October 27, 2012

Progress on 0.1.6 (Part 2)

I haven't posted an update for a couple days, and I wasn't really sure if I should even post this update today since I will probably be releasing the next version (0.1.6) tomorrow. Android will not have any networking at this time because I still need to hook up some authentication code for it.

Currently, for the multiplayer server it will be pretty barebones and only support one command: quit. However, for multiplayer support I currently have a server lobby, with joinable game lobbies and chat channels. Creating/Joining/Leaving/Destroying channels is currently automated but the idea of creating custom channels is quite easy to accommodate in the future. The editor appears to be working well over the network and the amount of changes to the editor itself was only a few lines of code. I guess I do know what I am doing after all lol. Obviously, the server code is quite a bit more extensive and as far as testing goes, 4 clients are working flawlessly on a local network.

Of course, some real world testing would be nice... but I have to settle with some local testing for now until I can deploy the server. Currently, I have a configuration file where you can set the port to run the server. More settings will be added later as needed and things like server name and such would be handy. The error handling on the client is very minimal so I totally expect a number of crashes related to networking in the first couple versions. Overall, it appears to be decently stable, but I'll take that with a grain of salt.

The next task will be online-enabled custom maps... Which is going to probably be a lot more work to get everything working reasonably over a network compared to the editor. Most of the server code can be easily reused from the editor, but battles have significantly more going on. Basically, I'm very uncertain about it only taking me a week to complete it on top of everything else I have going on. Naturally, I won't release anything partially working so if I can't complete it on time I will delay it by another week.

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