Ladies and gentlemen, here’s your weekly update! We have some exciting stuff to show off this week. Flavien performed a 400 “player” stress test of the game with the new networking code using simple AI bots in a simulated “massive space battle”. The initial results were quite encouraging and I believe are best summarized in Flavien’s own words:
“man, I juste tested a 400 ships battle. this is insane. totally insane. once we have weapons in and polish it this is gonna be big. hard to hold back to not tell the world yet ^^. made massive improvements to the camera system too. it’s starting to look like a professional product. the feeling of movement in the interceptor is pretty awesome. I hope I can get it right for the other ships too cause I’m mostly testing/tuning the interceptro so far. now the big question: once I add weapons/projectiles, can we still handle those big battles? we must find a way to it’s just too awesome. no other game has such a feeling IMO.”
Can you feel the excitement!? I hope so because we’re legitimately excited. These screen shots don’t really do it justice but we aren’t planning on releasing any new video until after we ship the Alpha (I already blew his cover by telling the world). Naturally, this leads to the question of when will the next patch be ready so those of you with access can try it out for yourselves? Originally, the next patch was going to be nothing more than a direct port of the game to the new networking code however, over the last month, it has evolved into new networking code combined with a Whole Bunch of Stuff™. Flavien has assured me that he will be finished working on the Whole Bunch of Stuff by Wednesday and then will start on the server-side planetary collision detection – for real this time ;). Unfortunately, I caught the funk a week ago Monday and was sick for most of the week so not much new to report on my end.
We’ve added a mockup of the space whale bobblehead to the cockpit
That’s all for this week. In our next update I’ll talk about how everything we’ve been working on over the last ~8 months is finally starting to come together and while the extra wait has been painful we’re optimistic it’ll pay dividends over the long run.
Nice, cool to see the destroyer and carrier in game for the first time! Can’t wait to play the patch, and a texture on the outside of the interceptor!
Lets hope that collision will end up beeing solved timely and not end up beeing super hard to do. fingers crossed shuffles away shyly
‘Tee hee’
Holy cow! 400 players? I frankly remember other space games where the servers start lagging with a player count of ~20. This can be a huge boost when such a video makes it to Reddit: 400+ players fighting each other like in the dogfight scene in Rouge One.
I’ll probably post a journal article ( haven’t done any in… forever ) and explain a lot of stuff… whenever I have a bit of time. Lots of things have been experimented or changed. The second bar on the left is for shields ( that’s a placeholder, new HUD isn’t in ). Yellow interceptor is customized painting colors. Third faction is indeed in. As for the red graph on top right it’s about sensors / energy emissions but I’ll elaborate more in that future article.
Sounds freakin’ awesome! Great to hear the testing went well! Can’t wait to see it in action! During testing might we be able to have these basic bots present in the prototype (with a massive disclaimer of course that they are no substitute for real players)? It would be a great environment to play-test weapons and gameplay!
Maybe. The problem is managing expectations, cause if we add bots for testing purposes, some people might expect them to be fully functional in the released game. And at this stage we’re not sure if we’ll have time to work on advanced AI.
At this point, I might say to put stupid AI in as a function for drone ships. They could be a special feature of carriers and bases.
Though I do completely agree with it being an expectation management problem. People will eventually come along and expect more even if it is only meant to be stupid AI.
You’ve probably already thought about it, but I’d like to remind y’all to test with some flaky network clients in your 400 bots.
Linux has support for adding network filters that will cause things like dropped packets, high latency jitter, out of order delivery, etc. Windows might too, I’m not familiar with the testing tools available there.
I know there have been several games in the past that have lost their minds when presented with network clients that aren’t performing well and had to have engine surgery after release into the wild Internet.
Not arguing there! I like the idea of really unattractive name labels as already suggested.
Or just occasionally host Stress Testing Weekends during Alpha or something? Activate a bunch of bots and people test to see the effect of heavy player activity.
Quite exciting! Looking forward to seeing those capital ships in-game amongst hundreds of other ships duking it out. Also, completely content with still images until Alpha. Keep up the great work!