Hey cmake is totally the lesser evil.

I've begun to dig in to Player.IO, and god damn all of this latency state updating nonsense is just NOT fun.

Yup, latency is hell. I started this thread with the hope that some best practices for dealing with latency will bubble up. HOWEVER, I do encourage people who want to make fast-paced games to just do it offline. I agree with Ivan in the rules thread, I would be disappointed if hardly anyone made any offline multiplayer games for this compo.

This is my 1000th post.

I am going to make a game. But first I'm going to make an offline prototype, in case it turns out to be a terrible idea.

The offline prototype will simulate latency. If it seems fun, then the final game will embrace latency.

P.S. I'm moving to a different city and starting a new job in a few days. This is going to be... interesting...  

Several Mario games fit that description. I'll try Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3.

the great thing is you can have up to 20 consecutive player server hosted for free, so it's fantastic for testing!

My interpretation of this chart is that you can have 500 concurrent players for free!

I'll check out this Stratus thing though.

Oh excellent, I'm planning on using Flash too, glad too hear that it works well with Player.IO. I'll try it out!

I suspect many of us want to make an online multiplayer game, but don't want to write our own servers from scratch or don't want to worry about collapsing under a Reddit bomb. I sure as hell don't want to have to think too hard about it.

After a little bit of googling, Player.IO looks like a reasonable option:
http://playerio.com/features/multiplayer/

But this isn't my area of expertise and I'd appreciate any other ideas. Basically I want to know how to:
- (optional) keep track of players who want to join a game and match them up somehow.
- send bytes from one player to other participating players, preferably with low latency.
- (optional) a persistent database. I guess there would need to be some logic on the server to validate incoming data?
- host the above things, for an unknown number of concurrent players, preferably as cheaply as possible.

I don't need a database, but I might use one if it is available and I'm sure other compo participants would like to use one, so recommendations are welcome.

In fact, I don't even need to manage the matchmaking part as long as people are willing to swap IP addresses, but that would probably dampen the game's popularity. Sleep Is Death seemed to do alright without any dedicated server, but I was hoping to be able to make something more casually accessible, and with more than two players. Like Transformice. Does anyone know how Transformice works?

What kind of technology does everyone else want? Discuss!

- Bad swimmer conducts an invisible choir that can only sing four notes.

Wind Waker

The lowest frequency that anyone can hear is around 20 hz, and at that speed it is more "felt" than "heard", and only if it's pretty loud. So you can probably fade out over 1/20th of a second reliably without artifacts. In fact you can probably fade out even faster, probably even twice as fast. Keep running the tone generator while you're fading out though, instead of a flat slope to zero; a sudden change in frequency can have audible artifacts. Don't reverse a wave midway either, that can have artifacts too.

#2 is monster party

The solution is in the right-click menu. 

Image > Image Size > Resample Image > Nearest Neighbor

You talk to the shrink and then shrink leaves you at the end.

...Eliza?

Yeah I was pretty upset when I realized that NULL is not a keyword. So I use 0 instead now.

Random generation is a subset of procedural generation. Procedural generation is generating data with code, and randomness is one way to do that. It's usually more interesting if randomness is combined with other techniques.

Personally I'm a big fan of NOT labeling myself with a gender, if I can help it. This isn't a matchmaking site, why does my gender matter?

...Um, I guess my name kinda gives it away. Oops!

You'll be able to specify draw order.

Can you change draw order mid-animation? It can be useful for dealing with handheld props, like a sword, which might be in front of the character at the start of a swing and behind the character at the end.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1899092/pietepiet_poppenzine_allitems.png

Okay this makes me so happy.

Iterative mesh deformation? I'm intrigued!

I made something similar a few years ago for a fighting game (

, download) and ever since then I've been fantasizing about making a more fully-fleshed-out one. Squash-and-stretch was definitely on my wishlist. But already your mesh idea sounds cooler than anything I had come up with.

I personally would prefer the API method over the spritesheet method. I like me some ragdolls and other procedurally generated/composed/blended animations, and I like having smoothly animated graphics without explosive memory requirements. But I understand that not everyone wants to deal with another API. Maybe one day I'll still make my own character animator for the crazy people like me who don't like spritesheets.