> SnowdenHail

Alpha Release(s)

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Nytalix:
Should add voice channels or just use ts

Koolio:
Voice Channels..

Well the plan for multiplayer was to start with a just basic chat/channels.. I wanted to use an irc server for handling the backend  ..ie all game clients would optionally connect to that, there would be a global chat channel for it. And then per hosted multiplayer server/lobby would be a virtual channel created either on the irc server as private channel for only those in that lobby/game or the channel server would be the server host and communications for those those in that particular game would be handled by that server host. By using irc (its pretty old tech now) but it already supports a lot of server security admin stuff.

The only reason I haven't got to implementing that setup in the Snowdenhail is that the c# libraries that I'd like to use for the client side only support c# 4.5, and Unity as a game engine is stuck to mono c#3.0 .. Sometime this year they should support c#4.5+ and I'll finally be able to work on that doing it the way I want.

The other thing is that VOIP is another beast entirely, again its where I think Unity should already step up and add native support for Voice over its own Unet system both as p2p and as a server/client host option that handles encoding and relaying data instead with some better voice quality codecs instead of shitty Opex ... honestly if you haven't noticed most games with built in voice are are crap sound quality. (ofc my guess is if they do bother they'll probably do some cloud based approach and all your voice data is goes through their servers and then passed on.. shit design that just allows data collection, reason why I prefer teamspeak based appraoches with lots of little servers as opposed to using services that handle it on global scale like discord etc)  but they haven't bothered either way.. and marketplace for prebuilt solutions isn't great either.. often using RPC's and is basically P2P..(as Unity networking underhood workings are largely a mystery) not good. Still alot of the third party options use P2P... the advantage to that is voice is sent directly to other connected players on the server directly.. its fast and has little delay in you talking and anyone else hearing. The major disadvantage, is EVERYONE (depending on the client/server design of the game some better than others) can get your ip because that is how it works.

More people are becoming aware of this poor piss design now with so many being targetted in DDOS attacks...  https://www.reddit.com/r/playrust/comments/5tpzt9/your_public_ip_address_is_visible_to_anyone/ careless developers who don't care to the problems it can have especially on popular competitive games or where someone can be easily targeted just by knowing the server they play such a game that has such a design flaw.

 ... So alot of mainstream games use p2p for multiplayer (and it some cases depending on the game type and competitiveness etc this can be fine like console games, not that it would be impossible to work around for the most dedicated hacker)  and even when they don't use it for the multiplayer game itself, because players data is going only to the main server. When it comes to voice chat it is often falling back to p2p not good.. and Valve are even big culprit of this shit design as they provide an API for voice chat, that is used by alot of games these days. Because developers just don't care and choose whatever is easy to implement and takes the least amount of time to implement is just the preferred option, not to mention general publics ignorance helps as is the case for all things in life allows those who should be doing better  to get away with not doing so.

Personally it should only be the server or the nearest server between players that relays this data onto another connected player. And that's not even talking about encryption aspect and  err governments and nefarious third party interests in communication spying (yknow they seem to have no problem importing masses of terrorists into their countries and would like to spy on everyone.. the level of stupidity and evil going is something behold.: )

So voice will just have to wait, unless I find a good voip library that does this fast, and securely and most importantly is easy to implement :) It's a lot of boxes to tick just for voice chat to be done right. Either way I don't want p2p voip in my game(s) should they ever be finished. l;

=================================================================

Anyway enough about that rant.. though it does cover some of the todo stuff I was planning to write about for the game, which is largely just a sandbox of systems most of the changes aren't even seen, though the arrow indicators are finally in, and now when you move the city camera, you will be able to tell which snowballs can be effected by the wind... *this is just due to the way the mouse position is projected onto an invisible plane, and the snowballs are spawned above that area, due to 3d space and being able to move and rotate the camera around the scene, the entire method of interaction with your mouse position and the snowballs becomes alot harder to get working right. So still alot to work on to make this entire thing feel fun to play with.... sometimes I feel like scrapping the thing and thats partly why I end up working on other things.


v0.3.62
- Time of day color changes
v0.3.63
- Added LoadingScreen, multiscene handling loading code mostly done.
v0.3.64
-Updated Unity to 5.6b4
v0.3.65
- Voxel Atlas texture saved to resource folder
v0.3.66
- Voxel Atlas texture /filter-trilinear/mip mapping/ changes (less blurry at distances)
v0.3.67
- Blue back hitblocker enabled again
v0.3.69
- Voxel codebase updated
v0.3.71
- Version entry class changed
v0.3.72
- Suggestion commands tab/tab+shift now cycle extra commands.
v0.3.73
- 'More console commands added prefix: cn_ '
v0.3.74
- Snowball Indicator Arrows Added
v0.3.75
- Snowball Arrow hover timer
v0.3.76
- FastLineRenderer Update
- Updated Unity to 5.6b9
v0.3.77
-Building Test checker button attributes added
v0.3.78
-Snowballs out of interaction area will lose arrow indicator and change color

Well its been a few weeks, I've been added some more backend stuff to the game to have better version control system now so most code changes I make I then also write a short description and bump the version number up (at least that was the plan, bad habbit of making changes and updates to plenty of things and just a short description of '.' or 'updated stuff' becomes less helpful months later :D )  it stores other log data like type of changes and timestamp, perhaps something I put on the unity asset store when its more full featured. ..here a picture of along with another tool I was working on.. for class generating.



Useful for me as it makes it easier to check previous changes when I commit updates to the remote git repository. And useful for when I do releases, as I'll have a way to export out all the changelogs from the last version that was publicly released (also later will be an ingame changelog, where you'll get version updates (probably pointless with just me working on things as I get sidetracked on projects all the time) but it will have more uses in the future, one of those things I can reuse with other game projects aswel so things like that often get priority.

The devconsole also had some pretty good improvements, I've made it so that it now shows the total command suggestions.. and you can hold down [tab] to cycle through all other commands, with [shift]+tab] working the opposite direction.. its nicer than valve's source devconsole used in most their games now, ok its still missing some more things but again its one of those systems I have ready to use in other games as its pretty core and Unity doesn't provide a decent devconsole for game development anyway.

Another big addition to the devconsole was that it can now has  c# reflection option to use make custom command alias's out of an object class public properties.. all technical lingo but it means for devconsole that a ALOT more of the ingame options used internally for the game can now be exposed as console commands, and also be saved and loaded in the save file. It's pretty useful addition that allows me to easily add public/private class variables into the devconsole, and by doing so they are also exposed as part of the config and console command system. Because when I build the game for release Unity provides no useful modding/api/toolkit stuff so have to kinda build this stuff yourself for your game(s) if you want to support such features.

As an example, Sb_ (Snowball) will show a whole bunch more commands that are used in the game to control various Snowball settings, you can mess around with them all, if shit goes wrong just delete the config.json file to restore default values.

example: If you change "Sb_GrowIncrement 2" snowball sizes will grow really quick... 0.42   ...is the default value.
example: Sb_ArrowIndicatorAlways true  ...will cause snowball arrows to be shown in other camera modes like voxeleditor mode (F3) default is false...

cn_ (Console) also includes a few options
r_ (Renderer) so far just render like options
e_ (Engine)
v_ (Voxel stuff) all prefixed this way, though alot of the voxel commands are also without prefixes so that they are similar to the minecraft worldedit commands.


So alot easier now to expose these game variables as console commands, before it would require me to write out each individual console command for any particular value that was needed in the console.

Of course what it is missing is a way to set the default value back directly in the console or at least show what a particular console command default value is.. not sure on the best way to implement that, a future todo :)

And a new  problem is the amount of commands 'helplist' can display in one go has grown a lot with this addition ..so it gets cut off trying to list all the console commands :( you only see half the commands.. Unity has a problem with ugui stuff in that it can only draw like 64k vertices on a canvas.. and the entire devconsole is on its own canvas, with each text letter taking up 4vertices.. when you have alot of text on the canvas, I have it strip out enough of the old text to keep everything under this limit... huge limitation and looks like I'm going to have to reimplement how the devconsole displays info. :( Perhaps I'll just have to have helplist, use a paging system, so helplist 1, helplist 2 and it only shows like 20commands per page, that way it doesn't print out all the commands and you can't scroll up to see all earlier printed ones. improvements =  new bugs :( I do hate Unity sometimes :)

Also fixed a nasty bugs in the voxel engine (since last update in January it has plagued the project and is one of the reasons I didn't put out an update earlier) I finally tracked it down to a file commit made over a few months ago by the other guy working on the voxel engine. That was one of the reasons I haven't had an update out for this, as the voxel blocks would have some missing faces in geometry.


