DarkTOPIA - Updates & Ongoing Development (As requested by Philip)
Tried to get to this sooner but here goes...
OK, after the successful beta on Sept 3 here's whats being worked on currently:
The Media Manager has been revised to make use of an Unzip library (ZLib) exe written by Thoth Onegan, to make the media download/extraction process painless and Dialog free. This also had the two-fold benefit of lessening the size of each media pakage by 80-100k per package, because the winzip Self-Extractor data need not be compiled into the zip/exe. That savings may not seem much but at 80k per user that adds up quite quick (beta test had 23 packages for example). The media packs are just plain zips now and are decompressed after download, behind the scenes. This has been fully tested and is smash-o-reffic.
Next item of great importance to this project is the web based registration of screen names (and a website itself) This must be implemented before any more public tests can occur and is an integral part of the Client app functionality. Those of you who participated (or tried to) in the public beta saw the results of not having registered user names "Object/File Not Found" crashes left and right. This was due to the lack of name registration in that once your Nick is registered that nick is used to denote all of your media etc like Philip.x for your av model, Philip.bmp for your model texture, Philip_Plate.bmp for your name plate etc etc. This media must be present on all of the connected clients machines when the log in occurs (which the media manager takes care of) else the connected clients get crashed out. You may be thinking why not just check for the existence of the files first, well that will be included but the server will also be set to not allow unregistered logins, before that event can cause problems for others. Currently the server just accepts anything you choose as a nick and password and creates an account. This was the major problem on sept 3 in the beginning of the beta test. When Mnemonix gets back from holiday both of these items (server check, web reg) will be getting off the ground. If any of you reading this want to lend a contributors hand to the web aspect (html,asp/php etc) of this project feel free to post here and one of use will get in contact - thanks.
Now, finally for the client application itself and its issues
Ok, the item that needs immediate attention is the out of sync positioning of the clients over time. There is a phenomena(sp) occuring where 3 or 4 connected clients start to "see things differently" than the next one. For example in my POV it may look like Phil is standing right next to MikeS, but in each of there views they see things differently. This discrepency has ranged from being very slight to completely out of whack. This bothers me as you can imagine. Before I go off on a tangent scrutinizing every little float value in code theres a couple things that need to be done, that may eliminate the problem: A) world collsion, I need to have the players movement values squashed when they collide with world objects like walls. currently the player was allowed to pass thru and then stop. This leads to the second point is that maybe the point and click system doesnt like clicking on a backfacing normal(term) after the player has left the world. We added a bigger test area the other night, to accomodate many users, and we made only the ground surface hot-clickable where as the walls were not, but we still experienced the disjointed positioning thing. B) I need to disallow mouse clicks that occur once a player movement has begun. I was unaware that you could still register mouse clicks while the mouse is hidden (silly me) but apparently you can so this also may be arsing up the movement data as well. I eliminated mouse press-and-hold when I originally wrote the time-slice system but forgot to check about clicks when mouse is hidden, so that will be fixed. After I get these fixes in place I will have less possibilities in the group of things that may be causing the postional disjointing, although it could be something else entirely - and from having written this code, I know my eyes are in for some bleed time if thats the case
- Lets hope not
Anyway, after these things are sorted, it will be a matter of finalizing the world space and model specs with MikeS, and getting a version of this thing out the door - and up and running on a consistent basis, so people can come and go as they choose, without all this "public beta" logistics crap - meh. Then we can have scheduled server/media/world/client updates so everyone can stay in sync.
I hope for new and exciting news soon. Until then thanks everyone for your help, concern, participation, criticisms etc - we are hoping to make this a great place for a great community.
TeamTOPIA
DBP_NETLIB_v1.4.3
DarkTOPIA - September 2004
