Defining Awesome

Good news: is that I have everything prepared for the alpha release. Simple deployment takes a lot of time and effort but I got it ready even with an installer. Bad news: is that private testing revealed that the performance of the game over network is bad and takes too much bandwidth. It’s barely playable at this point and I need at least a week to fix this.

I bought a cooling pad for my laptop. It works great I can even play Mafia 2 (which has my recommendation btw). But this doesn’t solve my problem with Link-Dead, I think I need to revert to the original Dell video drivers. This doesn’t stop me though from preparing the alpha release for LD. Anyone that has ever shipped software will tell you that preparing a release is the most intense & hard period and it is one of the reasons why everyone procrastinates on releases.

I’m spending all day with the debugger killing network bugs, trying to make it as polished as I can for the alpha release. Btw. many have asked for this (QoS Emulator) – I use it for simulating latency and packet drops.

Today I made RCON commands. It works like in Quake, so you type /rcon [password] when on the server; then you type /rcon [console command] and it works as if you were on the server console physically.

Today I’m making taking stuff from dead soldiers and stealing items work over network. Having menus for this makes it all easy and possible. I also made quick picking, reloading and gun changing without the need to go into menu. Just tap the button quickly and the soldier decides himself what to pick.

I’ve really gotten fast at coding. I think it is a result of straining myself with the network code. After writing something terribly difficult everything else seems easy! Push yourself into new territories and you will get gains 10x for your efforts.

Bam! Done. At each reload or grenade throw you’ll pick which item you want to use via a pie menu or list (players preference set in options). This will be extremely useful when you have different clip types or grenades (normal nades, smoke nades etc.).

I need to rewrite part of the reload/change_weapon/throw_grenade code. Currently it doesn’t work well on the net. It doesn’t accomodate for the fact that you will be able to pick a specific clip/nade/weapon from your inventory.

Added attachment sprites for characters to make hanging hair, cloaks, jewelry etc. (like in Soldat).

Made dedicated server work from the same exe as the game. It was relatively easy cause Irrlicht lib allows to run the game with no video driver. As you see I’m moving closer and closer to the alpha release.