Just a quick update to let you all know that Battlemass is now free to play. You can grab it from my main site, enjoy

Features:
* Account system, register, login
* Saving and loading settings to/from server
* Public & private Chat channels
* Friends list. add and remove
* Show news and adverts in game

I’ve reelased my 3rd Unity3d Asset Store package, Tile Based Map and Nav.

This package will get you started with games that needs a tile based system, either where you would see the tiles or only a tile-based navmesh is needed.

The code from this package is featured in the game, Battlemass, and you can view a video of it here.

Features:
* Hex tiles
* Base class for Units
* Unit selection
* Target tile selection
* Selection indicators
* Highlighting tiles
* Unit movement over tile based map
* Land and air/flying units support
* Support for Walls (block both land and air unit movement)
* Sample editor script that helps with map creation
* Camera move and rotate/tilt controllers

Connect Google App Engine

Connect your game to Google App Engine (GAE) based server (Python). GAE enables you to build and host web apps on the same systems that power Google apps. Depending on the load you could host the server side for free or very low cost

Features:
* Account system, register, login, saving settings on server
* Public & private Chat channels
* Friends list. add and remove
* Show news and adverts in game. Manage via browser
* Payment system. PayPal IPN. Game Keys to unlock

Little War Machines

This art package includes 9 optimised models.
* 2 buildings
* 2 flying vehicles (carrier and copter)
* 4 land combat units
* and an engineer unit

The models incl. idle, movement and attack animations where needed; and it is as simple as creating a new material with a specific tint to create units of different colours.

I thought it would be interesting looking back at the past 5 months of Battlemass’ development and write a little something about the development side.

The client side of Battlemass was developed with the Unity3d game engine. The server side is running on Google’s infrastructure via the Google App Engine (GAE) and written in Python. I’ve released a package on the Unity Asset Store which will show you how to communicate with a GAE based server in your own Unity3d game.

Development started near the end of June 2011 and I quickly had a PHP based server up and a lobby system ready.

Around the middle of July 2011 I started looking into cloud hosting solutions and discovered the Google App Engine. I figured that if the game does well I would not have to struggle with scaling and it would be an opportunity to create code that could be used in future project. Only problem was that I had to choose between Java, Python and Go. Since I only had a little experience with Java and nothing when it comes to Java based webapps, and because I thought it might be easier porting from PHP to Python than Java, I decided to learn Python and scrap what I had in PHP and rewrite the server for GAE.
Visit the Battlemass site to read more and view lotsa screenshots …

Check it out at http://plyoung.com

Here’s a gameplay vid of the game.

You will see the latest version for download on the right-hand sidebar of the official site. Please have a look at the online tutorial page to learn how the game works since there is no in-game tutorial yet.

Here’s are some screenshots from the game.
This is a far view of a map to give you an idea of the style we are going with for this game. The map looks quite empty because the artist is still working on décor objects, obstacles and other random stuff that will make the map more interesting. I will post more screenshots once the units are done and in-game.

This is a shot of the lobby, showing the improvements we made to the GUI art.

First you will need to save the cookie somewhere, and since the WWW class will expect a hashtable I will save it in it from the start. So you might have something like this. I created this in a singleton class called Game (you will notice I reference it in later code).

// will be set to some session id after login
private Hashtable session_ident = new Hashtable();

// and some helper functions and properties
public void ClearSessionCookie(){
	session_ident["Cookie"] = null;
}

public void SetSessionCookie(string s){
	session_ident["Cookie"] = s;
}

public Hashtable SessionCookie{
	get { return session_ident; }
}

public string GetSessionCookie(){
	return session_ident["Cookie"] as string;
}

public bool SessionCookieIsSet{
	get { return session_ident["Cookie"] != null; }
}

Now we will look at the function that will log the player in. This was done in a class called Net (which is my wrapper to handle all my WWW calls). This function will make a call to my web server which should respond with a string “1Player_Name” , no HTML, just plain text) – just adapt the code to handle whatever your server response is. Server side I am working with a cookie called “auth”, this name can be anything else and depends on what you want to call it or the technology you are working with. I’ve included a commented block of code that you can use to see what the cookie name is if you are not setting the cookies manually and/or using some 3rd party lib to handle it. The ‘callback’ is just a way I tell the rest of the game when the function is done talking to the server.

