NimbleBit

“A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.” - Scott Allen

Spending a day in Dillon Beach was a nice reward for the past 3 weeks of hard work and a couple full days of driving to San Diego and back to SF.

The game has progressed greatly the past few weeks. Caffeine is a hell of a drug. The start of last week was about getting a new build out. I worked on polishing the server browser by displaying map name and player counts as well as filtering out servers running an older version. I also smoothed out weapon spawning a bit and fixed random other bugs.

The end of last week was spent tracking down some excessive network lag related to servers with high ping and high packet loss. We found the source of the lag on Friday so I will continue efforts to fix it this week. I am also planning on fixing a bug where the windows timer loses precision when a computer is left running for too long. Timing in windows is not fun!

My tasks last week involved drinking coffee, and then drinking more coffee! Between drinking coffee, I managed to make the usual pruning, prodding and polishing efforts to the build. I also spent a good chunk of time getting some delicious music into the game, from some very cool cats that we will reveal in a future post! I have also been very busy making sure everything is in place to simultaneously open our beta sign-up, and unveil our new game trailer. I have been writing up a short little casual press release as well that I am planning to send out to lots of people in order to try and generate more interest in Zero Gear. It’s just about time for us to come out of the shadows and start pushing this awesome game we have been working on for over 2 years!!!

This week, I am hoping to be very busy mailing out press releases and managing the signups for our beta.

More usability improvements and bug fixes last week, we’re getting so close to a bigger beta release I can taste it! More subtle race bot improvements, they’re going to surprise you with when they use their items and you can now see what items people have in spectator mode. Luv bots will no longer latch onto their owners, and tweaks to the Sea Mine make it a little more dangerous! We’ve also added some more visual indications of the quality of your network connection to make it more obvious to people when they are playing on a poor server connection. The bottom corner of the screen is now home to a “signal bars” icon showing a graphical representation of your ping, and ping values in the player roster are now colored from green to red.

Last week’s SVN log: