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I love researching and writing about Entity Systems, but it takes me days or weeks to make a single article. I’ve written almost nothing for the past 18 months because on my current salary I can’t afford the time off work.

So … now I’m crowdfunding the long, detailed, in-depth ES articles. This gives me a way to spend the time I need to write each one while still paying rent, food, etc.

You don’t have to sign-up – I know there’s lots of people like myself who are in bad financial situations, and I hope all the articles will be made free eventually. But if you’ve found my ES articles useful, and you want more of them, and you can spare $5 once every couple of months, please do.

You can sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/tmachine

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This has been an eventful year. We officially launched a teaching product for schools, my daughter was abducted, I got a BCS scholarship, and I began full-time classroom teaching. I’ve represented myself in court – on my own – against a $15,000-a-day legal team. I successfully climbed some Font-6A routes. I learnt Jazz dancing, and was a show dancer for an 18-piece band. I moved back to London, after many years away.

In the last month, two people of particular importance to me died. One was a close family member, the other a house mate I lived with for 5 years and who’d only just got married. This underlines how much I want and need to get done next year.

Here’s where I’ll be focussing for the next year, and why…

Put best-practices in teaching “Programming” into UK schools

The company I founded to do this – Everyone Can Program – is a loss-making startup. Everyone involved is part-time or volunteering (we lack the cash for anyone to be full-time). This has to become self-sustaining. Every teacher that uses the products loves them – but there are 99,900 teachers in the country who’ve never seen it. Changing the second item will probably fix the first as a side-effect.

Incidentally, if you know any Year7 children, they’ll be receiving a free computer/circuit board from the BBC in a month’s time. It has no box, and is prone to breaking. As a side-project, I’m (ab)using the company(‘s spare resources) to manufacture customised boxes for them – sign up here. As with all manufacturing: the more we make, the cheaper it’ll be for everyone.

Entity Systems

It worked: Entity Systems are now widely used and understood by game developers. But the lack of a mainstream, commercial-quality, production-ready implementation is hurting the whole industry.

I have bits and pieces of a “total conversion” for Unity3D that provides an achievable stepping-stone towards that. I want to get that finished, published, and – eventually – bought-out by Unity (or ported to Unreal). IMHO an official feature would be better for developers: better supported, better maintained.

My first step is to resume writing about ES implementations and tutorials.

Classroom Teaching

I now teach Computing and Programming to 250 children every week.

I’ve been teaching part-time for a few years. But: being formally trained to teach, and living in a School 4 days a week, has blown apart my world. I’ve discovered more in the last 3 months than I’d normally learn in a year or more. There is too much to say; I desperately scribble notes as I go and hope that after I’ve qualified I’ll stop work for a few months to get it all down. Then I can start to share with you some of the eye-opening discoveries.

I love it, but … 250 children is a drop in the ocean. I will never be content if I’m only making a difference for a thousand pupils a year – less than half a percent of the UK school population!

Game Design

This year, I met one of my childhood heroes – Ian Livingstone. After a couple of hours, his advice to me: “In your position, I’d stop everything else, and design and publish a new mobile game every week [and see what happens]”.

I’ve become a lot better at prototyping: faster, more effective. Coincidentally I’ve had some shocking wake-up calls courtesy of my Teaching tutor (Peter Kemp). I think I can now prototype games as fast as some of the brilliant people I’ve known or worked with, and long looked up to – people like Kevin Glass, Markus Persson, and Andrew Gower.

I’ve got some great prototypes, but I lack the confidence and conviction to market them. This is a problem I don’t know how to solve. If I had a working Entity System engine, it would make things much easier – I’d spend even less time coding, and more time marketing.

Mobile Development (iPhone, Android, etc)

I’m pretty good at this now. The mobile company I founded has now shipped over 40 apps for corporate clients, including some I’m proud of, and some for clients I would run screaming from rather than work with again.

But I’m now part-time, which blocks me from most projects (e.g. I can’t do much programming in half a day a week). On most projects I did a lot of recruiting mobile teams, project-managing, leading design decisions, and account management. I’ve recruited mobile teams with only hours or days notice; I think that’s the kind of project I need to focus on finding.

Finding my daughter

The hardest of all. Realistically, I’ll need to burn a few hundred thousand dollars if I’m to have any hope of succeeding here. Any profits and salaries I make from everything else? This is where it’ll be going.

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Civilization was one of the best games ever designed and shipped.

