Defining Awesome

Today I’m rewriting the pickup item code to incorporate picking stuff from the ground, so that you can pickup a grenade and throw it back!

Working on suggestions and bugs from alpha testers. Plus added support for point sprites which is a super fast way of rendering particles.

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I’ve been thinking a long time about hiding in darkness. It’s a cool option but everyone has a different monitor and it’s very easy to cheat by adjusting the brightness on the monitor. I’ve thought of a solution which is to simply make the player more transparent in darkness. In pitch black he wouldn’t be drawn at all.

I’m beginning work on fixing the issues testers have. First thing I did is improve the controls, there is still a lot to do in this area.

A few test matches have already been played. It feels amazing to at last play my game with a couple people on the server. There is still a lot to do but I can honestly say that I am sure now Link-Dead is heading in the right direction and it will ultimately kick ass.

I think I got it right this time.

I need a few alpha testers for initial closed alpha testing. I think 20 people at most. In first order I will pick people that are long time fans on my blog (over 2.5 years), then players that have succesfully accomplished the Link-Dead Technology Test. If you don’t hold any of those criteria please don’t bother and wait for the public alpha testing. If you do and want to participate please contact me with your nickname written in the message and write LINK-DEAD ALPHA TESTING in the subject.

Also please note that you will need good hardware because we’ll be playing an unoptimized version. You should have a couple hundred FPS on the LD Technology Test. Another thing, is we’ll be most likely playing on my server which is located in mid-USA.

It’s time to write down for everyone the gamemode that will be available in the alpha. This isn’t the full gamemode that I am planning with robots, bases and hacking but something to play while I will be developing that. The current gamemode is called read more »

The last few days I’m just sitting with 2 clients on localhost, lag emulator running in the background, and testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking, fixing bugs/mistakes. It’s very tiring. I just wish with all my strength that I will get the netcode right and it finally works. The last build seems promising, but I still need to test it in a real environment.

Other stuff I added in the meantime:
– holding the fire button when throwing a grenade arms the grenade so you can wait for example 3 seconds, release the fire button and throw
– bombs explode from other bombs, nades and bullets (this makes bombs without detonators a not so stupid idea, cause you can put 10 bombs in 1 room, wait for someone to step into that hell hole and shoot just 1 bomb or put 1 detonator)
– I finally swallowed my pride and added unit testing. The code is just so large now that without some automatic testing I am wasting tons of time just on stupid mistakes. I’m using a very nice library called UnitTest++.
– added a Game Director, which is a fancy name for something that controls the time of the game, checks points, respawn units left, ends matches and restarts them, and finally decide which team won the game

OMGN made an interview with me about Soldat. Check it out.