Working on the camera- finally managed to separate camera from server control, allowing smooth client-side animation and hopefully removing the ‘judder’ that some users were experiencing. Improvements of the in-battle GUIs (thanks Jim). Spent quite some time removing client/server physics drift — realised for example that Torque normally only invokes onCollision callbacks on the server, whereas we need it on client too; other problems were due to compression/rounding errors when sending commands from client to server. Spent lots more time with collision resolution — there are serious bugs in the method used by Torque for rigid body dynamics, so I had to patch together a reasonable replacement. Also had to synchronise the order of object simulation on client & server, because otherwise collisions would not turn out to be the same and we would be back in a drift situation. These problems of drift wouldn’t really be noticed in a real-time game where the client nudges the objects slowly back to position over a period of a second or two, but you really notice it when those objects are otherwise not moving!

Got basic waypoint-based racing AI working. Here we have a set of bots racing around the track, with speeds and collisions being logged in the database.

[This is an historical blog post which used to live on my Darkwind website]

Continued working on back-end stuff and GUIs for the town buildings (race track, mechanic, tavern). The database has now gone live so our testers have permanent characters now, who will soon start to gain skills.

Our first attempt at a database-driven town session/race was destroyed by rampant connection spawning causing the database to fall over repeatedly (… ok, a bug!) Sorry to the testers! But we had a successful test session the next day once the problem was fixed.

[This is an historical blog post which used to live on my Darkwind website]

Obtained a set of about 18000 surnames and 5500 first names, which have been imported into the database and tidied up. I also have the frequencies of occurrence, so ‘John’ will account for over 3% of all males while ‘Alfonsus’ only 0.001%. Also working on back-end stuff: login server, mission server spawner, script patching and versioning system.

I also started work on the Somerset town interface — each of the named buildings has a specific set of functions and associated 2D interface which pops up when you click on it — for example, the racetrack is where you sign up for races and choose the exact cars/drivers/gunners that you want to enter into a specific event.

[This is an historical blog post which used to live on my Darkwind website]