The Load/Save code is confirmed working, even with the cities and AI. So now the game state can have progress! Also, we have our first two multiplayer tests. The first was local and because of a bug, could only do three people. The second lasted for 3 hours and had 6 people (thank you testers!), and was done over the internet (which was actually a first!). There were no complaints about performance or lag, so I think the networking code is working well. There are two known bugs that need to be tracked down, but such is development. They weren't critical enough to stop a lot of melee battles in space! Both pulse based and beam based ships were tried out. A lot of good feedback was had, and everyone enjoyed themselves. Currently, it was simply dog-fighting in space. However, the biggest comment was how one got destroyed. Meaning, depending on what got hit, a person might lose a weapon (or all of them!) and limp along. They would experience the controls freezing when their engines exploded but didn't kill their ship, etc. So it felt more like dying by pieces rather than all at once, so it was a fresh experience.
Some of the feedback was taken to heart, so some of that is the screenshots enclosed. One was a sense of movement. So that got implemented by green “grid lines” as shown. Also, whatever is targeted now has a listing of who owns that object (building or ship). So it makes it easier to know which if your friends you are blowing up!
Other code additions have been getting the camera working again so that some of the “out of body” screenshots are now possible again. More to the point, the collisions with the ground with ships and weapons now works correctly finally. As shown in the screenshots, the ship one is flying is smaller than one thinks. The lighter blue triangles are showing the progression of the beam across the surface of the planet if it was perfectly smooth. The darker blue triangles are the same triangles as the lighter blue, but follow the terrain. In the end, you can see where the impact is on the ground. These beams are from an older design that had a longer than usual range.
I look forward to more multiplayer testing and scenarios as time moves forward. Hopefully there will be some videos of that at some point.
Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.