Civ5 is tragic. It’s one thing to launch a AAA title full of nerfed gameplay and obvious, in-your-face bugs, but quite another to leave them unfixed for years after. It’s one thing to officially fix your bugs only in pay-for add-ons – but quite another to keep those add-ons at full price for years after they released.

Here’s a quick view of what’s still broken in Civ5 today, if you buy it direct in the online stores:

• The game autosaves every 10 or so turns; this has NEVER been correct for Civilization (from memory, the original game used to save every other turn by default (maybe not; running out of disk space was a real concern back then); modern teams at Firaxis seem to be too amateurish to implement this. Civ 4 used to crash so much that putting it on “save every turn” was a requirement).
  • No-one at Firaxis should be “unaware” of the need for every-turn autosaves
  • I struggle to think of a rational explanation; best I can think of so far is some weak game-designer thinking that autosaves are “cheating”, so they decided to deliberately break the concept so it only half worked.
  • I haven’t yet found an easy way to un-break this in civ5. Given how crucial it is to the game, and how it’s been present in every previous version, it should be in the game-options, but it’s not. That’s two bugs for the price of 1!
• The user-interface for moving units is more broken than in any version of Civ to date. Civ1 had a perfect system (but predated the existence of a mouse on every computer): units moved where you told them by pressing numeric keypad keys. Civ3 and Civ4 had “automatic” pathfinding that was badly broken: it often walked your units into 100% certain death for no reason.
  • Civ5 takes this one further: if a unit is selected and you move across another unit, civ5 moves BOTH units, causing double the catastrophe.
  • This automated action – that IME is almost NEVER what the player wanted to do, and is extremely destructive, frequently causing game-losing events – cannot be undone. This breaks the cardinal law of user-interfaces: if you do an automated, un-asked-for, action (which you generally shouldn’t) … then you MUST provide an Undo.
• Civ5 also has a strangely bad algorithm for pathfinding: it generally takes 1-4 seconds to run the algorithm during which time the game lies about the game-rules, and claims that your unit is “immovable”.
  • This appears to be a junior programmer discovering “asynchronous” coding for the first time in their life, and not realising the obvious side-effects
  • I have no idea why the algorithm is so insanely slow. It is slowest in a huge game, but even in a tiny game, with nothing happening, and only a tiny game-world, it randomly takes anywhere from no time to 1-2 seconds to “switch on”
• The buttons for “required” actions are deliberately placed in the worst-possible positions: the far OPPOSING corners of the screen.
  • This breaks the most basic and obvious guidelines in UX design
  • For bonus points, the buttons don’t get larger on large/wide screens. Those buttons are so small and so far away you rarely see them, let alone find it easy to press them
  • It’s as if the Firaxis team were out to beers with the misguided team at Microsoft who decided that Windows 8 would rely upon a single “magic pixel” to activate core functions, and thought: “hey, I know how we can really mess-up our players! That impossible-to-hit pixel idea is great! It’ll make the game so much harder!”
• The interactive HUDs giving critical information on the global state of politics, that made Civ4 a significant improvement over previous versions – and that were extended massively by the community, increasing gameplay without removing any challenge … have been deleted.
  • The question begs: we know Firaxis has many people who’ve played the previous civs; how on earth did they forget how critical and popular the dashboards were?
  • The game is almost unplayable without dashboards. It’s a waste of time: you have to play solo, or click through a series of menus every single turn simply to find out the current status of your opponents. A massive step backwards in gameplay.
  • Best explanation I can think of: failed game-design strategy to “make it more mass-market friendly”.

That last point leads into the legion of game-design failures in Civ5. As I understand it, most of the game was “Designed” around the idea of dumbing-down: apparently the Youth of Today are so stupid and lazy that they cannot play games that are deep, enjoyable, or interesting. The way to make money is to make games idiot-proof with as few options as possible and no meaningful decisions.

Ironically, this is the exact opposite of what the legions of Civ fans had shown they valued in the Civ franchise, via the overwhelmingly popular mods for civ4. Master of Mana added depth, difference, more depth, more variety, more difference, and yet more depth, across the board. It hacked the tech tree into becoming 5 different tech-trees, all running in parallel (WTF? Oh, yes!) – and players loved it.

One day, I may write a post on the flow of game design, successes and failures, and the #facepalm that civ3 and civ5 were (between the two of them, both abject failures). Strangely enough … the two things in civ5 that I remember the community being most afraid of (hexes and 1-unit-per-tile) … seem to have worked fine. The radical changes were a success; it was all the easy, “you can’t possibly screw this up”, parts that the dev-team screwed up. And that is why I consider civ5 “tragic”: they got the hardest bits right, despite the odds … and tripped over their own shoelaces messing-up the easy bits.

