Corneroids alpha 1.0.5

Tomorrow is the day!
My initial goal was to release the first version of multiplayer mode this year and I'm going to keep it! So tomorrow somewhere around 18.00 (CET+02:00) (20:00 по МСК) I'm releasing version 1.2.0 which contains the brand new multiplayer mode and some other bug fixes.

Please keep in mind that this is the very first release and it has a lot of bugs. I did final tests today and everything went great, but it is still possible that the game will crash and you will lose hours of work!

Here is a short list of main features:

- Works exactly as the singleplayer mode but without enemies
- Custom itemsets and textures are supported. No predownloading required!
- No registeration, accounts nor active internet connection required!
- Some features such as enemies and beacons remain unimplemented in mp mode.
- Collision detection and response improved but ramming can still send you spinning around.
- No dedicated servers yet . Its not difficult for me to implement one to work in windows environment, but support for other OS requires a lot of work.
- Player cap is soft-limited to 8 players for now.
- Many known issues and bugs!

Overall I'm satisfied with the code I've written although it requires a lot of optimization. I'm mostly concerned about the memory usage and the pressure put on garbage collector since I didn't have time to implement proper data pooling. That's why I'm going to spend next few weeks fixing bugs and improving performance.

Please check out these few screenshots I took during last tests. Player model is still missing so I used that purple thingie as a placeholder .

Happy new year!

The future

The update frequency of Corneroids has been really slow since the multiplayer mode requires so much work. I want to make it as bug free as possible before releasing it to public.

But what happens after the multiplayer patch? The answer is: MUCH more content and more frequently! Corneroids is just a sandbox game atm but I want to make the space worth exploring! Artificial gravity and more diverse space are my top priorities for the first content patch.

I will upload some new pics soon! =)

Mikko

Few thoughts on the upcoming multiplayer mode
Programming of a multiplayer game is a real challenge. Suddenly everything becomes asynchronous but it has to work in sync with other machines across the network. I never thought it would require this much work, but this is why love programming: overcoming obstacles, learning new things and creating great games!

The multiplayer mode of Corneroids is coming along really well. I just finished the first iteration of method for transferring entity data over network. In the end of this week I will most probably have entities with working consoles and guns transferred over network!

But I'm still struggling with the greatest challenge of network programming: how to keep things synchronized? For example entity data is outdated the very moment it arrives to a client. Making a stable and robust base for multiplayer requires a lot of work so I cant give any dates yet, but I'll keep you updated.

Mikko