Defining Awesome

Here are some ideas we have been working on lately for Link-Dead: read more »

Since Easter Holidays is all about killing and torture I decided to give you a little present. Here is an actual gameplay video from Link-Dead with bots. The graphics and animations in the video ARE NOT Link-Dead graphics, they are placeholder graphics I made in 5 minutes. I know there are a lot of retarded people out there, so please remember this and don’t post “that’s crappy graphics!”. The thing that matters is even with 5 minute graphics the game is awesome. Click on video to watch in Higher Quality.

Made bots up until the point where I can play with them. I’m not happy with it, it’s not fun. The movement feels bad (the one from the Test Box I posted here). I slowed down the movement to make it more realistic. It is much better. Still something is missing.

I installed a profiler that works with VS 2003 C++. I never used anything like this before. I think this is the next best thing after a debugger. It’s brilliant I learnt a lot just by looking at the performance of different functions. I’ll be optimizing the code for the next few days.

We are discussing with Sigvatr some possibly brilliant new ideas. Remember my post about Seamless Servers?

More bot programming. I made them use the waypoints even if they are not walking on a path. That means if they see an enemy and between them there is a hole, they do not blindly go like a zombie at the enemy and fall into the hole. Instead they use waypoints to determine what is usually done at the spot they are on. So if they want to walk to an enemy but on the given spot players usually jump, they will jump. This is a very simple, yet very satisfying trick.

I made a bot today with working waypoints. Waypoints are recorded by the player moving then the bot uses that as a path for his movements. It looks promising. Maps in their architecture are more simple than in Soldat, so I think this will be sufficient for realistic bot movements. Although I am thinking of making some kind of ‘probability-based’ algorithm for the movement. It would be more life-like since things in nature work more like that. We’ll see, I’ll keep you updated.

The Link-Dead network code is probably the toughest thing I’ve ever programmed. The concept is amazingly simple (check out John Carmack’s Quake 3 snapshot model) but coding it is a different story. Because of its 100% reliable nature it is extremely prone to human code error. For example the Soldat netcode could go through a lightning and nuclear storm and it would still work (maybe the occasional team switch bug but it would keep on going). This is actually the first time in my career that I decided to use the test-driven programming model to catch out bugs at the coding phase. Wish me luck. 

Since we decided not to publish any game content until it is nearly finished I made a mod. This is the first ever full modification for Link-Dead. Some of the effects don’t work here 100% cause the graphics weren’t really meant to be normal mapped and shadowed; also I didn’t spend much time on the animations. Anyway enjoy.

I encountered some performance issues while stress testing the game. Both with Box2D physics and the new pixel shaders. Is normal mapping really this slow? Also the ragdoll isn’t the fastest thing, don’t know what’s up. I made the whole system faster by scaling the world down. It seems physics engine perform better in the scale of 0.0f-10.0f instead of real world values. Nevertheless ragdolls are a bit slow. It’s either their complexity or collision performance. I guess the latter cause a ragdoll shouldn’t be that slow.

Can’t fix that bug. It’s related to reliable packets. Maybe later, on LAN it works correctly so I just moved on to other things.

At least we fixed the weapon bug in Soldat (with help from Shoozza and Sable).

I made deaths and ragdolls work over network.  So technically you can run around, kill guys, respawn. It’s a working game!
I also brought back the old wall paint code. Made some blood on body shot painting with it of course.

I’m struggling with one annoying network bug for a few days. Net bugs are hardest to catch. I’m doing the same in Soldat now, so it’s double frustrating. Nothing more to say from me. Sigvatr is making tons of tilesets for the mapmaker.