Jan
15
Erstellt von:
Jashan Chittesh
2011-01-15T14:21:20
This is to keep you updated on progress on Traces of Illumination V1.1.2. This release is focussed on two major areas: Performance optimization and minor fixes in the area of networking to be able to re-enable networking with the next release (in V1.1.1, networking is broken so I currently don't even have a server running).
Fixing Networking
Currently, I'm working on the networking issues and already have fixed quite a few problems regarding players joining teams, changing game groups and so on. Some of this broke when I moved to a more efficient handling of sending network messages (in earlier versions, all team/game group changes were sent to all players which wouldn't really scale too well and creates a lot of redundant information; now changes in a game group are only sent to the players in that game group). Another issue I'll be fixing (probably today) is that the new Apples aren't really "network aware", yet. In other words: Collecting apples simply doesn't work in multiplayer sessions (yet). Finally, shooting power-up icons also needs to be tested and checked for multiplayer.
Once these issues are ironed out, network sessions should be possible again - and some of the enhancements I did to networking in V1.1.1 will finally get a chance to be used (e.g. I can now use LoadTester-clients to simulate players and even create special game groups that players can join for "small to large" multiplayer sessions ... even when there's no people online which is quite likely in the current stage of the game).
Optimizing Performance
The other big area of improvement for V1.1.2 is performance. When I published V1.1.1 I was aware that Web players are huge (15MB) - but I didn't feel like investing the time to clean this up and make it much smaller. I can probably get below 10MB rather easily, so that will happen for V1.1.2. The main aspect of performance, however, didn't occur to me until I played Traces of Illumination on my MacBook Pro: There, it was almost unplayable due to terrible frame rates. V1.1.2 was designed from the start to bring major performance improvements. In fact, the idea of V1.1.2 is to make Traces of Illumination ready for Android and iOS from the performance perspective.
I won't publish builds for these devices, yet, because there's much more involved than just performance. However, I need to make sure I have the most important performance issues solved before I can move on with creating new levels and tracers, as any major change I have to apply for the mobile devices will multiply the effort when distributing those changes to all levels / tracers. I have already done a lot in the area of optimizing the levels in V1.1.1 (Level 01 - The Square and Level 03 - The Cube already have very optimized level geometries, Level 02 - Plus Ceiling still is a terrible mess with probably around 60,000 verts which really aren't needed). In V1.1.2, I'll complete the levels and also do major work on the tracers ... and all other items you see in the levels, of course. The goal is to be able to test and run on mobile devices, and when I have achieved that goal, it shouldn't be too hard to have decent framerates on any desktop Mac / PC. So that will be a major step - because performance is the area that received most criticism in Traces of Illumination so far.
Tags: