v0.06 is nearly completed. Just a few bugs to clean up, and then it's off to v0.07, which will essentially be a "polish-up" version before Open Beta commences. After all, everything needs to look shiny and presentable in preparation for the unwashed masses. [grin]

Today I added a new bullet-expiration-animation (original art thanks to Draffurd!) that replaces the previous system of spawning ~7 additive particles upon a bullet being destroyed. This saves a lot on drawing/processing time, since, for example, a shrapnel grenade releasing 75 shrapnel bullets would create 75*7=375 particles, as opposed to now making only 75. The other cool thing about the new effect is that 'debris' remains for 5 seconds or so after the bullet is destroyed. Gives a cool effect after a bunch of shrapnel grenades have gone off in a room. [smile]

Also fixed up some more layering issues (darn layers!) that was more or less just a logic-burp in my head with how I was Z-ordering sprites on-the-go. All fixed up now; so you can safely hide under that tree, hehe.

The game now also refrains from drawing the 'ground' graphic on portions of the map outside the map's physical boundries. This was making for some confusing instances for players where -- if the map-creator neglected to wall-off the map edges -- they would bounce off seemingly an invisble barrier for a very "WTF" moment. Nothing says home like an endless black void.

Two new maps today as well! One from Draffurd, and the other from DarkCampainger. Both of which are Capture-The-Flag maps for the gamemode-in-the-works. Although both of them (ironically) look similar, I'm positive that they'll both be very fun to play on. I'll post up some screenshots later, or maybe coax them into posting them up on the Skirmish forum. :P

And lastly, the last couple of bugs I'm fixing before we can proudly call v0.06 complete. The main two are players who leave a game can't rejoin (unproducable thus far), and the master-server sometimes neglecting to drop a player from the online list, thus preventing that player from accessing his account afterwards.

Since TCP/IP is connection-based, I reasoned out that I would have to get a notification if the player left. So, I determined that it might -- nay, must! -- be because in some rare case Skirmish is hiding its windows and refusing to actually shutdown, thus maintaining the connection invisibly! Doh. So I slapped in a timer that checks for the game becoming a run-away process and terminating it. Hopefully that fixes that one. [smile]


And what's a journal entry without a screenshot? This one is from Thursday night, where we had an absolutely mayhem-esqe Free-For-All game on DarkCampainger's "Arctic Outpost" map. One of the more notable things about this image is the average player latency. Previously having an 8 player game would bring all players up to at least 200ms+ ping. Now our highest is at 221ms. This is a huge improvement, and a great leap towards having much larger-scale games of Skirmish in the (hopefully!) near future. Yay. [smile]



(Alex's little, ah, comment aside, the lag was very much at a minimal. [smile])


Which reminds me, YES there will be a spiffified new playerlisting system in v0.07. I'm well aware of the current model's ugliness. :P