PROGRESS
This sprint we focused on technical improvements to the Alpha like continued stability, bug fixes, and networking improvements to make the game more playable on poor connections. A few team members were out of town or sick for an extended period since our last newsletter, so this one will be a bit shorter than usual. The team is chomping at the bit to get back to our normal schedule, so we expect to have some more interesting progress to show next time!
We modified how we reference and load our assets like characters and abilities. This allowed us to fix a 1 second hitch that would occur when summoning a Kinfolk for the first time after booting up the game, which has been a pet peeve of ours for a few months now. This also allowed us to have fewer assets loaded at one time, freeing up more memory.
We added the concept of a "network handshake" when a remote player joins a host. Essentially, we now have a process of back and forth communication between the two computers where we confirm on both sides that the remote client has correctly joined the host and is ready to continue before the game progresses. This helps stabilize the game, as we can always be 100% certain that the connection has been fully established before other gameplay logic tries to run.
On the networking side, we reduced the size of our player input data when it is networked to be over 3 times smaller! Our network actually sends the most recent input data plus the previous 3 input data for every frame, meaning that for every frame we send the 4 most recent input data (this redundancy helps solve various networking issues). So, because 4 of them are sent for every frame, reducing the size of each input data drastically reduces how much data we are networking for every frame, which should clear up a lot of bandwidth.
We improved some of our existing multiplayer systems so that both players now see each other’s characters move more smoothly. Previously, some players would see choppy movement from the other player’s character because we were sending them less detailed information. It should now be much smoother as we use the other player’s actual inputs to move their character instead of just that character’s position data.
We fixed a multitude of bugs, including one where a Kinfolk could end up having no cooldowns in the next arena round if it was the last one to die in the previous round. We’ll include a full list in our next patch notes!
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server.
Input: Any button press, mouse click, etc. that a player does to tell the game what to do.
Logic: The programming side of any feature. For example, “cooking logic” would be the base level programming for the cooking mechanic.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Remote Client: (aka Remote Player) Any player whose data is being networked across the server to simulate a character's actions. In P2P multiplayer, this is the opposite of the host.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on February 7.
