“Time is the longest distance between two places.” ~Tennessee Williams
26 weeks of logging NimbleActivity, thats 182 days! This week I am going to start posting a screenshot of the previous weeks SVN log entries to let people follow along more closely as Zero Gear enters the home stretch of its two year development phase.
I am happy to report that last week was the most productive week in a loooooong time. The game is running about 500% better than even one week ago. Mostly due to a few small networking changes. I added a concept I call time shifting which reduces the bandwidth by more than half in most cases (and even more in some cases!) that I will be writing about later in the week. After dominating the networking systems, I fixed a few more bugs related to input, the blur screen effect, error reporting, etc…
Next I plan to do stress testing using bots so I can track down remaining performance issues. Zero Gear is going to fly by the end of this week!
Things are getting pretty busy around here as we Kick Ass™ and Get Things Done™. Last week I was bouncing all over the place like usual, massaging GUI’s and tweaking game assets and level scripts due to feedback from our daily playtests. Last week I also started on a new race map inspired by the classic arcade game Ironman Stewart Offroad Racing. It will be all dirt and have plenty of twists, turns and jumps!
I will try to wrap up the new track this week, as well as dealing with all the other tasks that crop up.
I spent some time in the the first half of last week putting in a new game weapon (the Repulsor Shield) which repels all physical objects (fun!). I also added some graphical niceties including a drafting effect and random bot models (to go along with our hilarious new bot names). Some bug fixes rounded out the middle of the week before I took a break to beta test an OpenGL iPhone class being given by Noel Llopis of Snappytouch. This week I’m putting my nose to the grindstone to try and get the rest of the game GUIs up and running before moving on to plenty of AI bot programming!
Last week’s SVN log:
Good to see it is coming along well. See a lot of network fixes in your logs which is always good to see better to catch them now than have them popping up after release. Well guys keep up the good work and will look forward to playing it when it’s released