- The Global Game Jam.
- The Game Developers Conference.
- The birth of my son, Avery.
- Teaching several new courses in an ever-changing curriculum.
- My mad dash to finish my masters degree (almost there!)
- Traveling to visit our families for holidays.
- Our fourth wedding anniversary.
- And many more good things.
Man, it's been a great year!
So Where Are We?
Well, with all of the events going on this week, I haven't had a whole lot of time to devote to fixing the defects mentioned in my last post. In fact, I seem to have made them worse instead of better. But that's OK -- I've made another radical decision that seems crazy but is almost certainly good for the end result.
Character movement is the most complex thing I've implemented so far. I originally had it working well for local clients, but it was unreliable for network clients. My solution was a compromise between something that worked well and looked "just OK". Now that most clients are local clients, I'm going to return to my original algorithm but change the way the network messages are sent and handled. It'll look better and it should fix the character duplication bug that I mentioned in my last post. (Besides, it'll allow me to prototype something that will be needed in my next collaboration, Botz.)
What's Next?
So the next steps, which will begin 2012 for me and TLC, are as follows.
- Improve the character movement algorithm.
- Fix the intermittent spectator bug.
- Change the network message handlers to delegate to methods rather than handle the messages themselves.
- Also, change the local clients to call those methods directly.
- Remove network handling of objects that no longer need to be sent across the net.
Onward to 2012!
This year was awesome and I'm very excited about what the coming year will bring, both personally and professionally. I hope all of you have good things coming as well!
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