What's up this week?

Thanks for the update Neutrino!

Whilst I assumed as much it is still awesome to hear that.

Yep. Time for me to try and figure out what that means. On the plus side I get the feeling I'm going to be learning quite a lot following the development of this game.

I'm glad it's not just me who understood absolutely none of that.

He basically said, any client who has to render the item, will recieve the information on what physics variables started the item's movement. Thus, every client who has to render it (clients where the item is even on, some clients wont be rendering it because its out of their view or something) will also recieve the initial trajectory starter so the game paths it for them yet it should path it the same on everyones game because the same game is doing the pathing.

Or so I think.

That makes sense trophy, but it's kind of strange when you're talking about replication, no? Or maybe Neutrino meant replication in the sense of; graphics/physics replication on different client. Then yes that makes sense. However, what alternatives would you consider, beyond "having a client only 'replicate' what it needs to replicate? That just sounds like common sense to me.

I thought - and maybe i'm wrong here - that he was talking about replication in the sense of state replication for the purpose of saving games/seeds. But your explanation makes more sense, and it would go well with physics/graphics replication.

Unrelated to the current disscussion, but are reward emails coming soon? The Update on the 28th said "next week".

Nice to here your all keeping busy! sounds excited .

I'm still concentrating heavily on terrain, still mostly geometry at the moment. Steve continues to push on the different terrain types. WJ has started working on coding a UI prototype. Think of it as a wireframe UI but one that is functional (it's already surprisingly functional). William is working on replication/server stuff.

So far our idea of using curves to represent network replication seems to be working ok. The idea here is that every property that has to be replicated (e.g. position, velocity, aiming at etc) is simply represented as a curve. When a network client sees a unit all it gets is the curve for it's various properties which it then maps to actual graphics on the screen. Rendering a particular frame is as simple as interpolating all of the curves at the current time (t). Of course this implies you might be able to sample t in the past or move it backwards which gives us things like instant replays. As I alluded to in another thread the "save game" is simply a marker for time t within the replay. By allowing the client replay of the curves at time t to be injected into the sim we get a "load game". Technically this would allow splitting off a game from any point in a replay.

Awesome to hear that do many parts are already underway, I'd be interested to see what the UI looks like once it is ready for display.

Thanks for explaining it! I'm still no programmer but I understand the concept if not the specifics. really neat to see you are intending for it to work for replays and save games.

I'd never thought of that, but it's a truly awesome idea, especially against an AI. Play against a very difficult opponent, lose, then go back and watch where you went wrong, and fix it.

Or like when playing the SupCom singleplayer campaign for the first time, save every 10 minutes because you never knew what was going to happen next. Only that you don't need to save the game now because you can just continue from every point in the replay without having to "replay the replay".

Something good just happened. I'll post what in a few days.

You guys found a potential assistant Modeller on the forums? :lol:

Oh Oh Oh! Is the Pledge Fulfillment site almost done?!

The suspense is going to eat at me. But woop!

Thanks a lot Neutrino for providing feedback on a regular basis while you must be just coding during night and days :lol:
I'm allways impressed how veteran coders can bring to life so fast a working proof of concept for ideas.
I really appreciate the way you communicate Neutrino, this remove the frustration of having to wait for playing PA.
Thanks again.

I love the curve concept! It's such a simple, elegant solution. I'm guessing it's something like interpolating a spline, with the points being determined by player decisions and the rest of the curve being determined by PA's simulated nature. (Or I could be thinking in the wrong direction here.)
In any case, it's a method I find very interesting . . .

Here, we see an example of a developer trolling his community. Everyone watch, as over the next few days, the community will watch with baited-breath for more news.


And you all just read that in his voice.

Words can't describe my excitement. So I won't bother trying.

i put forth that the word "Squeeeeee" should be adopted as an appropriate adjective for this situation

That... makes so much sense to me now. I think. So the cogs of the game could essentially be thought of as a line graph with time as the X-axis, many lines/curves representing individual events, and by taking any point on the X-axis and interpolating through all the curves, a graphical frame for that time point can be generated based on the Y-scale information? With the whole graph being drawn throughout a game and saved in real time.

If the above is how it works then this is really neat. The progress you're making already is amazing, I'd assumed some of these challenges (replays for instance) would be whole separate coding challenges needing thousands of man hours.

Look forward to hearing about the "something good"!

you found the bed again? ;D