Wow, that's been three months of development time for just 0.08 of a version. But, this makes sense because it was about as much work as getting to 0.8... or does it?
Up to V0.8, TRaceON was more or less just my playing around with Unity (the game engine I'm using) and getting a prototype and proof-of-concept running. The most important change in V0.88 is that I have completely re-designed the networking. This should now handle "massive amounts" of players. The main purpose of this version is, in fact, trying to find out if that works the way it is designed. While V0.8 only supported 20 players at maximum, simply because only 20 players fit into one level and V0.8 only supported playing one single level simultanuously, V0.88 scales this into a new dimension: It hosts any number of game sessions, and each game session can have up to 20 players - and different game sessions can take place simultanuously in different levels, or even in the same level (without one game session interfering with the others).
Aside from that major architectural change, however, as you might notice, a lot of polishing was done. Take a little time to play the previous version, V0.8, if you wish, and see the difference. You can't play V0.8 in multiplayer anymore, because I don't keep the old servers running. In V0.8, funny things could happen: If a group of people wanted to start to play, but one person was away from the keyboard, the whole group could not start. For this, I now have "Force Play" - if most people have agreed to start playing, and a certain amount of time has passed and one person still doesn't hit play, the others can start the game. The people who haven't hit play then simply are removed from the teams and can join in again after the session, if they wish. Also, V0.8 did not do anything to prevent the ugly effects of lag. In fact, one cycle might have been in quite another location in one client as on other clients. V0.88 does a lot of tricks to prevent this from happening (there's limits to what can be achieved with this, though ;-) ).
I've also added the second level - mostly for testing the handling of different levels. There will be 10 levels altogether, and the new levels are one of the major things to be implemented for V0.9. I might compile a list of the changes between V0.88, but not right now (the sun is shining, and I've spent the whole day finishing this, now is party-time ;-) ). It's quite a long list, but I really enjoyed working on this. I hope you enjoy playing V0.88 as much as I enjoyed creating it. It's still beta, so it's still for free. Well, actually, it's not even beta - the actual beta-test will start with V1.0, when all levels and the whole gameplay are implemented.
Btw, all included (this includes this Website and a few things that are not even publicly visible, yet, like a logo for RaMtiGA and quite significant advanced in the concept design of RaMtiGA), I now have put almost 475 hours into this. So, basically you could say that this game is now worth more than my car (and I got a very nice car, bought it second hand, though, which saved me some ;-) ). So, as of today, I'm 33 years old, and my first game has reached it's V0.88... I think that makes sense. Now I'm off to celebrating my birthday, and TRaceON's "pre-birthday" as well :-)
As usual, all versions of Jashan Chittesh's Unity Multiplayer TRaceON so far: