Welcome to this weeks State of the Game. Now stop reading and go get the latest stable build and start playing!
Back? Good! So the new stable build wraps all the features from the snapshots into a bug tested [not bug free!] build that everyone can enjoy while I work on the next set of features. So what does this one have in it? Glad you asked! [Though you already played it so you should know. You did play it, right?]
New Pregame Lobby
The new pregame lobby allows you to switch out builds, switch teams, see the other players builds, and vote on the next level to be played. It was quite the overhaul!
Level Voting
No longer will you get stuck in a loop of playing New Amazon by a troll server, you can now choose your own fate and vote on the next map. There are 3 level options, one picked by the server admin, and 2 random levels. If the server does not have a level list, all 3 choices will be random [but never duplicated]. The level with the most votes wins! In a case of a tie, it’s the level that was randomly selected last, or the server admins level, depending on which levels are in the tie.
Steam Connect
If you play the game on steam, you will now have the option of connecting your steam account to a Bombdog account. Why would you want to do this? There is some Bombdog account exclusive content, like Alpha member features, or the Alienware cockpit. By connecting your steam account to your Bombdog account, you will be using steam to login to Bombdog account, ensuring you have access to everything, no matter what platform you choose to use. You can even use it to connect to a free Bombdog account! In this case it will not create a new paid account, but when you login from steam it will grant the free account all your normal unlocks and allows you to use any Bombdog exclusive content.
Custom Logger
So I wrote, what I think, is a really neat event manager system in preparation for stats and achievements tracking. What better way to test this system than with a custom error tracking system?! The new custom logger replaces the built in Unity error tracking system and does a much better job at filtering worthless messages, reducing writing to disk, and avoiding memory issues that could cause a crash. It also make finding errors SUPER easy for me. I have already discovered 3 new issues that are well hidden and fairly random from user submitted logs and have a great start on getting them fixed!
So that is what is in the current stable build, but guess what! I have already started on the next snapshot! I already have a skeleton of a player profile that gets created/loaded on login and have a fully written, but not yet hooked up, stat tracker and manager system. It’s kind of beautiful that I can create these systems in a fully modular way and just hook them up through the event system now. In fact, hooking up the profile system took exactly 1 line of code:
EventManager.Subscribe(“Account/Login”, new EventManagerEvent(ProfileManager.PlayerLogIn))
Once I get the stats system hooked up and saving data, I will start to manage the global syncing of that data through the Bombdog account. I will have to do some data conversion, as I want a lot of the game profile data to argument the online profile and be reachable through the website as well. There is also the big dark question of what to do about people messing with offline profiles, offline play, playing in one location offline, then playing online in a different location, and then playing online in the original location. All a bit of a nightmare, but I feel the problems are solvable and will provide me with a nice coding challenge. If you see a bunch of dumb questions flooding stachoverflow.com, that would be me!
Also, about the website. There is currently a contract developer working on a new version, but we are having a ….. quality disagreement. Sigh. I am doing my best to get the situation resolved in a mutually beneficial way, but it is highly likely the website will be delayed for quite some time. Originally, it was to be done by the end of January, but that date has long since passed.
Hope to see you next week for another amazing State of the Game!