New Release In Which You Stop Reading This Blogpost To Play My Game

Written By Martin Evans On 20 October 2012 Filed In Heist-Game

TL;DR

An new release of Heist.

Where Is It?

If you’ve never played Heist before you can get it from here. If you’ve played Heist before then just run it and it should offer to auto update (if it doesn’t, just get it again and it’ll write over the old version. Then send me an email and tell me you had this problem).

Major Features

  • Better multiplayer implementation
  • In Game HUD
  • New Scripting API for entities
  • New Scripting API for behaviours
  • Internally reimplemented tools (still a work in progress)
  • New Scripting API for tools
  • A sun with a day night cycle (entire cycle is 3 minutes)
  • A Laser Rifle

How to play

It’s still not entirely obvious how to play, I’ll be working on fixing that for the next release. A few of the least intuitive things:

  • When you first spawn you’ll drop out of the sky and die to fall damage then instantly respawn (long standing bug)
  • There’s no indicator which weapons you have equipped (work in progress)
  • When you spawn you have weapon 0 equipped, but the only valid weapons are 1, 2, 3 and 4. Rolling the mouse wheel will move you off this invalid weapon to a valid one (Fixed)
  • Number keys do not toggle weapons (work in progress)
  • Sounds created by tools all emanate from the world origin (work in progress)

What are my guns!?

Since there’s no indicator what you have equipped yet, these are the tools:

  1. Box Spawn (click to spawn a box on top of your head)
  2. Sniper Rifle (click to fire, this will knock back boxes an impressive distance)
  3. Laser Rifle (click to fire, this will fire a slow moving yellow laser bolt which looks cool at night)
  4. Torch (Pretty useful at night)

Full Changelog

This isn’t really a full changelog, it’s just a summary of the most important things I noticed while skimming over the past 2 months of git logs.

  • Fixed bugs in world subdivision
  • Faster texture atlas loading
  • Texture atlas will no longer consume 1Gb of memory while loading
  • Written some vague code exploring how to implement AI
  • Added in game HUD
  • Added a Lua to Javascript bridge for in game HUD scripting
  • Written multiplayer chat entirely in lua
  • Added a score board to HUD
  • Added a kill log to HUD
  • Supported BSON data in networking
  • Silently translate Lua tables to BSON for network transport
  • Better abstracted script sources (now called data sources)
  • Improved UI resource loading
  • Rebindable game controls (still a work in progress)
  • Added Script resource loading (currently only text and audio, still a work in progress)
  • Refactored network packet reading
  • Rewritten entire packet encoding/decoding system
  • Rewritten peer connection initialisation
  • Endlessly bug tested networking
  • Implemented a new system for synchronising network peers to the correct world state
  • Cut out half the code from Heist and moved it into a separate library
  • Achieved 52% test coverage on entire networking library (100% on some parts like encoding)
  • Written a load of clever bit twiddling trickery for packet encoding
  • Modified entity factory to handle default values, making scripting a load simpler in the default case
  • Refactored Configuration system to be much more robust
  • Rewritten Sound Renderer
  • Rewritten backend metaserver infrastructure
  • Migrated backend to a new server host
  • Neatened up physics body implementation (still a work in progress)
  • Neatened up API for entities
  • Neatened up API for behaviours
  • Rewritten every script to be in line with new APIs
  • Added many new input events (weapons, road vehicles, air vehicles, naval vehicles)
  • Rewritten texture pack format
  • Modified all data sources to support versioning
  • Changed format of data source configuration file