Pip 18 July 2008

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pipfromslitherine
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Pip 18 July 2008

Post by pipfromslitherine »

<p>The end of another week. Lots going on in both at the company level and with the code development. Multiplayer is running as a first pass, with battles staying in sync pretty well. A lot of that work got done earlier as we had versions which recorded user input to allow us to play back in realtime as a demo (which was quite cool - but needed a lot of work in terms of voiceovers and setting up). And then some further bug chasing to get the battle replays for the movie creation tool (something that hopefully people will be able to make use of in the finished game, if they have the patience!). As chasing those kind of sync bugs is usually the biggest problem, having a lot of them squared away already sped things up. There is still plenty of work to be done, especially working out the logic to allow people to create interesting multiplayer campaigns (although we may end up having to simplify things a little - a lot of assumptions about how to string things together for good gameplay just break down when you have more than 1 player) but I feel the back of the problem has been broken.</p>
<p>I have also begun to set up the codebase for the next project, mainly so I can get the first pass art pipeline sorted out so that we can begin to make (or at least prototype) art. It is starting off using the codebase from GBotMA which is good in some ways, but I always feel slightly guilty, as I know that it makes it less likely that I will redo those areas of the code that I have felt I could improve (not that there are many of those. Obviously...). But a running start helps prevent those dead periods between projects when assets can't be built because of a lack of pipeline or frameworks to validate them in. The fact that we're going to expose a lot of the internal logic as scripting files (which should be fun for the modders!) means we can prototype even faster, and without needing a new build to allow people to see results.</p>
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