Civ4 had a similar trajectory, with two differences:

1. It appeared to be a legitimate mistake: they didn’t realise until after shipping how broken their own game was
2. Within a couple of years, the add-ons were being bundled with the core game for free, or at most five dollars. As they should be: they were mostly re-adding content that had been removed, and fixing launch-bugs, with only a tiny sprinkling of extra content/changes.

For Civ5, someone in charge (publisher? studio director?) appears to have decided: “hey, we shafted the consumers and exploited the franchise well there – but we could do so much better! Let’s do it deliberately this time: save money by deliberately shipping incomplete product, then use online market-controls to force everyone to pay 3 times to get a working game! We’ll be RICH!”.

In their defence, Firaxis did ship one major content update for free, which was wonderful: they added retina support. That’s unnecessary (not a bug, retina’s didn’t exist when it came out) and nice to have – but in no way justifies ignoring the rest.

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I periodically write massive long documents detailing all the bugs in Unity that I know, have memorized, and have to workaround on a day-to-day / hour-to-hour basis. But it makes me so angry and frustrated – so much terrible coding, so little technology-leadership at the company – that I end up deleting it. Life is too short to be daily reminded how crappy (and yet easy to fix) our tools are.

Then, every 6 months or so, when people ask me for simple examples of how ECS’s fix Unity, I have to wrack my brains for something simple.

So I’m going to start blogging simple examples as I run into them, with only enough context for me to understand them. Here’s the first…
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New prototype I’ve been playing around with…

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There’s only a few tag-cloud plugins that still work – most of them have stopped being supported.

The best one I found has super-awesome-multi-colour mode. But by default it’s disabled, and the config-options don’t include a way to turn it on. You have to dig in the developer documentation to find out how.

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A new version of Unity is now out – https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.2 – and it’s a doozy.

I don’t normally blog a blow-by-blow account, but this set is particularly interesting.

It suggests the tech team has been focussed on fixing many “critical but un-sexy” problems. That is a noticeable change in direction from the past few years. Possibly this is a one-off to get Unity 5 working properly.

If you’re still using Unity 4.x, it is finally safe to move to Unity 5.

Unity 5 is not a complete replacement for Unity 4 – there are still major featuers of 4.x that have been removed from Unity 5 and have no upgrade-path – but it’s finally production-ready (or very nearly). That … is big news!

Hilighted improvements / fixes / changes

Please note: there will be a lot of negative comments here; that is inevitable, considering most of the change-list is “things that were broken, or wrongly implemented, or poorly designed – and are now not”.

To be clear: I’m pleased and excited by the overall shape of these changes.

Graphics: Added CullingGroup API, which allows you to specify a large set of bounding spheres that are integrated into the culling pipeline and subjected to frustum and occlusion culling

Unity has (amazingly) never had built-in culling accessible by developers, which is almost unheard-of in game-engines. This suggests we’re getting towards it (although spheres are only a first-approximation for culling, and I wonder how deep the interaction is with Unity’s pipeline here. I’d assumed we’d get access to something more like BSP)

Application.UnloadLevel. Unloading scenes is now possible while the game is running. References to lightmaps are cleared but you have to call Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets() to actually unload them.

Scenes in Unity are very much FUBAR as a concept – they were created by people who had very little understanding of computer-game design and development. Ideally, we’ll see Unity remove the whole “Scene” concept in a future major release, but in the meantime this is a significant step towards reducing their weaknesses, which is good to see.

Layout elements under a ScrollRect component may not work properly

No s***, Sherlock! Yeah, most people using Unity’s “new GUI” have found it’s fundamentally broken in a bunch of places. Good to see Unity working on this, and hilighting some of the issues – but really they need to create an entire webpage listing “the following parts are broken, don’t use them – or beware if you do”.

Right now, you tend to waste hours, half-days at a time … re-discovering known bugs in Unity’s GUI.

Scene view picking in linear color space does not work for DX11 when MSAA is used (quality: fantastic)

If you’re on Windows and have the highest quality settings, this is lethal: Unity simply doesn’t work. But it’s coming in an emergency patch very soon.

Mecanim: Playable API.

If this does what I think it does, then it was essential back when Mecanim was released (3 years ago); glad to see it’s finally here.

between 5% and 30% lower CPU cost for rendering

That’s an enormous speed-up for an engine as old as Unity – this is big news. Reading between the lines, the speed up is partly a side-effect of them making it a bit more multi-threaded (which became normal for game engines many years ago).

