I dug around a bit, because I had no idea what "jetsam" does exactly. Took me only a few minutes to find some helpful stuff: This one is for OSX, but explains about memory pressure - actual free pages vs. desired minimum free pages - in the section of the same name: http://www.newosxbook.com/articles/MemoryPressure.html And this one has an interesting answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13137922/debug-iphone-app-from-device-crash-log ... the app is using way too much memory - remember that iOS has no swap. The free page count is low so as to trigger a low memory condition, and your app is killed. By responding to Low Memory Events, you can stave off being killed. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-iOS-jetsam-and-how-does-it-exactly-work lists two specific actions: jetsam_kill_hiwat_proc(void) : Kill or suspend processes whose page count exceeds the high-water mark. jetsam_kill_top_proc(void) : Kill or suspend top memory-consuming process. I put my bets on the high-water mark thingie
Thanks for the info. I did some reading on my end and it looks once an app is in the background (by pressing the home screen), it can be deleted from memory at any time by iOS. With Demon Hunter's being a heavy 3D game, it's probably going to get removed first if you have lots of apps running. I'd suggest try deleting all other apps when you have a play session and see if going to the background ends the app. That's what I do on my test devices and it doesn't seem to get killed by the OS very often. Quick update on progress. I did some cool stuff over the weekend but not as much as I would have liked. It does look like the crash bugs when creating a new level or ending a level are gone. Not sure if the crashes that sometimes happen in the middle of a level are still there or not. Made some change that might take care of the weird bug where a random enemy or friendly unit becomes non-responsive and is no longer occupying a tile. No idea if it works or not as I haven't run into that bug yet since making the change. Also added life / action point bars onto the units themselves so that you can look at the screen and see roughly how much AP each unit has. It's useful but might look a bit cluttered so I'm going to set it as an optional setting. Also, I've improved the camera controls significantly by reducing the sensitivity of the touch pan component. So now, the touch screen controls ignores tiny movements during camera panning. This makes things a lot better. Still not perfect but I have no desire to re-write that section of code so I'm hoping it might be good enough for now. Will try to post a new version this week. I still want to finish the morale system and update the level up system to incorporate the new stats (courage and intimidation) before releasing a new version.
Some updates I'm planning to make for morale: 1 - When a unit dies, all units of opposing factions that are in line of sight of it get a bonus to courage. Essentially seeing an enemy fall boosts your courage. 2 - Similarly, when a unit dies all units of the same faction that are in line of sight of it reduce their courage. Seeing your friend get killed is going to make it more likely for you to lose hope. 3 - Certain AI units will be marked as "Leaders". When they die, all units of the same faction suffer a morale penalty. So this will be used on big boss levels so killing a boss early might help panic the enemy and allow players time to recover. That should do it for morale / courage. If I can add the above points, then I think the overall morale system will be where I want it. At the moment, units tend to lose courage if they aren't actively healed. The new morale system does make healing buffs even more useful so I'll have to go back and factor that into the cost / effectiveness of healing spells. Similarly, since damage also inflicts a courage penalty ... direct damage spells are also more effective than they were previously.
That'll work for the betatest, but not for an actual release I'm afraid. From my experience, you absolutely need a way to save progress at start of each turn at least. Ideally, both an autosave, and a manual save in a different slot. Some of the later stages took me over 30 minutes to complete, and I wasn't even on Day 5. People very likely will get highly annoyed when they lose their progress because they got a phonecall or their kid suddenly wanted to watch Thomas the Tank Engine on daddy's iPad (which happened to me a few times ) . I know you wrote quite a few pages back that Unity's save system is less than optimal and doesn't seem to have this functionality. However, I'd still take a long hard look at it, if you can find a way to make it work.
It's probably feasible in the long term to save everything needed to rebuild a game level at the end if an existing turn. However, it would be a major effort and would derail the current time line. I'm going to put it on a post release item list.
Hey guys ... question for you. What do you guys think of the weapon trails that I've added to some of the heroes? Should these also be applied to all enemy units with swords, maces, etc.?
Just a thought, this might be too much. I can see where you can create a snowball effect and you quickly get into an impossible position. If your guy dies, you take a morale hit and they get a morale boost. That's a double whammy. I think it would be much better if a random unit got a boost/hit to morale. Then it has an impact, but it's not overwhelming.
You might be right but I'm hoping that since it works both ways ... it should balance out. If one of your guys dies in a turn but you also kill one of theirs, the net effect on both sides should be the same. The cool thing is that it leverages the line of sight rules so sometimes if a guy in the back is killed but no one else can see it, then the effect isn't that much. However, if a leader dies out in the open ... then the effect is huge. I coded it up today and it seems to be working as I expected. No idea if it's too much of an effect or not. I need to play a few levels to get a feel for that.
