A place I thought I might never be...

Some great news this time!

Tank is now at the point where multiple players can connect to a game server and interact with each other! If I'm honest with myself, this is a place I thought I might never be. It's not over yet, not by a long chalk, but I feel good that I've managed to get this far. Of course I couldn't have done it without the guys from DaGodz. Suggestions, encouragement, but mainly help with testing the multiplayer code all add up to what I am considering to be a team project.

So I have decided, as this is my first multiplayer project (and I want to keep it real about what I am able to achieve) that Tank is initially going to be a 4 player game. The netcode over a LAN can handle 16 players in theory, and we've tested it to a point over the net with 10. But there is a lot more data I need to throw around, and for it to be viable over the internet using the TCP protocol, 4 players is a realistic starting point.

There are 101 things left to do. For example, currently the players can just drive around the grid, ramming each other! There is no code in place to allow them to shoot. If you drive off the grid, the game closes. If your Tank health reaches zero, the game closes. There is no facility to replenish health or ammo (other than using the "God mode" magical "A" button, which will obviously be removed for the v1.0 release. Also, I had removed the towers for the multiplayer test. The reason for this is because they are currently randomly generated in position and size. This means that each player would have a different layout of towers which is obviously wrong.

So here is a picture of a multiplayer game test. It shows the server running on the right, and each player in a small window. OK, it's not very exciting to look at I know, but it's an achievement. In this test, each player is on a seperate PC on my home network, but the test I did last night with Ragnar and Nick proved that it works just as well over the internet.

My next goals are to have dedicated spawn points for the players (they currently spawn at random locations), set up some kind of tower scheme where all players see the towers in the same places, and I need to lock the server when 4 players have joined, to stop people joining mid-game.

Of course the whole thing needs a front end, death sequences, ammo and health crates, slightly better collision detection on the tanks, more sound effects and of course, the ability to actually fire projectiles at each other...