State of the Game #241: A Helping hand

It’s been another very productive week as I march towards 0.6.7!

I have whittled down the task list to only 3 outstanding issues [pending testing]!

Outstanding issues:
1. Fixes for Master Server stability issues
2. Last support for Steam users- In game UI to manage the account migration
3. Full quick start guide help menu

The sad part is 2 of these tasks are UI tasks, which I have made sure that anyone that will listen knows that I hate doing UI. Luckily, these are fairly painless! I am having a bit of difficulty striking that perfect balance between providing enough information and providing too much information in the help menu. I feel like I am going to err on the side of caution and lean towards to much information. MAV can be a complicated game and I am the worst judge in the world on what players can figure out and what they need to be told. I do have some in-house testers that are perfect for this though 😉

So, that is looking forward into next week though. Let’s talk about what happened this week.

-Best feature implemented

Servers now tell you why you got disconnected from them! They will tell you if you were kicked, the server shutdown, or if the server is just restarting. This is helpful information for players that are trying to continue as a group but ran into server stability issues. Also, I have added system event messages to all servers. Right now these are only being used for player announcements, like Cyberdogs7 connected or Cyberdogs7 disconnected. These can be expanded out to include a kill log for arena mode, but that feature won’t make it into this release. As part of this, I did remove support for a long standing Easter egg that 1 player had discovered in the chat. To that person [you know who you are], I apologize, but it had to be done.

-Best Bug Fixed

Spine builds are killed of correctly when a silly player attaches their cockpit to a weak part that gets destroyed. Before this would cause a ridiculous bug that left the player to pilot around a set of headless legs. This one was a bit tricky to track down as it wasn’t actually doing anything wrong enough to produce an error. I was able to track it to an inheritance issue in which I was calling the destruction method at a lower level class than I needed. The Part class inherited from the Health class, both which have implementations for the Die method. The Part class was calling Part.Die() which would make a call to base.Die() for some inherited code reuse. My mistake was not recognizing that this changed the scope of the call from Part to Health, so when then making the Cleanup() call, the Health.Cleanup() was called and not the Part.Cleanup(). This only matters when dealing with ‘spine’ builds as the Part.Cleanup() was what checked the dependent parts for if the cockpit was also destroyed in the process. But it’s all fixed now!

I made quite a few other smaller fixings and features, but that is the main points from the week.

Don’t forget to check out the new weekly discussion thread on AI!

Leave a comment with your best guess for the release date of 0.6.7! 🙂