// Failed=Bad server error, Error=server did reply with an error, OK=all fine
public enum ReturnCode : int { Failed=-1, Error=0, OK=1 }
public delegate void OnNetResult(ReturnCode code, string result);
public IEnumerator Login(OnNetResult callback, string nm, string pw)
{
	// create params to send
	WWWForm form = new WWWForm();
	form.AddField("nm", nm);
	form.AddField("pw", pw);

	// let www do its thing
	WWW www = new WWW("http://path_to/login/", form);
	yield return www;

	// the following code can be used to see what the SET-COOKIE contains
	// Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie to see what Set-Cookie is all about
	// It is bascially how the server will tell you what it expects you to be doing with the cookie
	// The name you are looking for will be the first characters followed be "=", after that follows
	// the value of the cookie. There could also be other entries on the same line like 'Expires'
	// but they will all be seperated by ';'
	//if (www.responseHeaders.ContainsKey("SET-COOKIE")){
	//	Debug.Log(www.responseHeaders["SET-COOKIE"]);
	//}

	// handle the data from www, but first check if there where errors
	if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(www.error) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(www.text))
	{
		errmsg = "Network communication error.";
		if (callback != null) callback(ReturnCode.Failed, errmsg);
	}
	else
	{
		errmsg = "Network communication error.";

		// like I mentioned in description, this code
		// expects "1player_name" on success, else "0"
		if (www.text[0] == '1')
		{
			try
			{
				// extract the public name of player
				Game.Instance.name = www.text.Substring(1);
				Game.Instance.ClearSessionCookie();

				// check if session cookie was send, if not, well, no use to continue then
				if (www.responseHeaders.ContainsKey("SET-COOKIE"))
				{
					// extract the session identifier cookie and save it
					// the cookie will be named, "auth" (this could be something else in your case)
					char[] splitter = { ';' };
					string[] v = www.responseHeaders["SET-COOKIE"].Split(splitter);
					foreach (string s in v)
					{
						if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s)) continue;
						if (s.Substring(0, 4).ToLower().Equals("auth"))
						{	// found it
							Game.Instance.SetSessionCookie(s);
							break;
						}
					}
				}
			}
			catch {
				// this should only possibly happen during development
				if (callback != null) callback(ReturnCode.Failed, "Network communication error.");
			}
		}

		// let whomever is interrested know that the login succeeded or failed
		if (callback != null)
		{
			if (www.text[0] == '1' && Game.Instance.SessionCookieIsSet)
			{
				callback(ReturnCode.OK, "Login ok");
			}
			else if (www.text[0] == '0' || !Game.Instance.SessionCookieIsSet)
			{
				errmsg = "Invalid login name or password.";
				// my server sometimes sends "0some_explenation", therefore this next line
				if (www.text.Length > 1) errmsg = www.text.Substring(1);
				callback(ReturnCode.Error, errmsg);
			}
			else
			{
				// this should only happen during development since there was an unexpected
				// value at [0], not 0 or 1 as expected, so probably some script error
				errmsg = "Network communication error.";
				callback(ReturnCode.Failed, errmsg);
			}
		}
	}
}

Now we have the session cookie and can send it back when making calls via the WW class. One thing to note though is that you will only be able to make POST requests, but hey, that is probably fine if you doing anything that needs authentication and sessions. You might have a function that looks something like this.

public IEnumerator NormalRequest(string url, OnNetResult callback, Dictionary p)
{
	// p: is a set of keys and values where the key is the name and value the value for the post field
	// create form to send with request
	WWWForm form = new WWWForm();
	if (p != null) {
		foreach (KeyValuePair kv in p) form.AddField(kv.Key, kv.Value);
	}

	// let www do its thing, note that you send the SessionCookie along
	WWW www = new WWW(url, form.data, Game.Instance.SessionCookie);
	yield return www;
	// ...

.. and thats it. Not too hard.

Just a small update.
The above code obviously caches the cookie value after login and uses that same value over and over when communicating with the server, until the next time you would run the login logic. The problem is that on some systems that value could change! If that is the case you will have to check the www.responseHeaders["SET-COOKIE"] each time the server responded and cache the new value so that it can be used in the next request, else you will at some point be sending an invalid value to the server side and it will not recognise you and your authenticationcode will throw an error.