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An update? Yes an update!
There’s a lot to talk about, the news update was getting way too long so I decided to split it into a couple ones that I will be posting in the coming weeks.
Multiplayer
It took awhile but 2Volution has proper multiplayer now. The whole base engine has been rewritten so that everything is based on networking. This means that even ‘singleplayer’ is technically a multiplayer session that only a single player is playing. Because of this, it’s way easier to implement features into both singleplayer and multiplayer without any extra work needed so that if it works on singleplayer, it will work on multiplayer.
Multiplayer is completely server sided. The client only deals with rendering and sending the keys to the server, even though this approach has its downsides, from the different multiplayer setups that I have experimented with, this is the most safe, reliable and easy to work with because I mostly have to worry about the server.
Combat and the new animation framework
The combat and the animation framework have been completely revamped. The system allows way more complex and flexible weapons and various combos and animations.
The animator is bone based which makes it quite flexible and can be used for all of the animations in the game.
The previous system didn’t allow separate animations for different limbs which made it quite hard to have separate items in both hands and use them at the same time.
I’m going to deticate a whole news update to magic so I’d rather not go into too much detail in this one. Magic is going to be based on a complex system that allows players to write their own spells that can affect their enemies or friends mental and physical states, create projectiles, natural occurences and disasters, affect emotions and a huge variety of different things.
Magic will be hard to master, because learning to write spells will take a long time and using spells and creating new spells comes at a great risk, every spell requires enegery and some will require a lot of energy. If the player does not have enough mental energy, then the spell will absorb the required energy from the players health which can ultimately kill the player.
Here’s a gif of the most basic projectiles that are also in the game.
Lighting
Lighting is something that I’ve been playing around with for awhile, It’s hard to create a proper lighting system that runs without any problems even on integrated cards and is visually appealing, but I might have just got it right this time. The new shader based lighting runs on ~4000 FPS on my Intel integrated 3000 graphics ‘card’.
It’s also in the game already, but I feel like I could improve how it looks, if you have any suggestions feel free to post them below ;D
User Interface
The game will be mostly played with a keyboard or a controller. I’ve been playing around with a GUI design that would feel great on both and also support up to 4 player co-op sessions. This work in progress design so far has met all of the requirements.
Water
Water was a tricky one to implement, I messed around with different tile based water simulation algorithms for quite awhile and pressure was always the one that made them too slow to use. Luckily by handling water as a compressable liquid I managed to make it fast enough to be used in game without any major performance impacts.
In-Game:
Merry Christmas everyone! :D
A few things that I’ll be writing about in the next updates: World Generator, AI, Magic, Game lore, Combat abilities, Races, etc.
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