Current development: towards a public alpha

[Ingar]

As our IRC regulars have noticed, Project::OSiRiON has been far less inactive than the website would have you suspect. This week, I comitted the first step towards ingame weapons to the subversion repository. I've wanted to have something out before the end of the year but in all honesty, I don't think that's feasable. All this weaponry is a complicated piece of magik code, and a rewrite of particle systems will be required to make it look fancy (right now, a ship just shoots small balls).

That said, it can't be denied that the current download is ancient and needs to be updated. The project roadmap on the tracker has 0.2.2 before Eve of Armageddon, but by pushing weapons forward, I've messed up the timetable. (Eve of Armageddon is what I dubbed the alpha). I'll address the roadmap with the release of 0.2.2.

Short-term I'd like to finish weapons: it needs mountable weapons, client-server exchange of weapon slot configurations, particles to make it look fancy, and, most important, ship damage. If I do it right, I can reduce weapon-releated network chatter to a minimum and handle the graphics completely client-side. Currrently, projectiles are standard entities and a large firefight will probably clog the intertubes.

We walk slowly, like giants among the stars.

[Ingar]

Something I was just thinking about: it might be wise to implement admin commands. For a public alpha, the server would obviously have to run with cheats disabled. On the other hand, it might be wise to have a few commands like goto, teleport, kick, ban etc available for players with admin status. Admins should be able to apply those commands to other players.

Unstuck is something we'll definetly need

[Thorn]

Guid authentication ->

Goto/Jump become available.
Make Give available to admins? might be useful for public events
Mute
Kick
Ban

"Alert" - available to everyone. Informs all admins currently on the server and highlights everyone on an IRC channel?

[Ingar]

Guid authentication ->

Goto/Jump become available.
Make Give available to admins? might be useful for public events
Mute
Kick
Ban

"Alert" - available to everyone. Informs all admins currently on the server and highlights everyone on an IRC channel?

I'd make give available to admins and make it so they can give stuff to players: give thorn credits 10000
Some kind of generic teleport command seems practical as well: teleport ingar thorn teleports Thorn to me.

Instead of alert, an admin chat channel ? Hooks to IRC could be implemented later as they might be interesting for general chat as well.

[Ingar]

A year has passed, no alpha yet, but some interesting things have happened.

Short-term I'd like to finish weapons: it needs mountable weapons, client-server exchange of weapon slot configurations, particles to make it look fancy, and, most important, ship damage. If I do it right, I can reduce weapon-releated network chatter to a minimum and handle the graphics completely client-side. Currrently, projectiles are standard entities and a large firefight will probably clog the intertubes.

Most of this works now. I took a shortcut by skipping the slot configuration, but weapons are mostly operational,
and network overload turned out far better than I'd hoped for. The new particle engine seems do produce acceptable results as well.

The most exiting development as of late are the NPCs: I had a revelation on how implement the autopilot,
and from there the code started to flow like water. I already had tons of laughs with the stupid AI,
and a number of quite challenging dogfights. Explosion sound was just the icing of the cake,
I was even surprised to hear it yesterday, after I had forgotten I had implemented it.

In the meanwhile, I also had a lot of time to think about the alpha. Unlike other projects,
I'd like the alpha to be more than something that gets tossed as this might be interesting in the future.
The alpha should attract interest, but must have enough to offer to make hardcore fans stick around.
It goes without saying that, until then, I'll keep on offering new development builds.

For the near future I'd like to concentrate on two things. First if all, keep on building the universe:
create skies for the Dagon systems, add the Southern Rim, add factions, bases and patrols. As far as programming
is concerned I still want a decent options menu: players should be able to do basic configuration
without using the console (or reading the manual), the inventory should be made less confusing, and,
in networked games, the map needs infrastructure to show zones other than the current one.

The recent host move also broke the custom wiki theme, that's something that will need to be addressed as well.