The Reports Of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated In Which The Author Suddenly Remembers He Has A Blog

Written By Martin Evans On 05 August 2013 Filed In Site-Update

TL;DR

I suck at keeping this blog up to date.

Where The Hell Have You Been?!

It’s been nearly 2 months since my last update, sorry about that. June is always a busy month for my family and then in July I was crunching hard to try and achieve a goal (multiplayer deathmatch) in time for a LAN party I was running. Unfortunately I didn’t even achieve that goal because I discovered a critical bug in one of my dependencies (I’m still waiting for them to get back to me on that. Protip: Don’t buy the Ludosity Steamworks wrapper See edit below).

What The Hell Have You Been Doing?!

  • Adding support for save games (not exposed in the demo as it’s not complete yet, but most of the complicated work is done).
  • Huge improvements to how content is managed (mods can now load content, which is pretty important!)
  • Added a character and overhauled some of the character controller code to make it more scriptable.
  • Since I discovered I can’t do multiplayer how I wanted (I’ll come back to that) I’ve been working on building a skyscraper. As I work I’ve been implementing loads of changes to make building design easier (concave footprints, 2D CSG functions, entity creation from world scripts).

Multiplayer

This is the thing that consumed a lot of my time, and unfortunately I have nothing to show for it. Valve recently gave all greenlight developers access to the Steamworks SDK (this is awesome) and so I decided to write multiplayer using steamworks (for now) to free myself of all the horrible complicated bits like NAT traversal and session initiation. I went out and purchased a .Net wrapper around steamworks and got to work. Unfortunately the wrapper seems to have a critical bug in it (it will arbitrarily crash after a garbage collection) and so all my time was wasted. I have contacted ludosity about this (twice, over 1 month ago) but they haven’t got back to me. I can only recommend that you DO NOT BUY THIS WRAPPER (See edit below). I’m considering my options with steamworks at the moment (this will likely be the subject of my next blog post).

But What About AI?

I had intended to finish the AI series with demos of the AI in game (after I got basic multiplayer working), obviously my timetable has been a little thrown off! However, I do intend to come back to the AI series soon (tm).

EDIT: Ludosity - 31st January 2014

I have been contacted by the developers of the Ludosity wrapper apologising for the state of things back when I wrote this blog post. Apparently the critical bug I encountered has been fixed and the wrapper has been shipped in a complete game (indicating it’s probably pretty stable now). I haven’t actually tried the new wrapper though, so don’t take this as an endorsement - just an indication that problems from way back probably don’t apply any more.