Slick Forums

lol.

Eventually. I'm still at Alpha stage now.

But I appreciate the vote of support

Wow nice game very origanel,make shure you tell me when its out i really want to play it looks real good:)

pre-alpha is up and running... at least until it crashes

Please keep in mind this is VERY early still. The game play isn't even complete and it still needs polishing.

http://beta.worldwizards.net

Edit: if it just seems to sit there and hang at the "What is your name?" inoput, it means the server has crashed.

Oh and every once in awhile the bunny placement algorithm hangs. This is evidenced by a hang where the starting player sees the PAUSED message and everyone else just hangs at the joining screen. I need to re-write that routine.

meanwhile, if that happens just quit the game and start another, its fairly rare.

Very nice! Two suggestions:

1) the hunter's movement rate isn't very responsive/needs to be faster
2) either the bunnies shouldn't be able to move where the hunter is, or allow point blank kills

Other than that, not bad for programmer's graphics.

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On 2, yeah, the bunny Ai still needs a lot of tweaking.

The timing is a compromise currently to cover up to half a seconds round-trip latencies. This should be enough to cover players in Europe.

I can easily tune it up but then the latency requirements start getting bigger and people on slower connections will "miss frames' and be at a disadvantage.

There are few things to play with still perceptually. Actually slowing down the animation so it covers more of the frame time for instance might make response "feel snappier". Ive also considered a dynamic frame-time adjustment based on pinging the players but thats down the road some.

In general this all falls into that "polish" category which still hasn't even started. But the feedback is good because it helsp my focus the polish efforts when i get there.

On the artwork, i have to admit its a bit of a cheat. the characters and objects (hedges tombstones) are professional. They were done for me by a friend in the industry. Having said that, they are a quick professional job and I did some VERY quick and dirty image processing to get them to the right sizes and proper transparencies. So the "noise" around the edges of some animation frames ais my fault, not the artists.

Okay found a server bug that was hanging the server up

I'm fixing it but meanwhile Ive restarted the seever. No guarantees how long it will stay up though

ah explains why the game just hanged in game with the text 'paused' displayed.

Does nothing when I press Enter after inserting my name.

ok starts for me now, but its very laggy but could just be the fact that i'm in europe or the excessive System.out.println's on the console.

Yup... actually, you killed it

Thats a known bug I need to fix, it gets stuck in the bunny placement loop.
And the bug that brings down the server is effectively triggered by that.

You can tell when the server is all the way down because you never get past the "What is your name" screen.

Thanks guys. Keep in mind this is VERY early.

But getting some real user ship helps me find the issues so I really appreciate it.

New version of the server up.

Does a better job of placing bunnies and the two related hang bugs (cross fingers) are fixed.

Had a go, looking good, I like the hunter in particular - very elmer fudd.

The half second tick for movement really does make it play wierd tho, I suspect it would have felt better if there had been more than one player in there.

Kev

Yeah there is an issue there Im working with....

Basically, it would cover nicely if a hunter move started as soon as it arrived on the server because the anim covers half a second. The problem is, if it arrives at the wrong point in a tick it can be delayed up to an additional half a second. Then you add in net latencies....

I could speed up ticking on the server to reduce the problem, but Id probably have to move the bunnies every N ticks where N is the anim time (think of it as client frame tick) divided by the server tick time or they would move to fast for you to hit them. Anyway this might reduce the problem but I dont think it would eliminate it. It also might make hunters move out of phase with each other which might make shooting each other odd.

I could also move the hunter immediately rather then on a tick. I just find that a tiny bit scary because it start breaking down the server side synchronization of the logic. It also brings up issues of hunter position in relation to each other....

Once the full logic is in Ill probably experiment further with different approaches. Any thoughts you have are welcome.

I ALSO am still considering my controls. At the moment they are effectively pac man style where what "matters" is control state when the unit is standing still (actually when the previous frame is acknowledged by the server or after.) This works real well for "hold down the control" play but can feel odd for "press-release" play.

An additional issue that may be contributing to(or causing) the oddness is that, unlike pacman, you don't have a visual cue for when its really ready for a new command. Its *around* when the walk cycle completes but latency or the abvoe mentioned frame synchronization issue can cause a delay.

If I had the time and wanted to bother my artists id consider adding a "fidget" anim to cover that time. Reloading the gun or whatever. But they've been so nice already I hate to bug them for more art.

Still that may be the only "right" answer...

Another (small) note: you get 20 points for every shot, even if you don't hit a bunny.

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www.bryandenny.com