T+167

Over 100 hours since my last post. Feels bizarre. I had to recheck to make sure it was correct, since I was sure it was yesterday. I also have a minor sleep deprivation thing going on. Last night I finally brute-forced the first working network implementation for the Quickrally with pure willpower. When I finally got it up and running, it was something like 7-8am. I collapsed to bed for 4 hours, just to wake up for a afternoon lecture @ school, only to find out that the damned thing was cancelled. Fortunately I didn't wake up for nothing, since there was a weekly meeting of Load (our gamedev club @ school) soon after. We were able to do a little testing on the new multiplayer version, and even recorded a short video:



As you can see, I have removed all the eyecandy from Quickrally for testing purposes, just to underline the stuff about prioritising the gameplay/fun over the fancy (yet technically more intriguing) visuals. This also cut back my pregame loading times alot, which is great.

I realized today, that I need to start specifying some concrete todos for the crunch now. I knew beforehand, that my crunching would be more concentrated on december, and there were more "other stuff" for november. Yet I still have the feeling, that things haven't progressed as much as I'd liked. I really have to separate the must-have features from the rest. The truth is -- and I'm very glad this is the case -- that only the Tanksalot needs to be in a robust and polished form after the crunch. Quickrally can (and will) be more of a prototypish demo when I pass it on to my teacher. It has to run, it has to look decent and it has to come with documentation and that's about it. This gives me some leeway on what I'm trying to get crunched until the 9th of December.

Tanksalot

1. Replace the powerup placeholders with actual 3d-models
2. Polish the audio
   
3. Add a "Rematch" button
4. Clean up all the debugging data and unused assets
   

Quickrally

1. Make the server more robust with players coming and going
2. Give the players waypoints and subgoals (laptimes, scoreboard, etc.)
3. Try to test and optimize the network code for WAN connections
   
4. Finalize the carmodel
   
5. Bring back the old shaders and eyecandy when the other stuff is done
6. Figure out if the preload times can be optimized
   
7. Try celshading

There is also a common task for both of the games, which I left out from the lists: Try to make them work smoothly on different setups and OSes. Today I tried the Tanksalot @ school with a 64-bit Windows 7 and I got it to run, but it had a flickering loading screen and it eventually crashed on OpenAL initialization. I got the Quickrally multiplayer demo to run alright on the same machine, but it had some weird jaggs and jitters on frame rate every now and then, even though the CPU load never went over 30%. It was weird. Couple weeks ago we were also able to get the eyecandy version of the Quickrally to run on an iMac, but for now I'm trying to focus on getting the two games work on all the Windows setups smoothly.