For couple of weeks I have been coding Gamingstats. It is simple website/webapp that collects information from users steam profile daily and then generates statistics for user. Collecting and generating stats all happens on the servers background cron script, so user just needs to enter his/her steamcommunity url.

Because some users have lots of games (100+) It creates lots of data to database. (Played time for every game, every day = lots of data) And because it generates lots of data, I have created steamgroup. To enable time tracking for games, you need to join to the steamgroup. This way I can control growth of the database.

Project is still in beta and there can be some bugs. I may add some more stuff to it in future, like better layout/design and forums signature system, but now I just want to make sure it works.

System doesn’t currently work with the steamcommunity profile id’s (eg 76561197974577294), but it works well with the custom profile urls.

http://gamingstats.pelikoira.net/

Crysis: Warhead is a sequel to the popular game Crysis. And if you don’t know what Crysis is, you most likely don’t care anything about games and you can just skip to next post on my blog.

Warhead has some improvements from the first Crysis, but basically it is the same stuff. Enemies are the same and there is only one (?) new weapon. Engine is improved lot in the optimization. I can run all at enthusiast (aka very high) without any problems. (30+ fps almost all the time)

And yes. It looks damn awesome. Still the best graphics I have seen on a computer game.

The gameplay is also better than on the first Crysis. Levels are more fun to play and the alien part doesn’t last too long. I never got bored with the campaign. Fights are also more balanced and fun to play.

The biggest problem is that this game is way too short. It took only 5 hours to play the single player campaing. And the multiplayer is horrible, don’t even bother to try it… Way too big levels and confusing gameplay. I am currently playing the game for second time in the Delta difficult.

It doesn’t have anything new to fps games, it is just a damn nice game. And way too short. If you find it for good price and you have computer that can run it at high/very high, buy it.

This weeks game for my One week, One game project is Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter.

Serious Sam isn’t regular game in anyway. It is very weird game, from it names to the gameplay. I can’t really say that it is a good game, but I can’t say that it is a bad game either.

The story is horrible, some levels are extremely boring and gameplay is only about killing everything. I could easily write whine post and tell how horrible this game is, but I don’t.

Because I like this game. There is LOTS of stuff to shoot. It isn’t about the aiming skills or reflex, it is more about managing large groups of enemies. I really can’t say why I like it. It is just so fun to sometime just play something so stupid.

There is also a multiplayer that makes the game twice more fun. There isn’t much players on Serious Sam, but when you find server full of people, the game is seriously awesome. 12-24 people running and shooting everything that moves on same server is just so damn epic. Btw, I uploaded some demo files from game where I played on a 12 player server. If you want to see them, you can download them from the files section.

One thing to note, the game-engine is AWESOME. It can draw hundreds of objects with LONG view distance without any problems. Effects, textures and all the other stuff also looks nice. The engine is also very lightweight. (And it has nice console with some kind of lua stuff on it )

Just for note, I have not finished this game. I have played trough the first encounter in coop. But this is Serious Sam and nobody cares about the story. I just like to join random server and kill everybody.

I am currently building my first game/game-engine with c++. Before even thinking too much about the actual game idea, I want to make sure that the engine I am creating is good and works as I want.

I am building my engine very object oriented way. This way it is easier for me to manage the system, and makes it faster to create complex code at the later process of the development. But I also want to make the system flexible enough to allow me to change the way how the engine works if needed.

I have just finished cvar system that the engine can use. (get,set variables) In future I will add ingame console that can change these variables. I will also add way to store the variables on config files.

Right now I am finishing logging system. It is not very complex system, but it is very important to have. The logging system takes advantage from the cvar system I have build, storing filepaths and settings there. It can log events to console, file or both.

To filter important messages from random game events I have designed 4 level system to filter messages.

• 0 = debug message (Example: ai debug messages, small changes, etc. Can be bit spammy)
• 1 = game events (Example: kills, deaths, inventory changes. Good information for statistic parsers)
• 2 = engine events (Example: map change, engine start, etc)
• 3= Critical error (Example: missing textures/files, failed to init SDL/engine. Game crashing bugs)

User can choose level for the logging. Example if user wants to only see engines messages, he could choose 2. Then he would see engine events and critical errors.

Some users may want to see more information on the console they can choose 1. With filter level 1 user can see everything else expect floody debug messages.

When debugging error, developer can set the level to 0 and get all information game can give. Making good log file to analyze later.

The project is currently under heavy development. I will post more when the project goes forward.

One week, one game. This weeks game was Dawn of War 2.

Dawn of War 2 is RTS game based on the Warhammer 40 000 world. It has lots of RPG-elements, so it is actually a RPG-RTS.

I personally don’t like RTS games much. Single player campaigns are usually boring because the story is only couple of cutscenes, multiplayer is annoying because I am bad at RTS games and battles are usually just massive rushes to enemy base without any strategy.

However, Dawn of War 2 fixes all of these problems. The story is interesting and the whole Warhammer world is awesome. RPG-elements like items,exp,levels and skills adds extra depth to the gameplay. If you fail a mission, you can try again with more experience and better items. It also makes the game much more fun limiting the amount of “squads” to four. You give commands to four squads, not to single units. This makes the strategy much more fun.

At regular RTS games I would need to build base, build units and then rush to enemy base with 100+ units. Managing more squads than four is getting annoying easily. It is just way too hard for me to assign tasks to huge amount of squads without wasting resource, and because of that I usually just select everybody and command them to attack one target, and that isn’t strategy anymore…

There is also “last stand” multiplayer option that I really like. There is also normal head-to-head multiplayer games, but I like the coop game more because I am not good at RTS-games.

Last stand is game mode where 3 players are trying to stand as long as they can against waves of enemies. There is only commanders, so you are controlling only one character. Last stand also saves your items and experience over games, so you can level up your characters.

And the last mission of this game is so epic and awesome. Perfect ending for the game.

So far the best RTS game I have played. And so far the only RTS game I have really liked.