FROM THE BLOG

Progress, setbacks, boats and ropes.

This week has been long.

Well, long for me as I had my final exam as well as a lot of work to do. Very glad to have that out of the way.

Tom and Ryan have made fantastic work on a new, more secure, less annoying installer that can be easily rebuilt each build so that no patching is needed after an install.

Ryan has worked on more API code and a lot of in-game sanity checking (more stability, less console output spam, less data loss…) as well as proper quick join functionality and the client/server understanding what maintenance mode means.

Michal and I have worked a lot on the scripting side of stuff. We want to get this as stable as possible before releasing it to you guys so we’re holding it while we make sure the design is solid and re-implement a lot of the existing content as purely scripted content – this makes it easier for us to track down bugs and makes sure that you guys have some solid examples to work off while the documentation for the scripting API is lacking.

We’re also discussing whether a physics reimplementation is a good idea at this point – currently the objects themselves don’t have mass or drag, just velocity caps and radii – which can lead to a lot of weird stuff and makes configuring new objects and emergent behaviours hard. Its a lot of re-work though which eats into other development time.

Michal got a quick video together of him testing rope attachments out. It’s going to be interesting seeing how rope physics sync over the network, but you can also already do excellent things like swing from ropes attached to pulleys above, and (with some quick modding) water ski as a knight shielding down behind a speed-boat! This is a really exciting time, as it’s going to open up all sorts of possibilities – both for modding and for the vanilla game.

Watch it here: can’t embed, sorry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-AbLEnN1lo

There’s been some talk of these new “menus” and how some people are unhappy about them – we personally think that the pie menus are incredibly obtrusive and break up gameplay a lot, and hate the disconnect between picking something up when there’s only one thing and picking something up when there are many things. This new icon-based interaction system means you’re never pulled out of the action when trying to grab something quickly, or quickly buy bombs.

We know that it’ll be met by some opposition, but as it allows for custom, scripted interaction points on a per-object basis, we don’t think you’ll mind too much 🙂

Discuss here!

Max/Geti