Next updates... probably get the buildings in and the building destruction algorithm working on a separate thread, I had shown it earlier where it can detect floating voxel blocks that are not directly touching any block that is grounded (http://webmshare.com/nGb3P) ... well its mostly done as is loading in building schematics into the game..  so some parts have been done just waiting on other implementations to be finished or be worked on :)  So I'll try get that in so the world has some prebuilt shit to destroy  :D

Won't say when the next update is, I kinda started working on that other game mentioned in the shoutbox that is being built ontop of this game (2.5d top down shooter) though I have found a pretty pretty good  fps controller which has built in network code working and alot of more advanced features  (https://github.com/GreenByteSoftware/UNet-Controller ) .. so while I get familiar with it and add my own changes to it. I suspect I'll start implementing it into both this game and the other, if that goes well adding some sort of basic multiplayer chat system will be next step...actually next step would be guns and things to shoot at it, and syncing voxel edits between players, but I'll try do it with multiplayer working for all new additions.. though the snowballs falling might have to go, as physics simulation with multiplayer on Unity is just not easy to get right when all players need to see the same physics object changes replicated exactly :(

Nytalix:
Game designing & programming sounds like a very big hassle with a lot of traps and everything else you need to deal with. Hell, I'm just starting with the basics of building a computer.
But hey, as long as I can gather  anything for my secondary path

From a brief read of the updates so far, I can say the game is progressing a lot, specially with the ease of updates and control.

Koolio:
Yeh it's going all right, so this issue..


--- Quote ---And a new  problem is the amount of commands 'helplist' can display in one go has grown a lot with this addition ..so it gets cut off trying to list all the console commands :( you only see half the commands.. Unity has a problem with ugui stuff in that it can only draw like 64k vertices on a canvas.. and the entire devconsole is on its own canvas, with each text letter taking up 4vertices.. when you have alot of text on the canvas, I have it strip out enough of the old text to keep everything under this limit... huge limitation and looks like I'm going to have to reimplement how the devconsole displays info. :( Perhaps I'll just have to have helplist, use a paging system, so helplist 1, helplist 2 and it only shows like 20commands per page, that way it doesn't print out all the commands and you can't scroll up to see all earlier printed ones. improvements =  new bugs :( I do hate Unity sometimes :)
--- End quote ---

Is no longer an issue now :) Unity added TextMeshPro for free this month and I've been checking it out, it turns out it pretty much solves the above problem. Only I'm using unity 5.6 and TextMeshPro doesn't have a fix for one of the bugs that spams errors for build releases on 5.6. So rather than undoing my changes and going back I'll continue with that and hopefully 5.6/TMP have a fix for the issue before the end of the month and I'll release a new update then with other improvements.

In the mean time I've been working on another game (it has multiplayer first person controller setup and I've got it working topdown where character follows the position on screen.. it also works as a fps/thirdperson aswel.. So will be bringing that into SnowdenHail for the multiplayer stuff, will have to start doing the character stuff..

last years old poll about which character style to go for pretty much ended with "Low poly characters where can have your own skin (like minecraft)" as the highest voted and I have to agree having texture skins you can use for your character is a lot more customizable than trying to make some sort of character creation system where you pick and choose from a bunch of presets. So low poly might change too be a bit more than what minecraft had and texture size for skins will probably be a bit more than 64x64.

Anyway a video of the other game..

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=F18sOhy3se0
A slight detour off the plans of adding buildings into SH, but the the voxel stuff has been up in the air for a bit with other changes going on with it.  That video somewhat demonstrates my new custom debugging hud.. which is pretty versatile, customization and gives direct feedback on values I might want to see in the game, I've been wanting to add something like source engines net_graph to it aswel, nothing to do with making a game, but its all just groundwork stuff that eventually makes making a game easier.

Pepsi87:
art by me, bidding starts at 3million

*BEFORE THE SNOW WRECKED HELL

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