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[Fifth]

This is shaping up into something so great so quickly.
Dogspeed, Hempuli!  I can't wait to see how it turns out!

[Hempuli‽]

Wow, that sure was fun! Thanks to everyone who participated!  

Aquanoctis: The digging with mouse is just temporary, later on it'll be a lot more restricted (though truth to be told, it was quite funny to be able to create makeshift paths; maybe all classes should be able to dig).

P-Flute: A strafe button might certainly work wonders. The combat isn't too complicated anyway and mostly boils down to jumping and smashing the button!

Thanks again to everyone, and dang you Eclipse for owning so much!
(Uh oh, I'm so pumped up now that I wonder if I can wait until tomorrow to add more stuff!) 

EDIT: Thanks Fifth, too!

[kavs]

Aw, I'm caught behind my work firewall right now. I'll try and fire this up when I get home!

[soundofjw]

Hempuli! This looks fantastic! If you need some chippy battle tunes (or non-chippy or whatever works, I'm actually envisioning a hybrid) or somethin' let me know :D

[Hempuli‽]

Hempuli! This looks fantastic! If you need some chippy battle tunes (or non-chippy or whatever works, I'm actually envisioning a hybrid) or somethin' let me know :D

I'm thinking of trying to use non-chippy musics. I've already got a few offers for the musics, so I guess I'll have to wait a bit before I can say anything about that. I haven't really thought about the audio yet since the gameplay style of the game is still shaping up.

Looks like I forgot to tell: when playing, type your preferred nickname to the first textbox and press 'connect'. In the lobby, you can create games by typing to the textbox in the upper-right corner and pressing 'create', and when joining you'll have to press 'refresh', the select a game and press 'join'. In-game you use X to jump, C to shoot, arrows to move and T to talk. Also you can currently dig with the mouse.

Oh, and also, I'll try to fix stuff so that I can release a public test version with airplanes today! Maybe also proper digging.

[Hempuli‽]

PHEW! Working with this item stuff is boring and tough! Hopefully it seems like I'm almost finished now. Since some packets will be lost in any case, I had to ensure that when a player joins, he wont get to play until it's ABSOLUTELY sure that he has got all the data required.

The only thing left to do is to make the game recognize certain stuff properly, mainly related to items that are being carried as a new player joins. Currently every player 'mask' that you see while playing has an ID, and if a player is carrying an item, the item clings to this ID in the other clients to see which player is actually holding it. But when you yourself are carrying an item, the item will be set to cling to a specific ID. So currently, when you're holding something and a new player joins, that specific ID will be sent to them, and since that ID is the same for every player, things go wrong. Why am I even trying to explain this?

tl; dr: There's a bug, gotta fix it! But if everything goes all smooth, we'll have a working version with planes tonight!

YES! I FIXED IT!

[Hempuli‽]

Ok! Now there's a new test version up, with airplanes in! The digging is still mouse-driven, but at least I managed to make some quite serious stuff work.

TEST VERSION GET!

Again:
When playing, type your preferred nickname to the first textbox and press 'connect'. In the lobby, you can create games by typing to the textbox in the upper-right corner and pressing 'create', and when joining you'll have to press 'refresh', the select a game and press 'join'. In-game you use X to jump, C to shoot, arrows to move and T to talk. Also you can currently dig with the mouse.

Use Z to select the hand icon, and then press C to go into a plane. In a plane you can switch back to shooting, thus allowing you to shoot in air! Note that you can't shoot straight down- or upwards.

[Oddball]

I got mixed results. Sometimes I could see the other players and sometimes everyone was invisible. I could see all the terrain deformation and could get shot, but couldn't see who was doing it. The times when I could see people were good. I liked flying the planes even if they were easily grounded. It's looking promising.

[Hempuli‽]

I got mixed results. Sometimes I could see the other players and sometimes everyone was invisible. I could see all the terrain deformation and could get shot, but couldn't see who was doing it. The times when I could see people were good. I liked flying the planes even if they were easily grounded. It's looking promising.

Yes, the released test version is really buggy. I've been fixing stuff left and right tonight, so it should be a bit better now. Still a lot of stuff going wrong, airplanes being invisible and disappearing upon player death. Hopefully I'll get most of this ironed out tomorrow. Thanks to Inanimate and Jmickle for great testing (also geepit)!

List of known bugs:

• Planes may disappear for some players
• Killing messages do not show properly
• After certain point new players are unable to get the needed data
• Tons of smaller glitches here and there and everywhere

[geepit]

games looking great so far, the only real glitch i encountered was that i could only see one of the planes at a time

[JMickle]

my contribution was getting all the planes stuck

also me and inanimate destroyed the WHOLE WORLD

twice

[PaleFox]

For me it sticks at the class screen, with the message "waiting for level data;" I don't know why. Looks fun though.

