Still working

[Snottus]

Yeah man, congrats!

[Nicholai Pestot]

Right, now that everything has settled down a bit after the arrival of my child, I have picked this back up again. A few hours running back over my notes and going through the code and I’m back up to speed with where I was before. Proxy-turret-targeting-packet funtimes.

I’ve had some offers of help from a few sources, both within scrapheap and without, so I’m going to be sorting out a wee meeting so everyone who wants to get involved further can come have a chat.

If you want in on the meeting than either post here or PM me with your skills, experience, what you are interested in doing and how much time you are willing to contribute on a weekly basis.

[Nicholai Pestot]

I had an overwhelming number of offers of help both from here and other sources that know about my little project and have now finally gone through them all and let the people who can contribute know who they are. I’ll be contacting them shortly to organise a meeting time. Thanks to everyone who offered – I’m just sorry I couldn’t bring you all in.

From the development side, the alpha multiplayer is now almost done. I’ve been derping around with my local test rigs and have multi-boxed a small fleet fight (10 ships). All the functionality from the single player is now there, I just need to do a bit of debugging and alter some mechanics that don’t suit a multiplayer format.

Last few issues I need to fix

-Ships refusing to fire through their own shields. - Fixed. Error in shield layer flipping logic when performing LOS checking
-Shields not dropping when reduced to zero damage - Fixed. 'Immediate disable' logic on server was not replicating out the change in status/HP's to the client

-Damage meters not updating on the client - Fixed. Forgot to include logic for anything except fuel.

- HUD icons not positioning themselves correctly

Functionality that needs changing

-Death handling (currently a disconnect/reconnect is required to spawn a new ship)

Functionality I want to add
-Labels showing a person’s name, based on their login name.
-A little message when someone is killed, showing who killed them

This is all small fry compared to what was required to get the turret/turret banks system working, so I should have a fully working multiplayer alpha available shortly for you all to destruction test.

[Equium Duo]

A thought, maybe add a scene camera looking over the enemy fleet at a bit of a distance,. This could be what happens when you join the room before you click spawn + the camera that is activated after you die?

[Nicholai Pestot]

Good idea. I'll probably throw that into a later iteration.

[Nicholai Pestot]

So something's gone a bit wrong with my logic. Shields will no longer raise correctly. Now a shield will raise for a split second, before instantly bringing itself down again.

The most likely cause is the enabling of the 'immediate disable' network logic that brings down shields when the server detects their remaining hit points have hit 0. The RPC's that replicated this out across the network were not being called and I had to make some alterations to the server shield processing logic to support calling them at the right time.

I suspect there is a flaw in the server logic (rather than the RPC's) that is being a little over-zealous with the detection of downed shields and is not giving the shields a chance to charge themselves up before bringing them straight down. Hence the noticed bug.

Thankfully the shield system is well documented, so even though I wrote it about 3 months ago it should still be quite easy to fix this.

[Nicholai Pestot]

New shield issue resolved.
It was due to a change in process ordering that resulted from some small server-side modifications. I was checking if the shield HP was at zero while still transitioning from a disabled state to a charging state, so the shield was forever assuming it had been burned down before it even came online.

So this leaves

Bug fix
-HUD target icon incorrect locations (I suspect the conversion I perform from world space coordinates to UI space coordinates have been slightly fucked by some alterations I made to the UI logic) Fixed

Modification
-Auto respawn on death instead of forced disconnect/reconnect on death (Won’t take long as I wrote a separate system to handle player ship spawning, so the ship destruction event can simply call this system again after a short pause)

Additions
-Addition of player name to HUD target icons (Small additions to ship spawning, proxy object instantiation and HUD target icon objects)
-Kill message popup (Small addition to ship destruction event, along with a new RPC call to replicate the message out and a new UI zone to hold the messages)

[Nicholai Pestot]

Last outstanding development task is kill messages. Everything else is done.

Once I've implemented that, I'm going to be sorting out hosting for the game server and a teamspeak server.

Then it's just down to the organisation of real life and free time. The latest date the first multiplayer alpha test will be performed on will be the 12th of this month (Sunday) as I know I have that day free.

It may well be sooner if I can persuade my wife to look after my son all by herself one weekday evening and can get enough volunteers together at the same time.

[Nicholai Pestot]

All done.

I'll be creating a separate thread for the test.