ZONES, crap...


Vex is great! The remote object link system is actually working very nicely, objects are being instantiated over the network. When I run two sessions of vex, the two can see each other! A few things to iron out right now:

@p 1- I'm using a kind-of bad way of estimating coordinates. bad in that it's CPU intensive, and doesn't really make sense given the application. So i'm refining that.

@p 2- You can't see the other player model properly, right now it just uses a fixed graphic of a flare.

@p If I can fix these, the system will actually be quite good. At that point, I suppose it will be down to what I should support next. I may look at doing the winsock port (yuck!!! but neccesary), or I may do some testing with reduzie (fun!!!) or I may actually remotize weapons. Each aspect of the game that I want to be shared will have to be remotized. That basically means a little (hopefully, most of the time, will just mean a little) bit of code and so forth to coordinate things. Again, the network interface is very nice so this shouldn't be a problem.

@p Oh, that's right. I just remembered that I need to implement command-streams as well. Right now the system I have is used to sync objects and their parameters, but what I am going to do is support also command streams, so that groups of commands can be sent along the object. This is for instance, if a weapon fires, rather than use some kind of complicated system using variables, you can just send a command telling where it fired and the remotized weapons will all fire at that time. Conversely, say we are playing and I shoot you (just say). The drone I actually shoot can send a message to you saying that you were shot. Then, I support player vs. player battles (of course, lag is going to be a bit of a problem, so this probably won't really be supported; however, shooting enemies that live on another persons computer will definitely be, so you can coordinate your attacks).

@p What is most annoying? Well, it's the zone-coordinate system, as per usual. Not much can be done, I'm afraid. It's just annoying as hell to use. This was one of the few design mistakes in vex (but it's not actually THAT bad, just tricky)

2004-04-29


◀ Back