Played a few levels with the updated morale system and really like it. Battles are becoming a lot more tactical as you have to think about sticking together as much as possible to benefit from morale. Effectively like how a close formation such as a shield wall has benefits to all members within it. The courage penalty of new enemies appearing (and the courage bonus it gives to those of the same side) is huge. It can turn a battle from a sure victory where the player is just mopping up stragglers back to a real challenge unexpectedly. Similarly, having a turn where you are careless and lose a couple of your heroes can be absolutely devastating. All in all ... I'm really liking it. Looking forward to getting your thoughts on it. Otherwise, I've fixed a few more UI oddities and added health and mana bars to each unit. Also started to add more abilities to AI units. Now even the lowly Ratmen gunners and warriors each have a basic self-buff ability. I've noticed a nice increase in difficulty already from doing so. Also, the Giant Spiders can now trap adjacent enemies in cobwebs ... reducing dodge chance and movement. The Demon Spider boss has 2 abilities ... the cobweb entanglement and a more spooky horrify ability that scares nearby enemy. Lastly, the Ratmen Hero has both a slashing blade ability and a command ability that increases movement, hit chance and heals nearby allies. Since it's a heal, it also increases morale. Going to start adding patrol levels now. Here are some ideas: 1 - Prisoner rescue (Party encounters an enemy patrol that has captured some of your allies ... rescue them before they are killed) 2 - Monster hunt (dwarves have found the lair of a monster of some kind and ask your help in killing it ... players and some temporary dwarf allies fight against a big monster) 3 - Hold the Line (An enemy faction are attacking the dwarf defences ... players must help. Players and some dwarf allies fight against a large wave of enemies that keep appearing during the battle) 4 - Treasure Hunt (The party goes on a patrol and encounters some enemies looting an ancient tomb or treasure room ... a battle against an enemy faction where there is a lot of gold lying around. Big gold reward for success) 5 - Ambush (the player party agrees to help a dwarf advance into some new territory and are ambushed by an enemy or monster ... player units plus some dwarf units are caught out in the open against an enemy that appears from all sides and is fortified in an ambush position) 6 - Assassination (an enemy chieftain or mage has been sighted and the player's faction are asked to search the area and kill him / her ... basically a battle against an enemy character of some kind plus his or her body guards) With the new code I wrote to dynamically switch units to the player's side at the start of the game, all of the above should be easy to do. I'm going to re-use existing levels but just adjust them slightly and populate them with new enemies so creating the above levels should be much faster than creating new levels from scratch.
Both the update to the Morale System and the Patrol Levels sounds really good. Not to mention the nasty-sounding abilities for enemies. Will you drop this a testbuild to Apple? Would give us a chance to see new Morale and abilities in action while you are working on the patrols.
Absolutely ... just on a bit of a roll so want to work on stuff for a few days. Will put up a new test build this Friday. Want to actually include the patrol levels. Also, I'm thinking I might push back the planned submission date by 10 days or so. I want to spend a bit more time in final polish stage.
Also, I'm trying to track down the situation where either an enemy unit or friendly unit is visible on the board but cannot be interacted with and whose tile can be occupied by another unit. I can't figure out what's causing this behaviour. I've made a change that might fix it but it's a shot in the dark. So when I do finally release the next version (or perhaps in the current version that you guys have), can you try and watch for when this bug occurs? I really want to know what might be happening to cause this as it's totally random.
Also, working on giving players the option to add a unique name to each hero. Won't be fully working in the version that I upload today but at least it will show how players will be able to enter a name for each hero during the team selection process.
Hey guys, Uploading the next version now. Here's a preview of some of the new UI elements. You can see the different coloured unit indicators and the new life / mana bars below each unit. These allow you to quickly see which units are in high / medium and low AP and Life. It takes a bit of getting used to but it does seem to be a useful change. I'm going to keep these (and the coloured unit indicators) as options that players can turn them on or off. In the version I'm updating, they cannot be turned off. IMG_0049 by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr
Quick note that I've enabled both forms of landscape mode rotation. So players can now play with their devices in either landscape right or landscape left orientation.
Catching up on all your posts since I last checked in... been a little hectic for me so I have not had a lot of time on the game. Looking forward to checking out the new UI elements. The game has been crashing a little more then usually. I was caught in a loop where it would crash every time I would move the steel golem. Great news - I fell asleep playing the game and must have hit my home screen button at some point. I just checked the game and it was still open and running on there level I left it. I have not been using the phone much today other than texts and checking email.
