JCsUMTRON V0.6 - Multiplayer, at last!!!

Hooray - today, I had the first actual multiplayer session with a friend of mine. It's V0.6, so don't expect too much, but I think it's already quite a bit of fun to play. And this is probably one of the most significant "prototype releases" so far. Most of the GUI (that's been completely reworked) can now be keyboard controlled, many the parameters I'm using can now be controlled (number of teams, number of players per team, "difficulty level" of "AI", level of how "proactive" the AI is etc.) ... in the practice mode...

I've got the server running on my hosted server, and so far, this seems to work quite well (have to keep the Remote Desktop Session "open", but I'll do this as a service in the OS pretty soon, shouldn't be too hard to set up - I've even seen VMWares run as service, but still I think a true "headless" server would be nicer for that than the useless black Window I get when opening my game server ;-) ).

Well, anyways, it's up at one of my Websites

There, you can also download standalone builds for Windows and Mac OS X (Universal binary... um.. I hope ;-) ).

If you want to play with or against me, you can contact me via Skype: jashanchittesh. It's definitely most fun with voice chat, and that's something I'll probably not ever implement... Skype is just fine for that, why reinvent the wheel ;-)

There's still a lot of work to do, of course... The Tutorial is not a tutorial, yet (just starts with a single cycle), the Single Player mode is also not really a game, yet. Sometimes, the multiplayer collision detection behaves a little oddly. Many details to be improved and many more things to come, so stay tuned ;-)

Did I praise Unity, yet? No? Whoa, that game engine just plain rules!!! With all the learning, doing the tutorial stuff, even watching the Unite conference videos and, of course, developing my game, I've just spent about 15 days (à 8 hours) on this, so far, and I must say: I'm VERY pleased with the results... ah... actual development time so far: 12 days (and I'm a complete Unity noob... and I guess I've spent about 2 days with a very unpleasant problem that I think is just a hardware / driver configuration issue that makes the game crash really hard on some Windows XP machines).

So, I'm specifically interested in how the game works on Windows XP - I've been through some "pain" and have filed a bug report... I'm wondering if these crashes happen on many machines, or just on my two DELL Inspiron laptops (8600 and 9200). I've never seen the game crash on a Mac ;-) ... well, time to go to bed now... again...

Of course, I'd also like to know about how you get along with the GUI. Is it intuitive enough? I've noticed that saying "press left ctrl + [k]" is something probably only programmers understand, I'll change that to [c]... and make it more context sensitive (not having to make it more context sensitive was the reason I made it abstract, but... um... I didn't get through with that) ;-)

Jashan

 

Where is everyone? I want to challenge somebody! Join the game

d.

 

no player... :?

 

I'll be right there, homes ;-)

 

argh, too late :-(

 

working! oh, i see, it's all fun and games over there...

sounds cool holtsch and congrats on getting this far so fast. i'll check it out whenever i get some time... busy atm!

 

Nicely done. I used to play Tron for hours at a time a long time ago. Loved it. Unfortunately I don't seem to have any of my "old technique" any more Good fun though.

 

While TRON is certainly not my type of game, I must say I'm impressed with this.

Just a few questions.



My XP crashed too for some reason (XP pro with a PNY QuadroFX5500 and 2GB ram btw)

After that I returned and saw myself still logged in as a ghost ?



+ I am now running the webplayer and setup myself as a HOST. Somebody logged on, but I did not see that person appear in my players list, it kept at COOLER

Is this intended ?



For the rest, nicely done, continue the good work

 

Sorry to hear about the crashes on another Windows machine :-(

The reason you're seeing yourself as a ghost in that case is because I haven't connected the NetworkPlayers with the "in-game players", yet, so I can't do proper clean-up in those cases (when a client just "disappears"). Now that I know that NetworkPlayers can be sent as parameters in RPCs, I think that should be somewhat trivial to implement, though ;-)

Concerning the other, "invisible" player: People appear in the players list only when they join a team. That's also one thing I think I should add (wasn't aware of it until I played this with a few people over the net): A list of players who are currently online...

It's been cool playing with you guys!!! Now I only need to get all the bugs fixed and the new ideas implemented (and the old ones, too ;-) )

Jashan

 

JC's Unity Multiplayer TRaceON V0.7

Is it really 4am? ;-)

Was I having an incredible lot of fun developing this?

Well, this fixes some of the issues we had discovered while having a little session recently. Plus a few nice surprises ;-)

Jashan

 

Hey, if anyone wants to challenge me: I'll be online for about 2 or 3 more hours ;-) I'll keep the game open during that time... and work on the power-ups meanwhile ;-)

Btw, if you use Skype, you can always "ping" me at jashanchittesh... When we create larger sessions, it sure would be cool to do some team-communication in Skype-conferences ("let's take out the MCP, you go right, I go left..." ;-) "ah - remove your wall or your poor team-mate me will run into it" - "help, I'm stuck, need bullet-time!!!"... you simply can't type stuff like that while you're in game, and even if you put such messages on hot-keys, which I'm considering to implement, it's unlikely people will read those messages while playing ;-) )...

Hm... maybe voice-chat would be a cool feature for Unity in the long run ;-)

Jashan

 

On my way

 

This is a fun game. Nice job.

 

Wow, that was an intense session ;-)

Thanks to everyone who joined in!!!

I guess I need to implement something that there's a more consensual approach to starting the game sessions... Right now, whenever someone hits play, the match immediately starts - which can be hard when people are trying to join the teams but only have about half a second to hit the join button ;-)

Probably, I'll change that to "everyone who is currently in a team has to push the play-button".

Also, I noticed quite some "lag issues" this time, so it's probably good to do more synchronization (right now, I only synchronize on turns and in "bullet-time", when it starts and ends ;-) )...

I have to see if I can implement something that when you're in the lobby, and a match is taking place, you could "see" that match. Right now, I'm just faking the sounds of a match ;-) It's a bit tricky because that's different levels, and *usually*, it should be that you only are "stuck" in the lobby when you log in while a game is taking place. The next session, you should be "in the game" ;-)

This would also be kind of tricky to implement because I'm planning to allow multiple matches to take place at the same time on the same server. Getting a "view" into those sessions would require quite some interesting things ;-)

Another thing I noticed, which should be much more easy to implement is having a better overview when you're cycle has crashed but the match still continues for a while. It was a cool idea of (don't remember who that was, but thanks!) to switch the camera to the team-mates (I guess I could simply cycle through the remaining team mates). I guess I'm gonna implement that...

Also, I can "open the chat in game" when you're cycle has crashed. That way, you can at least chat, while you watch the others playing ;-)

Thanks again to everyone who joined in - that's really incredibly valuable to actually play the game in multiplayer-mode, with a few others... It's gonna be exciting to have 20 people in a game. But it definitely needs the "consensual start play", because otherwise, it will be impossible to get all 20 people into teams ;-) ... also, I feel some of the other things need to be implemented before a session with 20 people really is fun for everyone (it might take quite some time before such a match is finished, so being "out of the match" should be nicer that it is right now).

Any further feedback is greatly appreciated!!! And thanks again everyone!

Jashan