Defining Awesome

Holiday season is over, hope you had a good time. I tried to rest as much as possible but it was hard. I still got a new map, FOV, bots and other goodies done. I hope to make a new release at the end of the week.

I finally found some time to fix the bots that were working in the LD Deathmatch Test so you can expect bots in the next release which should be really soon. Don’t expect anything spectacular cause they do a lot of stupid things but still they can do pretty smart moves which I am proud of.

I tought about Field-Of-View for a while and decided to give it a shot. For now this will be a server-side option and we will see how much fun is it. The implementation was easy cause I had it already coded. Just had to fix a couple bugs and add a shader to render the out-of-view map parts. Here’s a couple versions of the shader. I think the last one will be in the game.

.. And yes, that’s a new map I’m making.

Added map file compression and texture bundling in one file. All gfx of the map are in one file. This makes it overall larger but is easier for deployment. I still have to decide if I want it like this or not.

Added file downloading from server. Works asynchronously. Can be used even during the game. Uses throttling for optimal bandwidth usage.

I invented a way to synchronize physics code over network using very little bandwidth. I’m implementing it now to see if it will work. This might be used for a variety of map objects, like guns, clips, rubble, boxes, ragdolls and finally doors and elevators which could possibly be destroyed; fall and kill somebody beneath it. Hope this idea works.

I updated my Network Code Research mindmap. It includes now a presentation link from Gaffer On Networking. It is an excellent read especially to see how much the internet sucks for online gaming. The data Gaffer provides corresponds with my experience that I gained just by diving into the waters and trying my best at making multiplayer work good in my games. Here are the 4 bullet points:

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The lecture was a lot of fun. I told everyone to make a game next year and sell it. The game should be appropriate to the skill level they have right now. Hope to see some good polish games in 2011.

This is the kind of error message reporting I made on the LD server. I didn’t know why this occured until I saw who joined the game:

I just made in-game video recording! Awesome article, copy-paste stuff.  It uses ogg theora compression which is awfully slow, I’m looking for an alternative. Also the article doesn’t explain recording sound. But it does explain how to upload directly to Youtube which would be fantastic!