If we thought that was a lot, wait till you see:…

Particle rendering optimizations (especially for VR), with speed improvements varying from 15% to 50%

… 50% performance improvement! Wow. Name-checking VR here is probably the key item. We keep seeing VR’s extreme performance-requirements forcing engine-makers to up their game, and dig deep to find perf boosts. The “minimum” hardware reqs for basic VR rigs are very high even now, several years after Oculus Rift launched.

UI now uses multithreaded batching & geometry generation backend

This was the minimum we expected from the “new GUI” when it launched in Unity 4.6 almost a year ago. This fix brings the GUI most of the way towards being “production ready” … ironically, 6 months after Unity changed their website to hide the existence of the “old (but works) GUI” and pretend it didn’t exist.

Added parameter QueryTriggerInteraction to all physics queries (raycast, spherecast, overlap) to allow any query to override whether or not the query should hit Triggers

This is patching a MAJOR design bug in core Unity that has plagued Unity for many years. I want to play with this some more, and see how much we can un-**** Unity’s ****ed ray-casting system using it.

(I don’t believe any experienced game-developer would have accepted Unity’s original design here – it was clearly a terrible approach that would cause never-ending head-aches when making games. It mixed concepts that were very obviously unrelated and distinct)

Fixed Function shaders work on all platforms now (including consoles)

This one has been blogged about extensively by some of the graphics team, IIRC.

In my experience, Unity’s shaders have been OK, with a few that were terrible (e.g. all the Mobile ones), but the framework which holds them has generally been excellent: it’s isolated us from the pain and suffering of GPU-specific shader bugs. This house-cleaning doesn’t make much (if any) difference to most of us, but apparently keeps Unity’s internal code clean in a way that will facilitate rapid changes and improvements going forwards.

2D Rect Mask

TL, DR: “we finally implemented masking properly in the new GUI”.

See previous comments on the new GUI, and how it’s getting much closer to production-ready.

UI: Dropdown control

Yes, really – Unity has finally added the “dropdown”, which has been a global expectation in UI design for 20+ years (it was made compulsory in web-browsers back in the 1990’s).

Editor: Remove legacy Mac OS X corner window resize behaviour

Apple told devs to remove this … um … about 3 or 4 years ago? At first, it was broken (couldn’t resize windows), then it was annoying (Unity added optional resizing on all edges, but put an illegal resize-hot-corner in bottom right that broke all EditorWindow code, because they made it a private API).

Working around that on Mac … forced you to mildly break things on Windows.

TL, DR: custom editors (as found in many/most of the best Asset Store plugins) will now be a little less-broken across the board.

Substance … All crashes and hangs at build time, level load/change time, playmode entry/exit should be gone

Yay! I’ve not been using Substance, but I’ve met several developers who’ll be breaking over the champagne over this, given how miserable they’ve been about crashes and hangs with this in the past.

CanvasRenderer now takes a Mesh instead of List this allows for the use of imported meshs as part of the UI

Without this feature, the new GUI was not usable in most non-trivial games. It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of this for declaring the new GUI production-ready.

Allow sprites to be dragged into scene view in 3d mode

Small but sweet. It’s a little thing, but makes a big difference to the frustration level of the user; in my experience, these things are often the real reason why you sacrifice the cost-savings and benefits of your own engine and use something like Unity instead.

i.e.: with your own engine, you can’t afford the time/money to polish every small interaction; 3rd-party game-engines can shine here, and should take more advantage of it.

I sometimes mention stuff like this as suggesting that Unity’s senior management team are out-of-touch with their product. Unity’s early community loved it largely because of small things, but as Unity grew, the company stopped sweating them. I suspect time will eventually tell that was a huge strategic mistake.

Improved Export Package window (now uses a proper tree view)

This window hasn’t correctly worked for at least three years; converting it to a “proper tree view” might – finally! – make the “Export Package” function do what it’s defined to, instead of exporting the wrong things, breaking keyboard and mouse interactions, etc.

(most of the bugs appeared to be a side-effect of the non-maintained, half-implemented, custom tree view code)

Make sure ObjectField and Object Selector shows icons for game objects and prefabs

Co-incidentally, I tweeted about this recently: Unity could make their engine noticeably faster to develop with if they provided visual feedback on these fields.

It’s embarassing, almost shameful, how poor the UX is on these fields today. By the sounds of things, this patch merely makes them “less crap”, rather than fixing them – but the last 5 years has been so awful that any improvement is welcome!

