[devblog] Welcome to Pastel Park
*Casually checking pixeltennis.com*
"Oh, there are more than 1000 people visiting the site right now. Did it become viral for no reason?"
"Uhm... why is the page so slow?"
*Receives mail from hosting provider*
"We have taken down your website because of a massive DDoS attack"
That was definitely unexpected. To keep it brief: after about a day of downtime, pixeltennis.com is back online, now fortified with some technical safeguards against future attacks. It's actually a fascinating subject to dive into - though I wouldn’t have minded if it had come up at a more convenient time.
With today’s news, there is a new update for Pixel Tennis available which includes the all new court Pastel Park. This marks the fifth playable court in the game, adding even more visual variety to your matches.
From now on, when you create a room, a court will be randomly preselected to keep things dynamic, but don’t worry, you can still switch to your favorite at any time. I will spare you the deep dive into the countless technical tweaks under the hood, but if you're curious, you can find all the details in the changelog.
By the way, what happened since the last update roughly a year ago? One of the biggest topics was the evaluation of switching to the Godot game engine. While the engine itself is great, migrating Pixel Tennis revealed several limitations - particularly in areas like mobile performance, animation toolsets, camera functionality and exception handling. Additionally, Godot’s open architecture makes it challenging to safeguard the game from decompilation or external tampering. That might be acceptable for a single-player experience, but Pixel Tennis is fundamentally a PvP title with an online progression system. If I were to develop a game from scratch again, I would likely choose Godot. It is lightweight, open source and I have even used it to build a few private apps. That said, given the complexity of migrating Pixel Tennis, especially with its existing architecture, the game will remain on Unity.
I really wish I had more exciting updates to share, but unfortunately, life outside of game development threw a few not-so-nice curveballs my way. Those unexpected events took up a lot of time and energy, which meant less progress on the game than I had hoped. Anyway, I hope stuff will get better going forward!
See you on the court!
"Oh, there are more than 1000 people visiting the site right now. Did it become viral for no reason?"
"Uhm... why is the page so slow?"
*Receives mail from hosting provider*
"We have taken down your website because of a massive DDoS attack"
That was definitely unexpected. To keep it brief: after about a day of downtime, pixeltennis.com is back online, now fortified with some technical safeguards against future attacks. It's actually a fascinating subject to dive into - though I wouldn’t have minded if it had come up at a more convenient time.
With today’s news, there is a new update for Pixel Tennis available which includes the all new court Pastel Park. This marks the fifth playable court in the game, adding even more visual variety to your matches.
- Pixel-Tennis-Pastel-Park-Court.jpg (444.76 KiB) Viewed 904 times
From now on, when you create a room, a court will be randomly preselected to keep things dynamic, but don’t worry, you can still switch to your favorite at any time. I will spare you the deep dive into the countless technical tweaks under the hood, but if you're curious, you can find all the details in the changelog.
By the way, what happened since the last update roughly a year ago? One of the biggest topics was the evaluation of switching to the Godot game engine. While the engine itself is great, migrating Pixel Tennis revealed several limitations - particularly in areas like mobile performance, animation toolsets, camera functionality and exception handling. Additionally, Godot’s open architecture makes it challenging to safeguard the game from decompilation or external tampering. That might be acceptable for a single-player experience, but Pixel Tennis is fundamentally a PvP title with an online progression system. If I were to develop a game from scratch again, I would likely choose Godot. It is lightweight, open source and I have even used it to build a few private apps. That said, given the complexity of migrating Pixel Tennis, especially with its existing architecture, the game will remain on Unity.
I really wish I had more exciting updates to share, but unfortunately, life outside of game development threw a few not-so-nice curveballs my way. Those unexpected events took up a lot of time and energy, which meant less progress on the game than I had hoped. Anyway, I hope stuff will get better going forward!
See you on the court!
Pixel Tennis Changelog
Not released yet
Effectively, this changelog does not introduce new features. However, it delivers essential groundwork that makes Pixel Tennis more modular, enabling the development of new gamemodes/features while maintaining a stable and reliable core.
Misc
Updated to Unity 6.3 LTS
Refactored ball handling which allows having 0 - n balls/shots per match
Refactored match handling to allow for other game modes
Refactored player handling to allow for modular features based on gamemode
Reduce memory requirement by lazy loading equipment
Improved shot prediction algorithm performance
Refactored internal handling of quality presets to allow for finer control of graphic settings
Added custom logging system
Added custom gameloop system to keep networking, timers and stuff always in sync
Added protective timeouts to stop a match when something went wrong horribly
Added more utilities to allow for easier playtesting and debugging
Refactoring based on Rider code analysis and code cleanup
Visuals
Fixed reflective floor too bright on potato quality setting
Improved post processing effects by using a third party asset
Fine tuned graphic presets which allow for better performance while keeping the same quality
Added new quality preset "Mobile" which can reach constant 60 fps on a mid-range phone
Improved performance when lots of UI elements are visible
Improved quality of some textures
Fixes
Fixed rare cases where scoring a point could result into 2 points given
Fixed rare cases of desyncs due to thread switching
Fixed all kind of issues when starting a match on a potato computer
Use UTC time internally to prevent issues when switch to/from summer time
Fixed constant GC allocations when checking for screen rotation changes
Fixed memory leak when loading item preview images
Fixed memory leak when loading player profile pictures
Fixed UI freezing during special shots
Fixed touch gamepad triggering virtual mouse cursor within match
Network
Improved network traffic efficiency
Improved player position sync to allow free position ranges
Fixed jitter when a new round starts
Effectively, this changelog does not introduce new features. However, it delivers essential groundwork that makes Pixel Tennis more modular, enabling the development of new gamemodes/features while maintaining a stable and reliable core.
Misc
Updated to Unity 6.3 LTS
Refactored ball handling which allows having 0 - n balls/shots per match
Refactored match handling to allow for other game modes
Refactored player handling to allow for modular features based on gamemode
Reduce memory requirement by lazy loading equipment
Improved shot prediction algorithm performance
Refactored internal handling of quality presets to allow for finer control of graphic settings
Added custom logging system
Added custom gameloop system to keep networking, timers and stuff always in sync
Added protective timeouts to stop a match when something went wrong horribly
Added more utilities to allow for easier playtesting and debugging
Refactoring based on Rider code analysis and code cleanup
Visuals
Fixed reflective floor too bright on potato quality setting
Improved post processing effects by using a third party asset
Fine tuned graphic presets which allow for better performance while keeping the same quality
Added new quality preset "Mobile" which can reach constant 60 fps on a mid-range phone
Improved performance when lots of UI elements are visible
Improved quality of some textures
Fixes
Fixed rare cases where scoring a point could result into 2 points given
Fixed rare cases of desyncs due to thread switching
Fixed all kind of issues when starting a match on a potato computer
Use UTC time internally to prevent issues when switch to/from summer time
Fixed constant GC allocations when checking for screen rotation changes
Fixed memory leak when loading item preview images
Fixed memory leak when loading player profile pictures
Fixed UI freezing during special shots
Fixed touch gamepad triggering virtual mouse cursor within match
Network
Improved network traffic efficiency
Improved player position sync to allow free position ranges
Fixed jitter when a new round starts