👑 6th GUILD CLASH RESULTS!! 👑

The GUILD CLASH has finished!

(Cortez Voice)* Let’s check out how you did!

HANGING BY A THREAD

Spaceguild Score
Raiders Justice 415
Pizza 353
On Target 282

IN SHOCK

Spaceguild Score
E.D.E.N. 122
БРО SQUAD 111
On Target 105

A BREATH OF HOPE

Spaceguild Score
On Target 298
Raiders Justice 181
Pizza 125

A FIST FULL OF SAND

Spaceguild Score
On Target 207
БРО SQUAD 153
E.D.E.N. 93

THE ENEMY WITHIN

Spaceguild Score
EL CERVECERO 133
Raiders Justice 98
LÖRDS ÖF PÖWER 66

 

THIS WEEK, the competition will take place in the following MAPS:

 

– HANGING BY A THREAD

– SHORT-FUSED

– A BREATH OF HOPE

– A FIST FULL OF SAND

– THE ENEMY WITHIN

 

Good luck Spacelords!

😱 SPACELORDS IS COMPATIBLE with NVIDIA GFORCE NOW!! 😱

We are really proud to announce that SPACELORDS is now COMPATIBLE with NVIDIA GFORCE NOW!!

If you guys don’t know it yet, it’s a streaming service that allows you to play compatible games in real-time directly from their cloud to your PC, Mac, ShieldTV, or Android device! 

The only thing you need is a phone and a Steam account to carry the Broken Planet with you wherever you go!!

Give it a try here: 

https://www.nvidia.com/es-es/geforce-now/

 

ALPEH OVERLOAD ACTIVE!!

Friday has finally arrived and with it, THE EVENT.

The special weekend: ALEPH OVERLOAD!

It’s ACTIVE till October 25th, so make sure you take the chance to blow the competition away!! (literally)

As you guys liked the hell out our Facebook post, Aleph fountains will spawn more often + Elites will spawn with more Aleph in the following maps:

– A Weapon From The Past

– A Fistful Of Sand

– White Noise

Enjoy the ALEPHCALYPSE!

😼 5th GUILD CLASH RESULTS!! 😼

The GUILD CLASH has finished!

(Cortez Voice)* Let’s check out how you did!

 

HANGING BY A THREAD

Spaceguild Score
Raiders Justice 786
PIzza 337
144thousandv. 330

A LOW BLOW

Spaceguild Score
Bearly Deadly 409
E.D.E.N 366
On Target 276

IN MEDIA RES

Spaceguild Score
E.D.E.N 247
Raiders Justice 108
Dragonflying 106

DOUBLE AGENT

Spaceguild Score
lobo team 150
E.D.E.N 146
Barney Wiki 129

THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS

Spaceguild Score
On Target 154
Barney Wiki 136
Raiders Justice 127

 

THIS WEEK, the competition will take place in the following MAPS:

 

– HANGING BY A THREAD

– IN SHOCK

– A BREATH OF HOPE

– A FIST FULL OF SAND

– THE ENEMY WITHIN

 

Good luck Spacelords!

📝 MSE Story: Carlos Rodríguez! ✍

Gossiping tongues have been saying that Enric and yourself had to carry a whole desktop computer to a meeting with a publisher to prove that one of your demos could run in real-time. True or false?  

Definitely true. That was part of a prototype made back in the old times of PS2 that was based on a scene of “The Exorcist”. We sent them a video of a possessed girl’s head to Codemasters and they could not believe it was all running in real-time. So we took a plane, and just to make a point!

We set foot in their office, execute the demo, and… They were amazed. As a result, they asked us to make a horror game and the result was of course Clive Barker’s Jericho, which was published for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

It’s also been said that in an E3 videogame fair you were basically lying on the floor somewhere, hitting the keyboard to show a demo to a publisher.

Yeah, this time with a laptop! (laughs) It was back at the time when we were developing Scrapland. MSE home-base was located in a small house built in the Spanish First Republic. Old as hell but quite cozy.

Anyway, we spent the night before the presentation making sure the game was working as it should. But when we arrived in the E3, with 1 or 2 hours left to meet the suits, we had the great idea to test it out.

And it basically exploded! So after a 20 hours journey, we weren’t going to be able to show them anything playable. No way. I had copied the whole project’s source code “just in case”. Imagine both Enric and I looking for a socket like maniacs. When we found one, I basically threw myself to the floor to make it work.

And guess what? It was an issue caused by the change of time zone. At that moment, our engine checked the last modification time before deciding if an asset needs a compilation or not. So by moving from one time zone to another, some of the assets were trying to erroneously recompile. When I found the culprit I just made that code line go away. And it just- worked again!

Now that you mention the MercuryEngine, what would you say are the advances of having an engine of your own?

Well, I like it better to use an engine of our own because you really get to know how it works on the inside. That way you can blend it to your needs and adapt it to the game you’re making. If your game takes place in the dark of the night, you can create an illumination system that solves all the problems that may come with it. With a generic engine, you can of course create a night environment but it won’t likely be as good as something specially created for the game.

If your program over a generic engine, you’ll find a lot of obstacles when fixing a complex problem. You get to change small stuff, but not it’s architecture to make it behave like you want to. As much tools it might provide you, the architecture is what how it is. On the other hand, if you don’t use those tools provided properly or use too many features, it dies. The performance goes down because you’ve introduced too many things in the game. Being given more edition flexibility usually ends up affecting performance negatively.

When used, you can’t really know what issues are going to come up because it’s incremental. Yeah, it might work just fine at the beginning of the development. But when adding more and more layers to it you end up saying “Hey, this is not going as well as it should”. And by then, you’ve been working on that project for a whole year!

