PROGRESS
This sprint we focused on some big networking improvements and bug fixes for the Beta, as well as quality of life improvements. We’re currently on track to release the Beta near the end of Q1 this year!
General improvements:
A flying character only lands when they touch the ground if you have recently pressed the "Descend" key. This allows a flying character to dash downward at enemies and still remain flying, but you can optionally press the descend key at any time to land.
Pressing the sprint key while flying acts as a "Stop Flying" input, and immediately transitions the character into a falling state when airborne.
We're working on a few improvements to the current tutorial. This includes things like adding a tutorial page for how to search for online matches and making the path toward the camp area more intuitive for new players.
We're standardizing the text for item and ability descriptions so that they’re more accurate and include fewer numbers that change with patches.
In the very near future we'll be starting on the final polishing pass for Red Letter mode!
Networking:
We’ve finalized our work on reducing how much data we network for every frame of gameplay. We now send about 4 times less data every frame than we did before the optimizations. This should help alleviate any potential issues with bandwidth.
We added client prediction to ability firing. Previously, a player's inputs had to go to the server and back before their character would start animating an ability. This caused noticeable input delay for remote players with high ping. Now, we allow a character to immediately start their attack animation as soon as the ability input is pressed, by allowing the local clients to "predict" that the ability will fire, as the ability inputs are still on their way to the server. This improves the feel of online play, and even shaved off some delay to ability firing that had existed in the single player. There is now zero delay between when a player presses an ability key and when their character starts animating in single player.
We’ve prioritized the code surrounding abilities so that it’s more likely to be the first thing that gets networked if there isn’t enough bandwidth to send all of the data at once at a given moment. We’ve also reduced the size of our ability data to further reduce how much data is networked whenever abilities are fired.
Work has started on further networking improvements that should help the game feel better for remote players with high ping. (Players who are very far away from the host player.) We're aiming to further reduce the feel of network delays and to keep the host and remote players more in sync.
As a part of our bug fixes this sprint, we made multiple stability fixes to the storage box UI, and fixed an issue where the remote player often ends up dodging and shielding at the same time.
By popular demand, we’re moving our newsletters to a monthly basis instead of biweekly. This way we can give more news at one time, especially while we’re focusing on polish and have fewer visual improvements to show off. Thank you to everyone who reads through our newsletters (even when our progress is mostly on the technical side)!
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
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.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Red Letter mode: The codename for an unrevealed game mode to be included in the Combat Arena Beta.
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 March 7.
