I finally got my act together and put together a highlight video from last week’s Capture the Flag test.
I will release Alpha 0.8.3 tomorrow, then I’ll start working on a new map!
Dear Piinecone,
Woohoo! I am so excited to see your game developing!
Physics-based Multiplayer Action, yaaay!
This actually happens to me a lot too!
But its better to spend days on something only to axe it, so you learn from actually seeing the gameplay result, and have it not ruin your game forever 
Gotta keep to the Higher Vision!
Rama
Thanks Rama! I couldn’t agree more. It was fun to build the helicopters, fun to play around with them, and great to get them out of the game. Nice to get it all out of my system 
I’ve spent the past few days working on a new CTF map. I really wanted to do a snowy forest. It’s still very much a work in progress, but here are a few screenshots:
Here is a video of my brother and I messing around in the snow level. Hard to say if it will be fun - it still needs to be playtested - but it’s cool to see how the visual effects affect the game feel despite the vehicle physics remaining unchanged by the environment.
Hi,
Looking good games although I have not tried it yet… One question: Is it hard to implement vehicle networking code? I intend to go coding this part next week… so any hint would be helpful…
Thanks! You get replicated vehicle movement with client-side prediction for free with Unreal Engine 4. Adding special moves that affect the physics of the vehicles requires some work. Feel free to ask me anything if you get stuck, and hopefully I can be helpful.
Here’s a rendering of some design work my brother has been doing.
I’ve been working on a little Redwood grove today for a level. Here’s a screenshot from the grove and a video of me pushing a redwood tree over on … myself.
Hey man, this looks great! Keep it up
From watching the videos though, it seems like the multiplayer physics still needs some smoothing - being hit before you ‘see’ the target actually being hit, for example.
Hey , thanks!
I wonder if you’re seeing collision detection errors or high latency projectile movement errors. I’ve done some work to make physics projectile movement in higher latency situations passable, but I still notice some correction if my ping is high enough. Are you noticing some weird projectile movement? I made some improvements for the latest build but haven’t released it yet.
The other possibility is the colliders: I have overlap-only colliders that surround the vehicle which detect approaching projectiles and swap the physics asset (in preparation for imminent explosion). I do this to prevent the actual velocity-affecting “hit” event from taking place, because I want the player to feel like their shot (or vehicle) went right through their opponent. I wonder if that’s the source of the errors you’re seeing - you can nick the corner of a bounding box (and not touch the vehicle) and destroy the pawn. Maybe you could point me to a specific clip so I can take a look?
I have a plan for doing away with the bugs from those overlap boxes, sounds like I should get into that soon!
I started implementing a jump planning and adaptive landing technique today. As it stands, jumping is pretty useless since you rarely land well, and so you become a sitting (or tumbling) duck. As a result, players don’t use the jump too often even though it can open up gameplay. Here’s a clip of some self-correcting jumps:
Fixed up the planning algorithm so it’s purely physics-driven - no rotation interpolation necessary to smooth out the landing.
Ahh, sorry I didn’t see this sooner!
It’s been a bit too long for me to remember which clip I was talking about, sorry 
I’ll have a watch when I have time and might notice something.
This looks cool, although there’s something ‘off’ about it - maybe it’s too slow?
I’d be interested in hearing what you mean by ‘planning algorithm’. To me that refers to the field of AI Planners, and I can’t imagine how that would be applicable (unless you’re doing some seriously crazy **** ).
EDIT: You and a couple of the other guys (AusPaco, etc) should definitely come hang out on #unrealengine. We’re a friendly bunch and I need more people online when I’m at work 
these game just looks like its going to be tons of fun ^0^
Just tried to play in the office - can I not host a local game? 
When your server isn’t up it seems like I can’t play.
Do you think perhaps the gravity is too floaty? I have been considering increasing it a touch. I also wonder if it could be that the adjustments to angular velocity don’t start occurring until after you take off, and it might look better and more natural if it seems like your launch is already considering your landing. I also think that introducing a bit of noise to the angular velocity adjustment might help the landings and adjustments look slightly imperfect and therefore a bit more natural. What do you think?
Regarding AI Planners, this is much, much simpler than that. “Planned landings” just refers to the vehicle’s ability to identify when and where it’s going to land, and an ideal rotation delta necessary for a smooth landing. Nothing too fancy here!
I’ll start hanging out in IRC again.
Servers were down for you? My monitoring tools are lying to me (or I guess I’m lying to them). The dedicated servers should always be up, though I only put in some monitoring and upkeep last week so it’s possible you tried before then.
If you grabbed the latest build from www.kingofkalimpong.com then you should be able to play on the dedicated server, or run a linux dedicated server. I should ship a win64 server build too.
I actually haven’t tried a game as a listen server – is that what you tried? I should make that work, too. As you can tell, I have a lot of buttoning up to do!
Thanks!
I think that could be a good change - it’s definitely too floaty and smooth at the moment.
Regarding the server play - I tried driving into the pads at the start and hitting E. I see the ‘open xxx’ command, and then I’m back at the start again. I can do this infinitely and never actually see any gameplay. I must be crazy - how do I run a server? There’s no options in-game and no server binary.