why Traces of Illumination won't go there.

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-02-15T00:53:03

Now that was a really amazing coincidence: I was playing Traces of Illumination on my iPad while waiting for the very first build for Google Android - and this time, I completed Level 03 in single player mode ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-02-12T16:55:45

I thought I'd quickly post some results of tests with my iOS builds that I first created yesterday. I'm pretty amazed how well this is working giving that this is the very first time I put Traces of Illumination on mobile devices, and when I first started developing the game, I hadn't considered ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-02-12T16:10:58

Diversity in Creativity - music, audio-design, modelling, texturing, gui-design, story-design ... oh wait ... read for yourself ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-02-12T15:39:48

This morning, I showed a friend the new iPad version of Traces of Illumination, and he mentioned that Bullet Time kind of had not so nice associations. Well, it does have pretty nice associations with ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-02-11T20:20:44

And, surprisingly, it just runs. It doesn't run particularly great (in the startup screen, I get 3 FPS, haha) - but in the actual game, I'm getting around 20FPS which, given that this hasn't really been optimized, yet is quite amazing IMHO. Funny enough, I'm even getting the water effect ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-28T23:16:57

I'm still in the process of optimizing the level geometries, in particular apples and power ups. And guess what (revolutionary truth on this channel): Profiling pays really really well. Like, it's common knowledge that in Unity, it's a good idea to cache any of the convenience properties (which misleadingly look like variables) like ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-27T20:43:14

I already started optimizing the levels in previous releases but V1.1.2 has a main focus on optimizations, so now I'm really doing the best I can (at this moment, this will change as I'm learning). While Level 01 - The Square was really trivial to optimize, and Level 03 - The Cube was pretty easy, Level 02 - Plus Ceiling had a somewhat more complex geometry and took me ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-17T21:41:16

The networking part in the V1.1.2 release is now pretty much done. I've done a lot of testing and fixed quite a lot of issues, some of which ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-15T14:21:20

This is to keep you updated on progress on Traces of Illumination V1.1.2. This release is focussed on two major areas: Performance optimization and minor fixes in the area of networking to be able to ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-02T00:44:54

V1.1.1, while being a "minor release" comes with a pretty long list of changes, some of which are really significant. You can always see the current list of changes in thedownload page - but here, for the history, the full list ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-02T00:19:30

I've completed the "tasks" I had planned for V1.1.1 and deployed the version the first time late this evening. Unfortunately, there were quite a few issues that didn't go too well with this release ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2011-01-01T16:24:26

Today, after an incredible New Year's Eve (went to bed at 06:30 after a great party and a very awesome "night", got up at 11:30 and finally got home around 3pm), I'm heading towards releasing V1.1.1 of Traces of Illumination.

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-12-25T22:40:25

Design of the Awards-System started almost a year ago, Feb 14th 2010 - and now a first version is finally online. While many of the awards cannot really be earned, yet, the list of awards should already give you a pretty good idea of what's to come when Traces of Illumination is finally finished.

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-09-29T15:30:49

Unity 3 was released 2010-09-27, so I can now finally release new Web players of Traces of Illumination. Unity 3 has quite a few great new ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-02-25T19:25:54

I've previously mentioned that I'm currently working on an Awards-System for Traces of Illumination. I don't want to go too much into detail, yet, but keep you posted on what's going on in that area. So here we go ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-02-05T21:49:23

Traces of Illumination has a pretty unpleasant bug in multiplayer: When you switch levels, the first time you enter the new level, all players spawn in the middle of nowhere ... so ... the level is unplayable. The good news: Everyone equally crashes after a little moment and you get to try it the next time. And then it should work. The even better news: I found it and fixed it. But if no one minds I'll wait with deploying that fix until I have a few more things fixed/improved.

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-01-29T21:41:01

As you can see, I've ditched the V1.0alphaX version numbers and moved back to a more conventional version number sequence. That should help keeping things a bit more orderly than they were during the last year ... and a half ... so what's new in this version?

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-01-29T21:37:32

This clearly is by far the longest time Traces of Illumination had between two releases - so I thought it might be a good time to dive a little into the history so far: The last release was V1.0alpha9b, released 2008-10-12. That's about 1 1/4 years. Until then, I had pretty short release-cycles ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2010-01-13T23:50:08

More than a year ago I did a series of load-tests to find out how many players my game-server could take. My goal was to be able to host about 150 players per server. Unfortunately, in the last of those load-tests it turned out that around 70 players things got really ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2009-06-07T12:56:38

I'm right now listening to the current state of the soundscape for Level 11 of Traces of Illumination - Everything in Nothing. It's not quite polished, yet ... but I'm happy that aside of some extra-polishing, it's done.

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-12-26T14:19:32

It took its time - but now it's done: Instead of using my homegrown "network filter" that basically sent the message to each player individually and directly (in loops for all kinds of groups), Traces of Illumination is now using Unity's built-in networking-scoping ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-12-13T15:55:24

Traces of Illumination was mentioned in Unite 2008: Highlights And Award Winners on GameCareerGuide. This is the second time Traces of Illumination is "in the media"; first it was in the Unity Developer Magazine, Issue 2 (I had written about that before).

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-12-13T14:44:52

It's been a rather inspiring time, and while development didn't advance quite as much as I would have liked it - the last two months were a time of many ideas, things becoming more clear and getting things settled ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-12-13T12:38:31

Ok, so altogether, I did three major load-testing sessions to which I had invited all people currently registered with the site. The goal of those load-testing sessions was to find out how many simultanuous players my server can currently take ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-09-28T13:32:04

I've just sent out the instructions for the first load-test. Full text below ...

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-09-27T23:15:11

I've just sent out the invitation to the first load-test of Traces of Illumination. For the purpose of this load-test, I've created a special "load-test client" which immediately logs in to the server. The user only needs to join a team, and then wait until a real player hits "play" - the load-test client basically simulates a user with the simple AI that's also used in single player mode. The full invitation:

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-09-15T00:16:37

I had been going back and forth with this for a couple of weeks now, and during last week, I finally came to a decision: TRaceON is now called Traces of Illumination.

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erstellt von Jashan Chittesh am: 2008-09-08T20:26:38

Whoa, that's quite an amazing feeling: My first game is being covered in an actual magazine. No, not just an online magazine, a real magazine printed on paper!

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