Progress Update #0002
I know things have been quiet on this blog however, things have not been quiet in the background. I have been and still am reluctant to visually show the progress we have made, since currently we are using a lot of placeholder art simply to test out various elements of the game and the mechanics.
So this post is less about showing visually what we have achieved so far and more about simply talking about it.
Networking
We have made many strides forward and a couple steps backwards with our networking. We got our networking to work over the internet with the usage of Unity's Master Server, which helps a lot. However, in order to get that working right we had to butcher our code a little bit which killed off local networking (it can still be done, it just uses the Master Server so it is not entirely local). Do not be alarmed as we are working to get local networking back in.
We are currently working on getting the server browser up to a standard that is expected from any multiplayer game.
Statistics
We have been working on getting match statistics and overall statistics working which is actually surprisingly difficult when working with Unity's networking because the server doesn't know whether it is NetworkPlayer -1 or 1 which causes issues when trying to assign kills/deaths to players. However a brain will be thrown against it, until it works correctly.
Weapons
We have made it so that when players are killed their weapons and ammo count is synced across to all players, this makes it possible to pick up weapons and ammo from dead bodies which is always a help.
Scripting
Our interface is entirely Lua script driven, hooking into Unity's GUI system (in a way, we have a bunch of wrapper classes that handle a lot of things to keep it working nicely). This means that in the future we might even open up the possibility for modding not just the interface but game modes too. Now before everyone starts crying hacker, we do have some strategies in place or that will be put in place to ensure that UI modding will be possible (to remove "clutter" or improve available info given), which would not affect balancing, can happen while core changes to game modes and so forth would need to be approved by the server, i.e. the server would need to be running the same mods.
We hope that allowing modding, especially on a PC title will allow some nice community engagement and who knows what might come out of allowing modding to take place.
Conclusion
Although this has been a wall of text post, I hope some ideas of the progress we have been making is visible, there are many more smaller things that we have been working on that hasn't been discussed. But we hope to put out some screenshots and videos in a little while once we have more of our own artwork and the GUI has been improved.
Once we have more of our art in place it is fairly likely that we will start some Alpha testing.
Regards,
Garth
So this post is less about showing visually what we have achieved so far and more about simply talking about it.
Networking
We have made many strides forward and a couple steps backwards with our networking. We got our networking to work over the internet with the usage of Unity's Master Server, which helps a lot. However, in order to get that working right we had to butcher our code a little bit which killed off local networking (it can still be done, it just uses the Master Server so it is not entirely local). Do not be alarmed as we are working to get local networking back in.
We are currently working on getting the server browser up to a standard that is expected from any multiplayer game.
Statistics
We have been working on getting match statistics and overall statistics working which is actually surprisingly difficult when working with Unity's networking because the server doesn't know whether it is NetworkPlayer -1 or 1 which causes issues when trying to assign kills/deaths to players. However a brain will be thrown against it, until it works correctly.
Weapons
We have made it so that when players are killed their weapons and ammo count is synced across to all players, this makes it possible to pick up weapons and ammo from dead bodies which is always a help.
Scripting
Our interface is entirely Lua script driven, hooking into Unity's GUI system (in a way, we have a bunch of wrapper classes that handle a lot of things to keep it working nicely). This means that in the future we might even open up the possibility for modding not just the interface but game modes too. Now before everyone starts crying hacker, we do have some strategies in place or that will be put in place to ensure that UI modding will be possible (to remove "clutter" or improve available info given), which would not affect balancing, can happen while core changes to game modes and so forth would need to be approved by the server, i.e. the server would need to be running the same mods.
We hope that allowing modding, especially on a PC title will allow some nice community engagement and who knows what might come out of allowing modding to take place.
Conclusion
Although this has been a wall of text post, I hope some ideas of the progress we have been making is visible, there are many more smaller things that we have been working on that hasn't been discussed. But we hope to put out some screenshots and videos in a little while once we have more of our own artwork and the GUI has been improved.
Once we have more of our art in place it is fairly likely that we will start some Alpha testing.
Regards,
Garth
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