Welcome back to this weeks State of the Game!

I have been pounding away a sounds. Do you know how many sounds it takes to do a game like MAV? I know I sure didn’t estimate it right when I started this whole thing. I have now created close to 300 sounds, prioritized over 256 levels, organized them under 125 groups, managed by 17 audio buses, and delivered to your 2 ears.

And with that, the new audio system is officially done. Also, the VFX update is done as well, with the last of the FX being the sniper ground impact particles. So go update this list!

So whats next?

There are still some minor bugs with the loading screens and the art and ‘hints’ need to be added to them, so I will be finishing that up next. From there, it was a big debate between the garage update or multiplayer, but I ultimately decided on doing the multiplayer first, as worst case scenario I could release the garage update as 0.6.1, along with a bunch of new parts.

As for the netcode, here are my goals.

1. Server stability – I believe this to be related to a lot of unhandled errors that just happen under stress loads, so I will be doing a lot of testing to find these.

2. New Master Server – This server will act in a larger capacity than the current server to allow games to have passwords and lockout players from joining an in-progress match [at least as players]

3. Client side prediction – Getting better lag prediction for players with slow connections is a must if we want to combat the hover overlords.

4. Bandwidth optimization – Let’s face it, when I wrote the netcode I had no idea what I was doing. Now, I know more about what I didn’t know, so I can learn and make it all better! Trust me!

5. Voice Chat – It’s in the game, everyone mutes it because it doesn’t work all the time and we just use teamspeak. I want to change that. Let’s get on the MAV-speak hype train.

6. Global Chat/Lobby – Ever tried looking for a game but just saw an empty server? Ever wonder how many other people are looking at that empty server? Well, lets make it so you can ask them!

Stop by the dev stream tonight to get a taste of that sweet new sound system! See you there!