To sum up, in a generic engine the question is: “How can I do what I want to do in the engine?” In a self-made engine, the question is “What do I need to change to make the game”. That changes the whole game development.

Did you always want to make games? What was your trigger to become a programmer?

I remember crystal clear having a Spectrum when I was more or less 9 years old. We had some games I went through a thousand times and one day I got bored. So, in the summer of 85 or 86, I started taking a glance at the Spectrum’s manual. There were some instructions inside teaching how to plug it into the TV and what really caught my eye; a Basic command glossary. I also saw something that amazed me. Instructions on how to program a small drawing of a little spider. It taught how to use binary data to redefine a user’s character for drawing that tiny spider wherever you wanted on the screen.

I was pretty attracted to it and started learning how it worked. I really liked to understand those lines of code looking at the glossary, those “print”, “let”, “for”, etc. Then I learned how to move the spider from one side to another. And yeah, that was mainly the trigger that made me really look things up, learn Basic’s commands, and start doing things on my own!

The bright side of those 8 bits computer is that you power them on and it started on BASIC. As they didn’t have a graphic interface, you used commands to run the games. It was pretty accessible to start programming back then. The very same way you load stuff using commands, you couldn’t help to wonder what else could that thing do.

One year later, I started learning about the assembly language. If you guys wonder, it’s a language used to write programs using the specific instruction set of a CPU, so you can read a CPU register, or add two numbers. Interestingly the Z80 didn’t have instructions to multiply numbers so you had to learn other ways of multiply numbers, for example using “shifts” and “adds”. But assembly is just a text representation of the machine code, so you need an assembler. I remember using GENS and MONS. The GENS assembler traduced them to machine code. The funny thing is that you had to save the program into a cassette tape every time before running them because it is easy to hang the CPU and lose your changes.

BASIC is a more abstract layer added to it. Instead of using CPU instructions, you write programs using more complex commands that the BASIC’s interpreter will execute using lots of CPU instructions. That way you can write programs easier but at the cost of performance. Nowadays, there are also compilers that generate optimized machine code that is usually good enough for most things. In fact, if you wanted to use assembly for a game like today’s, it would probably take you half your life to program it.

Nowadays, there is no constant need to code in assembly, but it can surely help you sometimes! For example, we have done SIMD optimizations in the video decoder used in a game as recent as Spacelords. Or in the game we made for N-Gage called Zombies, the rasterizer code (which draws texture-mapped walls and floors) was run by the CPU, so it takes most of the cycles. I remember doing all kinds of assembly optimizations and old school tricks like unrolling loops or calculating the texture projection every n pixels. All I could come up with to make it work better. And we almost double our framerate!

 

Anyway, although writing code in assembly language may not be essential nowadays, understanding it is still very useful. You never know when you’ll need to debug a memory stomp caused by a nasty multi-threading bug.

[To be continued…]

💀 4th GUILD CLASH RESULTS!! 💀

The GUILD CLASH has finished!

(Cortez Voice)* Let’s check out how you did!

 

HANGING BY A THREAD

Spaceguild Score
Raiders Justice 541
Pizza 355
On Target 353


THE MOUSE AND THE SNAKE

Spaceguild  Score
On Target 200
Raiders Justice 147
E.D.E.N 122


WHITE NOISE

Spaceguild  Score
Barney Wiki 235
KFC 158
CONTRA 155


UPSIDE DOWN

Spaceguild Score
E.D.E.N 283
Barney Wiki 124
EL CERVECERO 116


MIND OVER MATTER

Spaceguild Score
E.D.E.N 140
EL CERVECERO 121
Estamos ONLINE. 66

 

THIS WEEK, the competition will take place in the following MAPS:

– HANGING BY A THREAD

– A LOW BLOW

– IN MEDIA RES

– DOUBLE AGENT

–  THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS

 

Good luck Spacelords!

We have been hacked.

Many of you have asked via Social media about a weird-looking robot that has sneaked in the Broken Planet.

Of course, we have no clue who he might be. We believe we have been hacked by a secret army located in Chimera.

This very morning, we received cryptic messages saying things like:

“I’m in shock! This old guy looks like a pickle.”

We have no idea what that might mean. Does it make sense to you?

Please help us to figure this one out.

#WhoIsThatRobot 

😲 3rd GUILD CLASH RESULTS!! 😲

The GUILD CLASH has finished!

(Cortez Voice)* Let’s check out how you did!

 

HANGING BY A THREAD

Spaceguild Score
Active Warriors 359
Raiders Justice 330
On Target 294

SHORT-FUSED

Spaceguild Score
E.D.E.N 273
On Target 250
(LEGENDS) 185

NO RESERVATIONS

Spaceguild  Score
E.D.E.N 242
On Target 214
KFC 182

A WEAPON FROM THE PAST

Spaceguild Score
E.D.E.N 387
(LEGENDS) 174
Raiders Justice 158

THE BEAST’S LAIR

Spaceguild Score
Barney Wiki 238
E.D.E.N 226
(LEGENDS) 174

 

THIS WEEK, the competition will take place in the following MAPS:

 

– HANGING BY A THREAD

– THE MOUSE AND THE SNAKE

– WHITE NOISE

– UPSIDE DOWN

– MIND OVER MATTER

Good luck Spacelords!

🕵️‍♀️ Quick PATCH released TODAY! 🕵️‍♀️

We have released a quick patch including:

– Adjustments in the difficulty for matches with antagonists, especially for those with high MMR differences.*

– Fixed a collision/grapple bug in “The enemy within”.

Be reminded that these changes might not be definitive. Data is still required to track this modifications evolution.