Hey everyone it’s time for your regularly scheduled update. This week everybody continues their work on large, multi-week projects. Flavien has made some good progress on networking and has completed his initial implementation of our new client-side prediction code. To summarize, this means that the server is able to compensate for latency so that when it looks like you shot something on your screen the server actually agrees with you. This is obviously extremely important for a solid dogfighting experience. There’s still quite a bit of work left to be done as he needs to merge his test code with the game’s code and once that’s working move onto server-side collision detection with planets - a difficult problem.

Pre-rendered image of the command center of a factory

I ran into what I’ll refer to as an unexpected patch of deep mud while working on the path rendering R&D for the UI which has slowed me down over the last few days. The paper I’m using is dependent on some big-data and scientific computing algorithms that are readily available on NVIDIA hardware but not AMD hardware. I have to convert them to be cross-platform which is time consuming, error-prone, and tedious but once I finish getting through it I’m optimistic about wrapping up the rest of the initial path rendering code soon. I’ll still have to take care of font rendering and a few other things but at least I should be able to start showing screen shots.

WIP placeholder for the space whale bobble head

On the art side Kristian continues to work on the factory which is composed of many large, complicated structures. Once Jan finishes with the space whale bobble head placeholder, which is already looking pretty good, he’ll be helping Kristian finish up the factory before they both move onto the land base. Dan is starting on the final geometry pass for the destroyer which is likely to be the first capital ship we implement in the game.

That’s it for this week, until next time!