Kivi networking update 2
Friday, 23 January 2009

I have been able to get some more networking work done, not as much as I would like to though.  For the most part all of the gameplay actually works now with multiple players.  Killing things, damage numbers, messages, solving quests, chatting, and completing the adventures all works fine.

I've even fixed all of the weird stuff like teleporting back to the beginning when a new person logs in, your chat messages repeating what the server guy just said, and the server guy getting all of the damage numbers.  All of these are symptoms of assuming only 1 player. :(

There is still some hardcoded stuff, the game doesn't handle dropped packets, and it still sends full packets that can flood even your local network right now. :)  I'll get to all of that soon.

On another note, I'm making Kivi completely co-op.  It doesn't matter who picks up gems or gold, who gets the kill, or who picks up the quest items.  All of the players get credit for things like this.  It does matter who picks up things like powerups though.

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Official industry leader
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
There is apparently an interview in the Official Playstation Magazine that someone from Sony claims that they are the official industry leader.  There are some snippets over on Eurogamer. I'm going to ignore the obvious question of how the leader can be in 3rd place and answer a question that the interviewee asks.  Here's the quote/question:

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.

Um, how about develop better gameplay?  Is he really trying to say that making it hard to develop for is a feature or that they do this on purpose?

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Kivi networking update
Friday, 16 January 2009

So yesterday I finally got a chance to work on some networking code.  Luckily I planned a little bit ahead and the engine already uses a client/server architecture and passes messages back and forth, so there is a good foundation to build multiplayer on.

Well even with no real testing on the network code before yesterday, I now have at least some minimal multiplayer working.  I now can have 2 (probably more) players running around on the same map killing things.  There is still lots to do to get it working well or even correctly, but it's a nice start. 

One of the cool things is the Mac networking works even though it has never been tested at all.  All I did for the networking when I ported Depths of Peril over was to simply get it to compile correctly.  I didn't need to do anything further because, until now, neither game actually used any of the networking code even though it was there.

As a side note, I did run into a bug because someone had the receiving message buffer hardcoded to 2000 bytes.  It kind of has to be a fixed length because of the external api it has to call, but really, only 2000 bytes?  Who on earth thought 2000 bytes was ever going to be big enough?  Sigh.  Too bad there aren't actually any other programmers but myself to blame. :)

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Some people need to play more games
Tuesday, 13 January 2009

What happens in a game if you try to break into a house, when

1) It has an alarm system
2) It has a big dog
3) The owner is home
4) and you make a huge racket because you try to kick in the back door

You hope you have saved recently and curse yourself for being a moron.

Yeah, someone tried to break into one of our neighbors' homes like this the other day.  For some reason he wasn't very successful.  If he had played a few more games, he would probably know better.

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Fantastical Creature female vote
Tuesday, 06 January 2009

If you want to participate in our fantastical creature reality show now is your chance.  For the rest of the week you can vote for which female characters you want to be in the show. 

The poll is on the right side a bit down on each page of the main website.  You can vote once every 24 hours, so vote multiple times if you want.

You can get more information on each of the female characters here.

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