T+272

I think there was a bug in my 440h takeoff calculator. I "dirtyfixed" it now in the headline of this entry, and I have now exactly 7 days (168h) to go. I'm writing this entry after some extreme coding strech. I think I woke up at 12pm yesterday and went straight to my PC. I did some coding and then headed for my dayjob at 3pm. There I coded some more and left around 8-9pm, just to eat a quick pizza and do some MORE CODING back home. As I'm writing this, it is now 8-9am the next day, and I'm still pushing it. So far that's 20 hours of straight coding, which would normally make me into a passive-aggressive zombie, but I'm feeling suprisingly zen-like now. It must be those D-vitamin supplements I've been eating a few weeks now.

My projects have gone forward and I'm more pleased than I was when I wrote the last post. I have finished Tanksalot now, and all I need to do is write some light documentation about it, and it's wrapped. I think it still would not work on those 64-bit win7 machines @ school, but I'm not going to spend my energy on that. I have more important nuts to crack at the moment. The toughest being the networking in the Quickrally.

Last post included a video with four players on LAN with the very first multiplayer demo I managed to pull together. It worked well, but there was still some stuff and inconsistensies when the cars collided with each other. I also used too heavy frequency of updates because I knew that we would be testing in LAN and I didn't want to tinker with all the details just yet. Now I'm happy to say that in these past few days, I was able to get the whole thing much more robust. It's pretty smooth and consistent at the clientside, even if I send something like 5 packets per second from server to clients. If I'd throw in 20+ players now, I think the scalability in the networking-side of things should be playable. I'd be more worried about physics calculations with 20+ raycasting vehicles. Of course the networking could still potentially explode with 5 players. Testing multiplayer stuff locally with one PC and NIC loopbacks is just not going to make me feel like 100% confident, but I'm feeling about 96% right now.

The new IP

My friend showed me this youtube clip of some PS2 "partygame" they were supposedly playing the night before. I forgot what was the name of the game, and can't find it anymore, but I will post it later when I do. It was a multiplayer racing game with single top-down view and pretty arcade gfx and controls. The idea was simple: The camera follows the top car and if you drop out of the camera, you lose. When all but one player has dropped out, the player who survived gets one point. Then everyone is respawned again in the current camera location and another round begins. The game ends after some player has 20 points and he is the ultimate winner of the whole match.

I have never played this kind of game, or even heard such things exists. After 5 seconds of watching the youtube video, I felt like "WOW!". It was somehow instantly clear to me, how superior this idea actually was. "Perfect for multiplayer racing!" I thought. The very reason it is so good, is that it cleverly removes the greatest obstacle between fun and multiplayer driving games: It's boring to drive alone. When you take your average Need for Speed, and go for a spin with couple of online buddies, this is what happens: First there is a big hazzle at the start, followed by couple of critical knockouts. After this comes the "10 minutes of boredom", where you try to catch your friend who is playing it safe. At the same time, you are taking huge risks, and eventually crash (with curses and moaning). There is the good ole "catch-up" concept, where the game gives extra boost to guys behind, but that just feels so lame! What is the purpose of trying to get ahead, if the looser behind you always gets back with fony catch-ups, and eventually the winner is the one, who gets the timing of the last corner right. This new format with very quick knockout rounds is very different. It's action all the way. There is constant interaction between the players. That is what multiplaying is all about, right?

I'm going to try to implement this in the Quickrally asap. I will do couple of twists compared to original game, since mine has multiple views and I don't want it too be too arcade. I think I'm going to do it in a way that if you are leading the race, you gather some kind of "mojo", and after it's "full" you win the round. If you are overtaken, the mojo will go down fast. Also I think I will make the player who is in the last position, when the round ends, lose a point. This motivates the guys at the back, who were knocked offroad by evil peers, still put in the effort, even if it seems they lost the changes of winning the round. I'm pretty excited about this, and I hope my implentation is atleast half as fun as the original. I'm still trying to find that youtube-clip with no luck, and probably need to ask about it from my friend again.. Anyone know this game?

update:



This is the game I was talking about.