PGDmC - Unknown Name

[WILL]

So what kind of game are you making...?

[chronozphere]

So what kind of game are you making...?

Good question . You talk about virtual machines, ubuntu, prometheus and hardware-specs. You give us a lot of details, but I still don't have a clue what you're making.

[WILL]

I think he said platformer in the brainstorming thread.

[code_glitch]

Indeed it is a platformer... And one in the style of super smash bros / early tekken remixes. So it really just a platformer shoot em' up, blow the living daylights of anything that moves style game... Hence emphasis on multiplayer

[Traveler]

Sounds interesting. And a lot of work too. I hope you can pull it off.

[code_glitch]

I hope so too... My first 'issue' is the fact my game and attacks heavily rely on a particle effect system. Now how do you check whether 5,000 particles are hitting each player every frame... Hmm. I'm thinking of filtering it by angle then distance instead of re-calculating particle positions and then trying to match them.

The networking (ironically) is the easiest part: for each play to move, it must be sent a record of data. Each player has its own movement thread. In a human instance, this is done via the keyboard, for the AI it sends key codes. Simply, all you do is send off a packet of movement info over TCP to the destination IP and tell the network thread what player thread it should pipe the info to. simples. Sdl_Net comes in handy here - I had a go with the recently drafted Prometheus Data Transmission Format and Prometheus_Net but it is simply too buggy to be usable. Also its a tad slow for me likes since it has yet to be written in its optimized form for each OS

So its a fair amount of work, but aside from a few minor instances nothing I haven't done before. In other words, theres little POC code to go wrong. And did I mention: 3 days or so from beta?! (no networking yet so don't get your hopes up too high. Just a test for performance on other peoples systems. VMs only do so much)

[WILL]

Sounds like a lot is going into this. Just don't overstretch yourself trying to do something one way. In programming; if at first you don't succeed, cheat and make them think it's done the other way.

[paul_nicholls]

I hope so too... My first 'issue' is the fact my game and attacks heavily rely on a particle effect system. Now how do you check whether 5,000 particles are hitting each player every frame... Hmm. I'm thinking of filtering it by angle then distance instead of re-calculating particle positions and then trying to match them.

You could use a spatial collision algorithm - put each particle into a 2d grid 'slot' by it's location, and then when you check the player, see which 2d slots the player is covering and only look in those slots for particle collisions.

This will speed things up lots!!

cheers,
Paul