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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsText-Based Multiplayer Shooter [Greenlight]
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Eigen
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« on: March 23, 2014, 10:44:10 AM »

This year words will kill


     

     





Actual devlog entry will follow soon!
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Eigen
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« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2014, 11:05:16 AM »

Backend

Right now it's running on my rented Linux machine but I'm planning on moving over to Heroku or something similar in a very near future. I'm renting the machine from a local company and it's just too expensive to be feasible (as is the cost-to-specs). Plus it's geographically in Estonia while I expect most of the players to be from America or other parts of Europe.

I'm using NodeJS and a MySQL database although it needs to be ported to Postgres for Heroku.

I really love NodeJS. It's blazing fast to set up and work on and seems to be performing really well although the memory consumption seems to be quite high but there are lots of modules in use so I guess that's to be expected.


Client

Still SFML. The client itself is pretty lightweight only using an external JSON and websocket library. I started with the display code which I based on my TBMRTS code written in JS. It's not perfect yet but I'm trying to stick with the display limitations as much as possible. It's 80 by 25 text mode scaled to fit the aspect ratio of the monitor.

I'm rendering the display to a texture which I then wrap to a 3d mesh to create the curvature of the CRT display. Right now it's only curved on top and bottom but I'll add the sides soon.


What's done

  • Display code
  • Client registration / authentication
  • Joining / leaving rooms
  • Moving around the map
  • Displaying the game map
  • Basic weapon firing and hit detection on server-side
  • Respawning
  • Chat
  • Changable wallpapers!

I'm approaching something in a playable state soon and really need people to help test it. If you're interested, let me know! Gentleman
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Eigen
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« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2014, 11:28:41 AM »

A bit of background

So I wrote the original shooter and it turned out to be quite a bit of fun, surprisingly, but it never really crossed my mind to make it into an actual thing. It was really fast-paced right to the point kind of game. You entered the game and were immediately in midst of action. That's a good thing.

Last fall I participated in a local game jam cranking out the demo of TBMRTS game. It felt and looked a lot better than the crude prototype but as it turned out, the real-time strategy isn't fast paced game genre enough for this. You spent most of the time on your own trying to select the barracks to train some units and the text-input controls were tedious more than anything. Reaching another player to engage in combat was a rare occasion and most of the players never got there. Learning that was a good thing.

These two datapoints lead me to believe I should take the best of these two games and make something out of it. So I'm taking the hectic right-in-your-face gameplay of the shooter with improved visuals and a bit more gameplay depth of the RTS and hoping for the best.

I opted for Greenlight to see what the general reception would be and, of course, for the prospect of Steam. I wish it were, but it simply can't be a free-to-play game because of the cost of the server upkeep which is something I can't promise to be able to pay out of my own pocket for any longer period of time. There are certainly other commercial platforms out there should the GL campaign fail but we'll see about those if it happens. Most likely I'll get back to Pioneers (which is still my first love). I wholeheartedly believe in free games and making stuff just because you enjoy it but ... there's a limit to everything. If I have to choose between paying rent and running the game server I'll choose the former.

Dang it, too much whining.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2014, 01:20:24 PM by Eigen » Logged

Eigen
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« Reply #3 on: March 29, 2014, 03:00:13 AM »

18% of the way, 1301 YES votes (39%).

I guess that's as far as it'll go although I haven't really promoted it myself. Wouldn't know where to start even. Spamming people with this doesn't seem like a nice thing to do. Everything's been totally organic up to this point. I did address a couple of journalists personally who covered the prototype back in late 2012 but didn't hear back from them. Maybe they've just been busy ... But man, it did better than I expected anyway.

I'm not sure where it leaves the game. I'll probably tinker with it for a bit longer. Who knows, it might still pick up Smiley


There are still certain challenges ahead. One is being able to restart the server so that all the game states are dumped and restored on next launch. Another one is an administration interface (most likely browser based). Third one is something a lot of people have mentioned and that's players using macros. While I doubt I can completely prevent it, there are certainly ways to prevent macro users from gaining too much of an advantage. Anything from timing key inputs to limiting the time each command is procecced on the server.

The admin thing wouldn't be too difficult actually. The admin user is just a special type of client that can connect to the game room but not count towards nor show up in connected clients list. That way the websocket is still created allowing to receive the main game events while enabling to send special commands.
« Last Edit: March 29, 2014, 04:22:57 AM by Eigen » Logged

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