Warscale 80 - Not dead... just a hangover...

Hi everybody!

I have been analyzing the situation. Makes absolutely no sense to leave. Indeed, if we really want to make this work and make it easier for a potential buyer to get Torque then our mission as a community is to be as active as ever. Idiocy would be just to leave. It would be like shooting ourselves in the foot. Marketing 101 guys. If you want someone to buy GarageGames then start posting your projects, what you are developing and your best shots!!!!

So just forget anything I said in my previous post which was probably a spur of the moment and lets continue!!!

Do you remember in a previous post I mentioned doing a video for one of the contests I entered? Well, it looks like in my company they liked it too so I was basically ordered to produce a video for the system we are developing for my real time job. Here it is for those curious.

It was really nice practicing with Adobe Premiere, I learned a lot of tricks which I will use for future videos. The result may not be the best, but is not that bad either. But I only had 2 weeks to write scripts, pick background music, edit muic and sounds, photoshop each element in the video and animate everything. I barely made about 20 secs of video per day.

But the problem is that my office laptop, the one I carry everywhere and also use to develop Warscale is a 3 year old PC so it wouldn't cut it. I had to use my own laptop for this and even with the Corei7 using the 4 cores and their 2 threads each, it took about 15 minutes to render a single run for the video.

Anyway, the problem in carrying my own laptop is that all my Warscale dev environment is in the office laptop. Basically Warscale was stopped until I finished the video. But after that, developemnt continued.

What was done
Poison Cloud
So, the plan last week was to improve a little on the area spells I created before. I decided to go for a Poison Cloud spell. Similar damage to the fire wall but some additional quirks.

In fact this card has a huge bug I'm fixing right now.

So I really thought the creation of this spells would be more difficult than I thought. But it was fairly quick... at least on the basic level. After pondering it for a while I have reached the conclussion I really need to implement another feature which is difficult terrain. Basically each movement in the map costs 1 to traverse in but difficult terrain may make terrain even more difficult to traverse. Will have to solve this later.

But creating this cloud worked fine. Now I can create spells with a rectangular area. I also added a poionous cloud effect and fixed a terrible and really sneaky bug which had been hidden deep deep in the code. I wonder how it was never detected by all the test cases.

Fast game modes
This was a little more difficult. Basically because it involved modifying some server side control.
In a fast mode, players get only one action for a unit. The can move, attack, execute an special ability or summon, or just pass the turn. Thats all. You have 10 or 20 seconds (depending how fast you want it) to execute your action or the server will just pass your turn.
Of course in this case, all the time control is executed in the server side so that there is no way for a hacker to hold the end turn message thus keeping playing forever.
But the main problem is the lag. Say a player sends a command during his last millisecond. But at the same time, the server time counter has already finished counting the turn for this player and passes. So when the player command arrives to the server, the server is already counting other turn.
Indeed the problem can be exagerated given a 1 second lag as:
a. The server starts a turn and sends the start turn message.
b. The client receives the start turn message 1 second later and allows the player to act.
c. The client panicks and does nothing for 19 seconds. At the ame time the server has already counted 20 seconds and will pass the turn. Sends the next turn message. This message will reach the client in one second.
e. In his second 19.5 the player reacts and sends an action.
f. Server receives the action but is already too late, the action fizzles.
g. The next turn message arives.

So the point is, what can we do in this case so that the player understand his message was lost due to lag? Still not sure. I thing the easiest way will be to just send a message to the original sender saying something like: "Your action was lost due to lag." So the player has some input and wont get frustrated.

Of course a lag of 1 second is not likely... right... right????

Ok, so adding the fast game modes forced me to fix some bugs with the time counters and some turn sequencing in the client. It also allowed me to put back the game structure dialog in the new game.

Again, no video, I'm heavy at work with terrain modifiers right now.


The tasks for this week
Healing Spells
I have to continue creating more spells. This week I will make a couple simple ones which are healing spells. One is a Blessing spell which grants +2 HP and +1 damage. This is a 0 level spell. The other one is a Cure Light Wounds spell which heals 8 points of damage to a target creature. This is a level 1 spell. This two spells will take the total spell count to:
34 Equipment
15 Sorceries
30 Creatures
2 Artifacts

My target for release is to have at least 30 sorceries. I hope I can make it before XMas.

Difficult Terrain
This is really required for strategy. The problem is that it will require some additional modifications on the game.

Bug fixes
Even when I already have rolled all this changes up, I have noticed bugs here and there like in the spell descriptions. I'm fixing everything right now before announcing the release. But it is working should anyone like to try.

Time to get real
I think I have reached a fairly good progress in the game. It is more stable than before so I will start implementing the gold store where you pay real cash and get Warscale gold pieces. This is a very sensitive issue and it won't be publicly available at all yet, but I want to have it ready.

Luck to all on your projects!
Guimo

P.S. As usual, the game is available for download at www.warscale.com