I've been able to get a lot more done on the networking lately. 

The client and server are much smarter about their current state.  If they wait too long for a response now they will resend the message.  They will also ignore messages they get from the wrong server or they are not expecting.  Both of them will also drop a connection if they don't hear anything from the other side for too long.

The game now does some more advanced stuff like fragmenting large messages and encrypts the messages slightly.

The game itself has also gotten some attention.  There is now some movement smoothing/interpolation (this also makes single player look better).  Above other players you now see their health bar, their mana bar, and their name.  Other players also show up on the minimap and the world map.

There is now even more sharing that goes on.  I mentioned a while back that players share score since Kivi is designed to be co-op. Well now keys, secrets, and super secrets are also shared.  There is no reason to have people fight over who finds the secrets and having someone leave the game with the only red key would cause slight issues.

Right now I only have a few small issues left, a bunch of playtesting to do, and I need to find a solution for a master server (I'm talking to a couple people for this though).

One of the remaining issues is what do I do about limited lives?  I'm not sure the idea works in multiplayer.  A client that runs out of lives can just exit and come back in again (which is just a nuisance), but the server can't without taking down the entire game with him.  Right now I'm just leaning towards infinite lives but you still lose the end of adventure bonus if you die.  Anyone have any thoughts?

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Another fellow indie rpg developer, Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software, has been posting sales stats for one of his games on his new blog lately.  Quite frankly they are quite fascinating.

The short summary is that Geneforge 4 (one of his average sellers) has sold a little less than 4000 copies, it cost around $120K to make, and has almost broke even over the last few years. Considering that it is one of his average sellers and breaking even means the game paid his salary for a year, this is a pretty good thing.

For me this is a glimpse into a successful indie that I would actually like to mimic.  Usually the few success stories that I hear many details about are some crappy game on the iphone or some casual game on the PC.  Personally I'd rather go back to the normal retail industry than make any of these types of games, so it is cool to hear details about a fellow indie rpg developer.

Jeff is basically where I would like to be someday, making games he likes and getting paid to do it so he can continue to make cool games for all of us.

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They might not know it yet, but the Sci Fi channel is dying.  They just announced that they are changing the name to Syfy

Here's a fun quote from the article: “The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks.

So insulting your niche audience and changing your name to something stupid is a positive step?  This is an early April fool's day joke, right?

Get rid of good Sci Fi shows (Stargate & Battlestar Galactica), check. Don't add any new interesting Sci Fi shows, check. Add shows that aren't even remotely interesting to your core audience like wrestling, check. Piss off core audience, check.  Change station name to something stupid, check.  Just another crappy TV station, check.

Apparently it's not a joke.

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Let's see, last time I updated the progress of the networking stuff I was working on compressing the messages down to something reasonable and I had it down to ~6000 bytes per message. Since then I have compressed this down quite a bit.  I twittered a lot of this, but the path seems kind of interesting to me, so I thought I would group all of the steps here.

1) starting message length - 8102 bytes
2) basic bit packing of core types - 6104 bytes
3) player delta compression - 4809 bytes
4) game delta compression - 4742 bytes
5) entity delta compression - 737 bytes
6) pack entnum & network object type to needed bits - 529 bytes
7) if entity hasn't changed only send 1 bit for change list - 248 bytes
8) arrays now use less bits for length (usually) - 233 bytes
9) when not needed no longer write change list size - 224 bytes
10) now change bits are compressed using a tree - 175 bytes
11) lowered entity send distance from 600 to 500 - 108 bytes
12) list of entities to delete and send nothing for unchanged entities - 59 bytes
13) packed a few more message specific stuff - 53 bytes

For the moment at least, I'm happy with the message sizes so I have moved on to reliability.  I made commands guaranteed a while back, but now I can specify specific fields that can be guaranteed.  Also all of the game setup messages have acks and will resend if any of them are lost.

That's actually most of what I need for reliability.  Now I have a ton of little things to clear up and I need to figure out what to do about internet matchmaking.

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