Bit of a quiet update this time around.
1. The Online Multiplayer is, unsurprisingly, proving to be somewhat difficult to tame. Collisions are our main challenge at the moment. We’re working on improving their responsiveness. On the other hand, movement and events are all pretty accurate both on the client that called them and the clients receiving them.
2. Soon we are likely going to get a PR dedicated person. Hopefully he’ll be able to start by the beginning of next week.
3. The replay system is proceeding, with a pretty decent update this time. I’ve added camera control, timeline control, speed control and even the ability to target and follow a certain player. I’m focusing on hammering out all of the bugs for now, which is no small feat. Once that’s done, I will likely be moving onto other things, despite the replay system being nowhere near as polished as I would like it to be. While I knew this feature would be difficult to make (and in fact it only exists for Brawl mode at this time), I hadn’t quite anticipated how difficult and time consuming it would be…
Anyway, now you can achieve things like these when you want to watch things unfold. I think this is pretty cool.
4. A big problem emerged alongside the introduction of online. All of the game’s balancing has gone by the wayside, substantially. I was able to fix it, somewhat, but I do think it will need a lot more tweaking. I’ll likely write an article about this at some point in the future, as these insights may help other users in future.
5. I’ve rebuilt some of the models of the cores to reduce the impact their rendering had on performance. They are now less random in how they fall apart, which is a bit of a letdown, but a LOT cheaper to render. It’s all a matter of trade off, I guess. Here’s an example:
While before all of the independent pieces of the sphere on the right broke apart randomly and irregularly in approximately 40+ independent parts, now the entire sphere only needs the 6 parts on the left to render it all. And because these parts are regularly shaped, I can duplicate and rotate them as much as I need to to complete the sphere.
Thanks for reading.
– Mike