One step forward, and two steps back...

Well after the highs of yesterday comes the dawning realisation that things with the Tank project are not quite as rosy as they seem.

After more extensive testing of the networking model with Lisa, Chris and Nick, it has become apparent that the TCP networking protocol used by Tank for multiplayer data transfer simply isn't going to cut it. I haven't even implemented projectile tracking, ammo & health crates, or vehicle-vehicle collision yet, and already the latency is more than noticeable. It looks like I'm going to have to start over with the netcode, but base it on the UDP protocol this time. That's a lot of recoding. Right now I'm wishing I had gone down the single player/AI route.

It feels like I've learnt to speak Japanese and I should have been learning Chinese all along.

This is a major setback for me and I could easily hit the "Erase Project" button right now. But I'm not going to be too hasty, I'll take a break from it for a few days and let my emotions settle down.

I have to end this blog post on a positive note, and it's not all bad news. I did manage to achieve a few goals. 

• The players now have dedicated spawn points. Previously they were randomly generated positions, which meant there was a chance that a player could spawn inside a tower. This would mean the player's health would steadily drop to zero causing death, without having been shot or anything. Pretty frustrating I'd imagine. The spawn points are in the corners of the game grid. The towers, while still being pseudo-randomly placed, are coded to stay away from these areas. I have also updated the floor graphics to reflect the new spawn areas.

• There is now an audible alarm that sounds when the player health remains below 20%. This is a bit annoying at the moment (as there is currently no way to replenish health), but it's supposed to be annoying right? It's a warning! Once there are ambient sounds and vehicle movement noises added, the sound will fit in with the game a little better. I think.

• There are now routines in place for when the Tank drives off the gaming grid. The Tank object disappears and is replaced with an explosion (still loads of work needed on this), then after a delay of a few seconds, the player is switched to an overhead view of the grid, so he/she can watch the battle continue between any remaining players. Again, this still needs a lot of work, but the basic functionality is there.

• There is a routine in place for when the Tank collides with a tower and dies because of it. It works in a similar way to the "Tank off grid" routine.

• My proudest achievement of this version is the way the towers are now generated based on a known seed. All players get the exact same map, based on a single integer passed to the client from the server. From this variable, I can instruct the client to generate any number of towers, with their x and z co-ordinates, their width, depth, height and texture all matching perfectly across the connected players, and all from a single transferred number. If it wasn't for this single achievement I think I would have given up on this by now.

So to sum up (because I'm banging on a bit now), the project at this moment is hanging in the balance between "Something I'm working on" and "Something I worked on". On one hand I'm wondering why I put myself through this, and on the other I'm considering it a learning experience, complete with its ups and downs.

One thing's for sure, you don't realise how much work goes into creating a videogame until you try to do it yourself.