[JMickle]

that was because we were destroying the world. you dont "catch up" loading the level because we were "editing" it so quickly. I had a problem connecting and had to tell everyone to stop digging.

[emacs]

Any chance of a Mac version so I can play this thing.  It looks and sounds pretty epic.

[Hempuli‽]

ev149: I'm sorry, but Multimedia Fusion 2 is currently PC-only. There has been talk of possible porting methods, but currently I'm sorry.

Regarding the connection problems: I looked it a bit yesterday before going to sleep, and it seems that the newly-joining player will get the level ground data (i.e. where the walls are and where people have dug) just fine, but for some reason either the channel master continuously fails to send the item data (i.e. Where the planes and bombs are) to the player. Today I'll try to find out in which end the problem happens and why. Worst scenario is that the packet just fails to be sent because there's too much traffic, in which case I'll need to start some optimizing. That'd be boring.

It also seems that when a player dies while riding a plane, sometimes the plane disappears for the other players even though I've specifically made the plane not follow the player after he has died. Hopefully I'll find a solution to this today.

I'm still at school, but today's worklist will probably look like this:

• Fix the plane bug (Hopefully not too hard)
• Try to find out the reason of the connection bug and fix it (This may get nasty)
• If the upper two work, add a new vehicle (digging machines! This also means I'll remove the free mouse-based digging and make the Cybermasons able to dig).
  
• Try to give the players a coloured nickname (sounds simple but is actually a bit harder due to the stupidity of MMF 2).
• Try to make the killing messages work, maybe also add a kill counter for individual players

+ All the other stuff ever. That's quite a lot of bugfixin'. Fixing those problems has to be my main priority, though, since for later online games it's good to know if there are places that need a bit punching to work.

[Radix]

I kind of vaguely remember hearing that Lacewing works with the Flash runtime, so a universal version is a possibility, right? You know I've been getting around all the other various limitations (tiles, scroll lag etc.) one by one so I can help you with a port after the game's finished.

[emacs]

ev149: I'm sorry, but Multimedia Fusion 2 is currently PC-only. There has been talk of possible porting methods, but currently I'm sorry.

Alright, I guess I'll have to find my old copy of Windows XP and use Bootcamp to play.  Not too big of a deal...

@Radix - Then again, a native Mac version would be nice, too.

[Nugsy]

Try to give the players a coloured nickname (sounds simple but is actually a bit harder due to the stupidity of MMF 2).

Does it have drawing functions? You could draw a coloured shape behind the players name if changing the font colour is retarded in MMF2.

[Hempuli‽]

Ok, it seems that I managed to fix the bug about players not being able to connect! The bugfix also probably fixed the disappearing plane -bug, at least partially. Here's what I did (though I wonder why I'm telling this):

Let's say we have a plane and a bomb. Both get a fixed ID value when they are created; the bomb's ID is 1 here, and the plane's 2. When a new player joins, the game loops times equal to the amount of objects such as these, and in this case it loops 2 times; on first loop it gets the bomb, and on the second it gets the plane. However, if the bomb is detonated, there'll be only one object like this, the plane, the ID of which is 2. So when the loop is made, it goes only one time, thus not reaching the plane; the newly-joining player gets no plane. In this case, the object with ID 0 was a bomb, and when that bomb was detonated, a newly-joining player never got any data and just stayed there forever.

What I changed was making the amount of loops made not be based on the amount of objects, but instead the ID of the object with the highest ID. That's pretty simple, but sure took a lot of time to figure out!  

Since I'm sure there'll be another ton of bugs everywhere the next time I test, I'll make now a new vehicle (the digging machine!), release a test version, and gather a list of all those tasty new bugs.

EDIT: Oh, and Radix, currently the biggest problem is the Surface object, which is used to send level structure data and to display all the tiles. I imagine porting this to pseudo MMF/flash would be harder than recoding totally in flash, but if you want to try, then sure, let's discuss!

[Hempuli‽]

OK, fellas! A new update is upon us!


Behold the digger, the official love partner of the cybermasons!
I'm sorry to tell you, Jmickle and Inanimate, but from now on only Cybermasons can dig, and even they only by using these digging machines. Currently they're a bit awkwardly sized, I'll probably make them smaller and more agile in the future.

This version should also fix a lot of the bugs that annoyed us yesterday. Some things that still are there:

• You can still kill yourself in certain conditions (fixing this is boring so I'll do it later)
• The player teams are still hard to tell apart (didn't bother/have time to work on the coloured nicknames, sorry!)
• There are probably a lot of random little bugs that I do not know about, report those please!

NEWEST VERSION GET!

EDIT: A new bug emerges!



Apparently, if you disconnect inside a machine, it sticks to you when you reconnect!
Also:

Thanks to all those who tested today! It's good (but annoying) to know that there are still a lot of bugs around! Now to sleep.