New Build Notes Some cool new features added last night/tonight. High Points: Emotes and Looping Emotes added via chat commands. You can use some to play dead Online Player List added Player targetting and Iceball is now networked And so is movement! Beta 002.6 notes
Updated character pics Here are some updated character pics. I would say these are progressing nicely The artist is completely 'getting' what we're going for in terms of look. Click the little one for a larger version!
I have a Macbook if that helps, just let me know what needs to be done and I can help test in any way.
These of course will have eye and some facial feature choices as well, creating thousands of combinations. Here's a new pic Winin did this week: our World Map. The Sign Post marks Danger Forest, which is the starting zone. Click for a larger version
It's going to be a little quiet from me for a bit possibly, I'm working on implementing zone servers to run things like AI and act as message pumps for networked events, and it's complicated. There's been a lot of design work in the meantime and some planning discussions, so I may post some of those gems to tide people over!
Well, I might as well expound a bit, as there's a question for folks at the end. Early on I did some testing and made a decision to use 'click to move' based movement. The theory was that it would decrease network traffic and give the additional benefit of adding screen real estate. Which is absolutely true, based on how I use the game. However! I've been letting some people try out the game on the iPhone and observing their usage in the web version as well, and it looks like they are actually clicking quite often, sometimes several times per second! This sort of defeats the purpose. It adds the overhead per frame of figuring out where everyone is according to where they placed their target position marker. The second part of the need is that I need to implement zone servers anyway sooner rather than later. These are centralized apps which control AI. They would also be brokering move requests and other actions from players. So I am going to go back and attempt to implement a networked message pump for critical player and object information (position, rotation, vitals) which runs constantly. I've run some math on the packet sizes and it seems like it would give a more consistent play experience and avoid degradation of the player experience. It's a major surgery but one I think is necessary. It will set me back about two weeks I think, but allow me to move forward again, as I'm a little mental-blocked on some other tasks anyway. At this time I also have the opportunity to change the movement style to a more traditional keyboard/mouse move on the web version, and a joypad for iPhone. What do you folks think about that? For an iPhone game, click to move vs joypad? Do both? Check out Ravensword for an example of move pad, and Dungeon Hunter for click-to-move.
We're still doing online testing using the web version, which can always be found here: http://www.daveyounggames.com/dangerlands/dangerlandsWIP.php This version will be exported to the iPhone when we're ready to get more device testing in. See this page for more info
i'd sooner go for a joystick on the iphone, mainly because of the small screen, where clicking is often funny. joysticks just feel more natural.
I had what seems like incredible initial success at prototyping new zone server and networking model. Granted, it's a barebones test, but I had the server firing up 300 networked objects each generating moves as fast as 10 times per second. I used 10 connected clients (mac/pc) and one iPhone client and the server was sending out updates 3 times per second. All 10 clients stayed in synch with eachother. This is important! For fun, I restarted the iPhone client and let it be the server, with 150 objects updating the clients three times per second. Each object could move randomly between once per second and ten times per second. It worked the same. This means I should be able to embed and spread the zone server technology out onto even spare iPods hanging about As it happens, that feature is going to become important soon, for reasons you can only guess at!