Matzes Diary

[MatzeB]

Well, the promised demo still isn\'t out We find bug after bug and that takes much longer than expected. To shorten you the waiting a bit, I\'ll try to do a daily diary in this thread so that you\'ll be informed what happens in the developers corner.

(Please don\'t respond to this thread but in a new one... so that this will be a short story to read abotu the last days before the techdemo...)

          Matze

[MatzeB]

Yesterday we fixed some gui components texts that didn\'t fir into their frames or are very long without scroll button, I believe there\'s still more of that sort in but these are easy to fix things.
One of the harder problems at the moment is Collision Detection with climbing. I was able to fix normal CD, but climbing is still broken some stairs work, some other stairs don\'t, and I don\'t have an idea yet why.
Then we had again a real life test again after a longer time, 3 developers played together over inet, after some fixes it seems to work, however there are problems. There\'s always a small lag if someone joins (we\'ll probably not be able to fix this in the time to the techdemo), and then the server and client randmonly crashes if people are leaving However movement and chatting worked very good yesterday, even over my crappy home connection that brought us pings >250ms.

[MatzeB]

Hey,
didn\'t I write please post in a another thread to comment this... Anyway here\'s what happened yesterday:

As we coders need a bit more time, map designer are trying to improve the map, they experimented with some trees that will be placed around the temple and they\'re making a skybox (the image you see behind the scene as \"Sky\", however as Planeshift is underground it\'ll look more like a rocky thing with some clouds above.

On the coder side, the server has been cleaned a little up, by moving some code around to where it belongs. And I investigated some time to find the crash bug, unfortunately I had no luck yesterday.
We also created a script that makes an installer for linux with the loki setup tool, I\'ll investigate on how to make rpms today.
For the tress we had to fix a small bug with transparent textures and our map converter
Then acraig managed to fix the Collision Detection, so there are only 2 major issues left: The crashes and the rotation update of the player which are a bit out of sync at the moment.

[MatzeB]

More bugfixes Yesterday:
I finally find the crash bug, and it should run stable now (at least it didn\'t crash anymore for me, but tests with multiple clients should still be made)
We added a credits screen (very important
Then we shortened network headers wich should heavily improve bandwith needs (still 150-200 bytes per player and second which is too much = 4kb/s for 20 visbile players)

[MatzeB]

Yesterday was again quiet productive:
-Fixed the rotation problem, now movement is nicely predicted and smooth
-Did more testing over inet and fixed 2 more server bugs, and found 1 new (that happenes about every 30 minutes
-A text for the credits screen has been written
-error output is a bit more verbose so that it should be easier to see why something fails

[MatzeB]

What happened yesterday:
-I installed planeshift on our online server - unfortunately it behaves strangely there and sends packets twice which makes our client crash , so this means more bug hunting...
-In the afternoon I realized that my new HD arrived, so I didn\'t code but installed a new linux debian, I had it already running in the evening
-We cleaned up our files (deleted old ones) and changed the behaviour of the credits screen and the text it displays.
-the windows installer is ready (a script that you can call and it automagically creates an installer for you)

[MatzeB]

What happened yesterday:
-worked in the network code and tracked down a small bug... Seems it isn\'t crashing anymore, but all our people on win report problems that\'s very bad because I can\'t reproduce the problems here on linux... I hope that 1 of our win coders is able to fix them...
-Installed a new script on the server that automatically restarts the server if it crashed

All in All I\'m a bit frustrated at the moment... On my machine everything seems to run fine for now (hey, we could release a linux only version now ;-)... if nothing helps I\'ll boot into linux and so how far I get with msvc (I hate msvc).
Then we should also try to finish message combining, I realized that some operating systems have problems when sending packets with a too high frequency, so this will probably give problems on the server with much clients (>5) and for users on XP that have the packet planer installed it already happens with 1 client :-/

[MatzeB]

hehe, seems some people couldn\'t see the ;-) behind the linux ;-). Although I myself am a linux fanatic, we also have coders that use M$ software, so you can be sure that there will be a windows version, and that that windows version will be 100% the same like the linux version (with the little exception that you have to use a M$ win system - more flamewars please
Anyway what happened yesterday:
-fixed the crasher on win , now we only have 1 random crasher left that happens on both systems when more than 2 people connect....
-I started a rewrite of some network code, but then decided to wait with that and try to fix our current one (the new version will be ready some days after the release)
-Improved server script to let several admins look at the server together
-Added a say command for the admin on the server (so now he can say: \"Hey, I\'ll kick you cheater\", before kicking him
-Also the guild management is updated: Guild leaders can now invite other people to their guild. If you\'re invited you can accept or decline that request now.

[MatzeB]

-We fixed some more bugs yesterday, the client and server . The server seems rock solid now, and the client also didn\'t crash anymore at the end. BUT the client often ends in an endless loop while connecting now...
-I was also thinking about quests that could be designed by only chatting and walkling around (the dungeon master could play 1 or 2 NPCs...) If someone has a suggestion, please put into the \"Comments To Matzes diary thread\". I assume such a quest would make the thing much more fun...

We\'re very very near to the TechDemo...

[MatzeB]

yesterday was bad... I only improved heartbeat and kick messages a bit and fixed a bug, where clients have gone linkdead too early.
Apart from that I was searching the whole day for the loop in the client and couldn\'t find it
-We had some small fixes make the menu looking good in resolution bigger than 640x480
-We made the license text in the installer a bit more clear, to explain our licensing of GPL in source and proprietary (but free to use) content.

[MatzeB]

Yes! I looked 30 minutes at the code and finally fixed the network problem, only a crasher on windows left now (the last crash we know about that is, I doubt it\'s the last in reality            (I just got a mail from Talad and Vengeance saying that they fixed it, it seems it was a compiler bug in msvc... I\'ll check it later and tell you in my entry tomorrow)
I also found a way to avoid our 2nd win crasher, it seems only to happen for wrong UV texture maps in levels. (Although it shouldn\'t crash our app we can easily fix the UV maps and it should be working again...)
If everything goes well we can finally made a developer testing with more than 4 players this evening...

[MatzeB]

sorry, for not updating... but not much happened...
We\'re still hunting bugs... The map has converter has been improved a bit (you get some few fps more now), another server crash is perhaps solved and the installation package has been improved.
The hardest problem at the moment is testing... It\'s hard to test with more than 3 clients if you\'re alone...

[Vengeance]

It\'s hard to test with more than 3 clients if you\'re alone...

What Matze means is that when he is working on these problems, he must run the server and 3 entire copies of the client game in order to test.  That\'s a LOT to run on one machine!

Some of you are worried about being able to run even ONE copy!  :-)

Indeed, running 3 copies is very slow on the frame rate and therefore difficult to control.  Running 4 is nearly impossible.

Does this make sense now?

- Venge

[MatzeB]

Sorry, about the few updates... I\'m very busy at the moment
most of the bugs are away now and we\'re doing testing with some members of the planeshift team. If that goes well we can release this week (or later if it doens\'t go well...)

[MatzeB]

Update:
 -Testing runs good so far, only small issues
  -fixed lots of these small issues like the funny thang that numpad 7 crashs the client ;-)

Be happy: We\'ll definately releasing something this week!