Development Update - May 24, 2011

[Mycal]

Lack of posts, sorry. I've nearly finished bringing the worldeditor up to date now. It has some problems with converted maps, which isn't too big of a deal right now, but will be a problem in the future, so I'm working on solving that issue right now. All in all, it didn't take very long to actually updating the world editor, the problem came with a stupid mistake I made. I was experiencing some severe delays while rendering maps, especially maps greater than 20x20, turns out, I had started kind of a recursive rendering of every tile under each tile. Basically, I looped through all tiles, and for each tile, I again looped through every tile. So it was a never ending loop which caused some major slowdowns until I tracked down the stupid mistake.

I have also been trying to switch over the client code to XNA with very little luck. Our custom tilesheets are presenting some real problems so we may have to abandon them for the time being and just use XNA's content manager to do everything. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just slightly less secure, but at this point, I don't really care anymore.

In other news, I've kind of retired from Minecraft, but have now become addicted to Terraia. This game is loads of fun and I've gotten pretty far equipment wise, and just need to beat The Eater of Worlds boss one more time to finish off my Shadow gear. After that, I'm going to try my hand at fighting that crazy hard Skeletor boss again so I can loot the dungeon for spells.

I am also finally going to be upgrading my home desktop soon, since I'll be getting a 2600K for around ~100$ (great discount, so kinda have to take advantage of it ). Here is what I'm looking at spec wise so far:

CPU: Intel i7 2600K
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) CL9
SSD: Not sure yet (probably a Vertex 3 120gb)
HDD: Samsung F3 1TB (for storage)
Video card: Not sure yet (initially will be a single 250 GTX, but will upgrade later on).
Case: Corsair 600T White Edition
PSU: Corsair 850w HX
Heatsink: Corsair H70 + 2x Scythe Gentle Typhoon 1850 Fans

Will probably be a slow build since I can't afford everything at once, but I'll get there eventually.

 

[Alpha]

I enjoy these updates, give me something to look forward to and what to expect.

I don't enjoy, however, the lack of updates on the Odyssey project.

[ Post made via iPod ]

 

[Mycal]

Another update, the world editor is looking good now. It works pretty much as expected now and is in good enough shape to ignore it for awhile again. The client is also looking really good. I've separated the code greatly to be easier to manage when it is hooked up to the server (which is my next task). It is at this point that I will do a full code fork.

The fork will basically be when I start the full conversion of Odyssey. I have decided that I will do real Alpha builds of Odyssey as I go. This means that you will be able to start NEW servers using the alpha builds if wanted. I say NEW because I won't start on a converter until it has the same features as the current VB build.

Each time I add some "new" features that are realtively stable, will designate a new release for alpha.

Note that while I will be heavily working on Ody at this point, I will not be working exclusively on it. I will still be working on our full game that is still yet to be named.

Oh, and I think I have found a reliable way to have an all in one executable instead of separate client, updater/registry. So that's good news. Now the big question for Odyssey, do I make all updates mandatory, and how do I enforce it on servers..?

[ Post made via Windows Smartphone ]

 

[Alpha]

Sounds good man.

If you decide to enforce it, which you probably should, don't see why anyone wouldn't want updates anyways. You could make it prompt to check for updates, if they say no, close the program. It's a choice between getting the updates, or you get nothing.

[ Post made via iPod ]