T+49

I pretty much sat in front of my PC the whole day. I was feeling very unproductive thought, and everything seemed to take me longer than expected. I guess it was just one of those days. I'm glad it wasn't a total disaster and I was able to get things done too. I focused on the Quickrally's client/server implementation like I planned in my long post yesterday, but didn't get to drive my car around the server yet, like I was hoping for.

My networking engine was missing a system for reliable packet delivery over UDP and that took me many many many hours to get those ACK-packets to do their job. Now it's finally up and running, and I was able to transfer settings, heightmap and roadspline to client-side, without worrying about missing packets along the way. You can get away with losing a packet of current coordinates for some arbitary world object, but losing a packet describing your vehicles suspension or maybe some curve in your road is another thing.

I was planning to explain the way I'm going to implement the networking in Quickrally, but I feel that it is going to be more useful to write about it after I get the first working prototype out of the oven. I already have a pretty good idea how everything is going to be implemented, but I never used a physics middleware like Bullet along with my networking stuff, so there might be some surprises in store for me.

Tomorrow I'm going to focus only on Tanksalot. My goal is to add collectable ammo and health packets, which are going to drop out from the sky in some parachuting manner. This is going to make the gameplay much more sensible, because players now have motive to drive around and not go straight for the kill, which made the game pretty retarded so far. I don't have the 3d-models for the powerups yet, but I'm going to use some placeholders. I'm also going @ my dayjob tomorrow, so I don't think I have time to do anything else for the game. Well I could stick in the new audiosamples if I still have time & energy left.