FROM THE BLOG

A Few Snags with the Patcher, Good Progress Otherwise

Over the weekend, Friday and today we’ve had a sort of a mixed bag of development.

The threaded patcher development has hit some snags – it works fine on my machine but not on MM’s, works fine on windows but not linux dedicated, etc. Because of the “one chance” nature of an autoupdate update, we’re going to hold onto the changes, potentially for another week, to make sure that there’s no-one stuck on an old build or with a buggy patcher. Lucky for you guys, it’s in its own dedicated branch for this exact reason, so it shouldn’t impede any other changes making it out.

In good development news, so far this week:

• MM and Shadlington are working on Steam integration
  Apparently this is going along fairly well, but valve’s API is “quite bad”, especially with regards to documentation. Does this give us an excuse to leave things undocumented? Only time will tell ;^)
• I’m working on balance issues and bugs
  I should be done with a lot of these by tomorrow for a quick, mid week patch. A lot of them have been usability concerns, but some are also straight number tweaks (demolition items more expensive in CTF being the major one there) and routine bugfixes.
• There have been a few “High Level” Map Changes
  Somewhat behind the scenes, but this change to the engine-side pathfinding engine opens up a lot of nice options for us – we’d like to expose the pathfinder more directly to scripts some time soon, probably accessible as a contained object inside each CBrain, potentially as a mod-managed self contained object (like the Noise and Random objects are). This should help with both vanilla and third party AI development.
• The onHitBlob callback was changed/fixed – attn modders
  due to an oversight many months ago, and vanilla code not relying on the “damage” value being correct inside this callback, the damage value inside this callback was the original damage sent by the hitter. It is now the final damage after all modifications have been applied. Something to be wary of, modders.

That’s more or less it since last patch, figured keeping you guys in the loop especially re: the API change was a good idea. More when we have more to tell you.

Max/Geti