Developers Log. Development Date 41 - Networking

I'm behind a few days, but that is for good reason. Alpha is approaching (10 days and counting! Yikes!) and there is so much to do. With the restriction that every system must be in place, we are, obviously, getting every system in place, and that is taking a lot of time and commitment! From a collection system to a UI, my team has really stepped up to get a lot done this sprint. I started off the sprint helping Adam to get the corner-wall shimmy maneuver working, as well as helping Mavin with the limbo state transition the player enters when jumping off of walls (a limbo state is a state where the player has no movement, either for a set amount of time, or until he/she hits the ground, grabs a ledge, etc.)

Post helping the team, I finished the problems we were having getting the game to work on the Xbox. Which reminds me: sadly, you still get a wall of text this week rather than the promised video. That will come next week, but my progress this week isn't quite ready to be shown in a video.

After fixing the xbox deployment, I set out to integrate multiplayer. First, I set up a screen system to allow us to have a lobby screen, a matchmaking screen, a game search screen, and, of course, the game screen. The player starts off, is forced to sign in if not signed in (currently only noticeable on pc, but once the game is launched this will be important too) then they can choose to host a game (local or live) or search for a game (local or live.) This all works rather well. Once in the lobby, the players signal they are ready and the game starts. A lot of this code framework came from step 4 of the xna Microsoft tutorial found here. However, I built my own network controller class that helps manage the creation of the different types of networks, and different actions the user can perform. Additionally I added a player class that helps keep the players Character entity paired up with actions such as transmitting the data to the other sessions.

I'm not entirely done with the last part, but it's getting pretty close. Once I'm done with the basics of multiplayer, I will be working on the abilities to the end of the sprint. The final sprint will be helping the team finish their respective tasks, and working on controls. The controls have gotten wonky, and need much love before I'll be happy to call it Alpha.