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‘Codename Midgard’ or ‘Project Midgard’ continued today, with some minor modifications to the UI — nothing too saucy, just a tweak here and there, mostly to do with spacing.

Update

• GUI Status ~90% done / production stage;
• Client Logic ~2% done / planning stage;
• Server Logic ~2% done / planning stage;
• ‘Race’ file format (.ball) designed and implementation started;
  • Base game will ship race;
  • Free update race will come later (I’d prefer it to be balanced before release, and one race can’t be unbalanced with itself ;));
  • Potential for other races as free/paid DLC (would like to keep that 1:1).

There is a lot of background logic beyond client/server, such as main menu, option dialogue, bindings, etc, but the GUI now has default binds / shortcuts on most of its buttons.

As I have hinted to various people over the last few days, I am, in fact, attempting to put together my own game.  Sick of tormenting randoms on TF2 servers, or pointing out that that glitches still exist from the original release, I’ve taken to work on my own genre-bending madness, well away from First Person Shooters (though the engine was actually designed for FPS games, go figure).

For various reasons, I am codenaming the project ‘Midgard’.  This will, incidentally, be the name of the initial release/version. I’ll take posts about it with ‘project midgard’ from now on.

The genre of the game is, at present, a rather poorly kept secret, however, I will not be posting it here.  To say the least, it is more like an RTS game than an FPS game, though, the HUD will be more cluttered than many RTS games (you can, of course, turn off parts of the HUD, in game, without fighting with a nasty options dialogue).

The projected progress goes like this:

• Design UI (~50% complete);
• Design ‘Sandbox’ mode (~10% complete);
• Design campaign (planning stage — may not be part of the original, but instead listed as a ‘promised’ patch);
• Release a beta test of the game;
• Patch as required;
• Release single player game.

At this stage, this part is listed as ‘wishlist’ by me:

• Optimise the communication stacks;
• Work on additions to the game (free patches and some paid DLC)
  • Free Patches/DLC will include a campaign;
  • Paid DLC will likely include sidegrades.
• Work on multiplayer code (presently total wishlist stage, as optimising for more than 24 players is annoying).

There will be more updates as I progress, but for now I’m working on the core gameplay (available in the ‘sandbox’ mode). I will say that, like many other games, sandbox is all that is really required, but I would like to add objective modes, and add support for ‘modders’ (or level makers, in this case).

For the two people who’ve stumbled blind drunk on this blog, I hope this helps clarify the earlier post.

I wonder when Ubisoft is going to make an Assassin’s Creed game that plays like it was actually meant for a controller beyond the original Playstation; hell, I’d settle for jumping in more than four basic directions on the PC versions…

I’m yet to launch Brotherhood, but I’m concerned I won’t be pleasantly surprised.

For the last few days I’ve been relatively quiet.  This is, in part, because I have been watching NHKWorld and revising my knowledge of nuclear power (I prefer to be informed; and it’s not as if the overview is terribly difficult).

The other reason for my relative silence is work on a personal project.  Now, I’m no notch — though I’m sure we all wish they thought up Minecraft.  No, I’m working on a project I’ve kicked around for years.

Having secured myself a licence for a royalty-free game engine, I’m now exploring its power to bring my dream into reality.  (SFML, SDL, and Allegra all ultimately annoyed me more than they were worth, so even though this is closed-source, I still intend to keep bits and pieces open, at least to modders.)

More of this will no doubt come out later, and the people who need to know (or I want to know, at this stage), already do.

I feel that it would be appropriate to post a short update as to how the Saton Hale mask event went down, given that the fuss has died down, and anyone interested is more likely to be of sane/calm mind.

First, accusations that I modified the server or client binary in any way are out and out false.  While I am quite handy with tools like SourceMod and MetaMod:Source (via Pawn or CPP, and CPP, respectively), I wouldn’t have the first clue as to where to start on live-patching the client binary.  I have some ideas, but VAC2 (and VAC3 at the time, apparently) stopped me from considering them — I value my account far too much.

Second, the admin abuse complaints.  I was on a server, owned by a friend, and we were locating what we thought were “drop spots”.  The server’s password got leaked, we suddenly spiked from 10 players to 32, and notably there was a lot of whinging.  So for those 22 players who found out that the weak/generic password we used to use was ‘woodstock’, I apologise that you felt the wrath of admin abuse, but you interrupted science.

Third, I still believe there were some fixed locations, but that offsets were applied to them.

Fourth, there is no way to access the data from the server, we confirmed suspicions that the gamecoordinator data was being sent directly to clients attached to servers with that map.

Fifth, I did not use a variant of the ‘idle’ programme that Drunken F00l distributed long ago.  While I have a fairly good idea of how it works (I suspect a lot of people do), I would be too paranoid about losing half of the utility of my account to run something like that on it.

Sixth,yes, I have 9 friends who did not want the masks.  That’s right, they didn’t want them, they barely play TF2, and they just sat there using voice coms to gossip.  Go LAN party go.

Finally/Seventh, by my loose calculations I’ve given away more than two thirds of the masks I collected.

I know this is by no means what most people want to hear; they want to know there’s some magical ‘hack’ out there which allows you to teleport straight to the gifts, and, well, there is, but I don’t have it, never have had it, and only knew it was theoretically possible at the time (and yes, I know who has it, and no, they wouldn’t give it to me — a lot of others know too).  I now understand how it could be done, and hope that VAC3 would catch it in the future…

Going with Tumblr from now on. I don’t have the time to manage my own custom blog software while working on things for other people, or my research.

Dedicating this domain to gaming.