So multiplayer for Kivi's Underworld is finally done. :)  Unfortunately it took way longer than I thought it would.  I was hoping it would only take around 2 months or so since the engine already had a server/client division.  This did help a lot.  The biggest obstacle ended up being the master server.  That was a big chunk of extra time I wasn't planning for (I blogged about that here ).  It's done now though and having our own master server should be nice in the long run.

I went with a very co-op direction with it which I think suits Kivi's Underworld very well since it is a fairly casual game.  I had a lot of fun playing with various family members.  I can play a co-op game with my 7 year old daughter, where as a competition type game doesn't work so well.  Right now I'm thinking I might stick with the co-op direction for our next game.

So I have been working on multiplayer for Kivi for a while now. Unfortunately, it has taken longer than I would have liked.  Part of the delay is the master server.  Players need a decent way to find other players to play with. This is what a master server does, it's basically a match maker.  I was originally just going to use someone else's solution for this, because why write something that a bunch of people already have?  Unfortunately, I found a bunch of reasons why.

I don't get very much control over something that can be very important to my gamers.  What if my gamers hate how something works, can I fix it?

I can't completely customize everything to match my game exactly.  This would be nice, but probably not a huge problem.

Many of the solutions are external programs.  Ideally I would like the browser to be inside the game. An internal browser seems easier for people and I'm not telling them to run an external executable.

Responses to my emails sometimes took weeks.  Would my emails get responded to faster if an emergency pops up?

Some of the options cost in the 5 figure range.  Yeah, like that's going to happen. :)

Some of the options were free, but imposed lots of restrictions.  This always annoys me.  I understand that there must be some kind of restriction between the full version and the cheaper version, but they always seem to be some arbitrary rules that screw with my business.  I had this same problem with our sound engine.  It also feels like being treated as a child.  If you do this, this, and don't do that, I'll buy you an ice cream cone.

Most of the solutions only supported Windows.  I'm not going to dump our Mac gamers.  They have been very good to us so far.

All of the options that cost money were per game.  This might make sense for AAA games that ship 1 game every 2 or 3 years, but this really hurts indies that can make a new game in less than a year.  So us small indies actually would pay more money than AAA studios.

What if they go out of business or kick us off for using too much resources?  This isn't too likely, but would be a huge problem if it happened.

If I go with one of them and then move to our own server at a later date, is it going to be a pain that some people are on their server and some are on our server?

A few of these I could probably have lived with for a while, but for us every solution I found had a deal breaker. Oh well, in the long run it's probably best to have our own master server.  I just wasn't expecting to do it quite yet. It's a lot of extra programming time and a new monthly expense that I could do without.

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Assuming it's not a publicity stunt or some sleight of hand to get the publishing rights back, it looks like 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever are dead.  I have never worked at 3D Realms, but I still have a weird connection to them.

In 1996, some of the people that worked at 3D Realms and some from the Duke Nukem 3D team left and formed Ritual Entertainment (usual thing weren't happy and thought they could do better).  Not too long after in 1997 Duke Nukem Forever was officially announced.  I'm not sure how long they had already been working on the game at this point.  I want to say some of the Ritual owners had done some initial work on the game, but I don't remember.  In 1998, I started working at Ritual.  Given that a bunch of the owners were originally from 3D Realms and they are also in the Dallas area, I heard a lot about 3D Realms over the years.

Anyways, during my span working at Ritual we shipped SiN, Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.², Blair Witch Volume 3, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Star Trek: Elite Force II, and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down: Team Sabre.

In 2004, I left Ritual and started Soldak Entertainment.  Since then I have built a game engine, shipped Depths of Peril, ported Depths of Peril to the Mac, shipped Kivi's Underworld, and nearly completed a multiplayer expansion for Kivi.

Now that 3D Realms seems to be dead, what am I going to compare my progress to?

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Warning: this isn't about gaming at all.

So I read a bit of news this morning like I do most mornings and find there is more random nonsense about the swine flu.  They have now found 1 verified case of a death from the swine flu in the US.  The news seems to be making a pretty deal about it, but as usual they are leaving out all context and  making it as sensational as possible.  Before I go further let me state that the victim was a 2 year old child.  I don't even want to imagine what losing one of your children is like.  My heart goes out to the child's family.

But this is why I don't like the news.  There is never any context.  They just want to make a big deal out of everything.  Anyways, so there has been 1 death from swine flu so far (in the US).  So I was curious how many deaths are caused by just the normal flu each year. According to the CDC it's about 36,000 a year.  36,000!  So far just this year there have been around 13,000 deaths from the flu and according to an article I found there has been at minimum 800 deaths for every week of this year.  So this week in all likelihood more than 800 people, mostly the old and very young, will die from just your normal every day flu.  The normal flu is not new and not exciting, so most of our news sources are going to go on and on about the swine flu and make it seem like it's the next plague.

What they should be reporting is that the swine flu is a new strain (for humans at least) and that none of us likely has any kind of immunity to it, so it has the potential to be a problem.  So it does make sense to be somewhat cautious as a group so it doesn't spread too far, too fast.  However, it's likely that the regular flu will kill way more people this year, so there is absolutely no reason to panic about anything.  They should also be answering some basic questions.  How contagious is it compared to normal flu?  What's the death rate compared to the normal flu?  What are some sensible precautions? And what should we do about the normal flu?

For people that are older than me, were news sources ever based on reporting the news in a neutral way, with some useful context, and that wasn't based purely on getting higher ratings?

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