Selection.selectionChange callback triggered when selection changes

To call this “important” is somewhat of an understatement.

Substantial areas of the Editor API’s are surprisingly poorly maintained by Unity. The bugs undermine people each time they try to use one of Unity’s overwhelmingly greatest features: its extensibility.

Graphics: Added a quality setting ‘Shadow near plane offset’ to allow working around shadow pancaking artifacts

If this does what I suspect, it will make it trivial to fix a lot of common, frustrating “why do my shadows suck? OMG! UNITY SUXXS!!!!” situations.

Mecanim Improvements

SO MANY.

I don’t use Mecanim: it’s been slow, clunky, buggy – and it solved the wrong problems at launch. It felt more like a marketing excuse rather than a developer feature. For me, working x-platform and often on mobile: not very useful.

However, looking at how long the list of fixes is … it might finally be worth using it. In context of all the other changes we’re seeing – maybe production-ready for general use now?

(modulo: the performance. Last time I checked, it was still way too slow for cross-platform games unless you were happy to have a relatively small number of animated objects)

Go check it out! If you’re a long-time Mecanim user, let us know what you think of this list of changes!

Now a TerrainData object embedded into a scene (created by script) allows scene objects being selected as tree prefabs

Unity’s Terrain system was implemented using a nasty, ugly hack that should never have been used.

As I understand it, that was in itself an attempt to workaround some problems with the fundamentally broken – and allegedly “unfixable” – Serialization system that is core to Unity, but is too much code for anyone to fix (and will be thrown out / fixed / replaced around Unity v6 or v7. Maybe).

This change reeks of a “workaround to a workaround”: you can’t create TerrainData in the scene (which should be the ONLY option!), but you can artifically create one if you write a script to do it for you. Either way, it’s good news – TerrainData Assets are a common source of project-corruption, because they’re abusing a feature that wasn’t intended for this.

Stacktrace logging: Allow to log full (native/managed) stack trace when log is printed, the option is available in the console window in top right corner popup menu.

OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!!!!!!111!11111!!!!11!!!1!

I frequently discover major bugs in Unity core; there is never anything I can do about it because Unity strips / deletes all stack traces (in most cases) before outputting anything.

If this fix does what it says on the tin … WOOOHHHOOOO! … we can finally workaround Unity crashes (by debugging them!) and give Unity much more detailed and accurate bug-reports (leading to greatly increased chances of them fixing bugs).

Cross those fingers…

Fix Cursor

As I recently tweeted, Unity’s support for custom mouse-cursors was recently broken. That’s a huge pain given most games today use custom cursors. Several fixes here, looks like they’ve cleaned them all up (I hope).

Fix possible data loss on Windows when renaming folder with locked files

:O

Fix occasional recycle bin bypassing when deleting assets on Windows

:O

Serialization: Fixed not being able to serialize a field called “Base”

:O

UI: Stop disabled graphics from blocking raycasts

If this is what I think it is, it’s another example of “should have been fixed before 5.0 was released” – but I’ve had so many problems with the bad system of Unity raycasts that I go out of my way to avoid them anyway.

Core: Fixed hang when passing large arrays to the Undo system

Sounds unexciting, but … I think I’ve encountered this on some of my projects: unexplained hangs that came out of nowhere and destroyed my ability to keep working on one particular game, related to Undo.

Note: I keep saying this in public: Unity’s Undo system simply Does Not Work, it’s appallingly buggy. As far as I can tell, the person who originally wrote it had little or no experience of what they were doing, and didn’t consult the literature to find out how to implement Undo systems correctly.

Some days, I genuinely feel it would be better for everyone if Unity removed the “ctrl-z” keyboard combo, because so often when you press those letters you corrupt your game project. A lot of the time, you don’t notice that Unity has just corrupted your project – not until much later, and then you don’t realise that it was Unity’s broken Undo that caused the corruption. Instead, you blame yourself, or your co-workers. Seriously, it’s that bad.

(I’ve stopped bothering logging bugs against it)

Importing: Changes to scripts are now correctly processed synchronously, fixing a range of issues with scripts relating to asset processing at import time

Subtle, but … I suspect this fixes a LOT of bugs we see on larger Unity projects, where you’re frequently hot-loading complex sets of scripts, assets, inter-related dependencies, custom asset-processors, etc.

…the end

So that’s it. What do you think? Any other major items you notice in the release notes that will make your life significantly better?

What’s still broken?