Willy Updates

Posted by oddbob on January 24, 2007 · Lovingly Filed Under Personal 
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Oh dear!

Still working on JSWO! Man, oh man.

Stu’s made the shift over from Knet to Raknet for the network code, and the few tests we’ve had so far are showing an immense improvement in performance between the two. We’ve really got our fingers crossed that the perilous crash bug of death is finally gone for good.

Most of my end, as usual, aside from testing includes sorting out the map design. Thanks to both BobInce and Sokurah on the Retro Remakes forums, its been a lot less painful than it could be. Bob’s map has been really useful the past couple of days for editing the map. As you might notice from the map, there’s a fair few illogical leaps in the room design (I’m not including the deliberate addition of the two portal rooms here, which are primarily there to give you an advantage in some of the game modes). So I’ve set to making sure that the interlinking of the rooms makes sense more in a spatial sense.

So, with scant exception - most of the rooms tally up better with the map design Bobs constructed. This includes the removal of the “back to the bathroom” if you turn right at The Rift, the tidying up of Secret Passage and the addition of a number of different exits (The Hole With No Name Nor Point leads left to The Belfry, right to Thats Ent-Tertainment) and so on. Whilst its not as major an update map wise as 1.5 to 1.8 was, its a vast improvement to the flow of the game.

The constant map fiddling has also given me a lot more confidence to try out more risky stuff in the room design. As I’ve noted before my first designs played things incredibly safe - they were barren of nasties for the most part and looked better than they played. Aside from adding more nasties, I’ve shifted a couple around here and there to make negotiating the rooms more a matter of skill than either blind luck or a straight walkthrough. The treehouse segment of the game has seen a few tweaks, some rooms are easier and some are an iddy bit more difficult. Nothing too drastic from 1.8 though.

Theres still an entire section of the game that I’m not happy with really, and thats Rowsons original space sections. I’ve always found the JSWII “new” room design to be absolutely woeful, lacking in the spark and the character of Matt Smiths original work - huge sections of dull blue tiles with nothing to make them stand out. With the exception of the excellent Cartography Room (replaced in our version by Smila’s Control Mechanism) which mapped your progress around the game - they were, to coin a phrase… shit.

In an ideal world, I’d like to be rid of a lot of the original room designs in Space and have myself, Scott and Smila create an entirely new area - but with already lamenting the loss of the Nightmare Room due to its uselessness in a multiplayer environment I’m loathe to butcher more of the rooms unless we could really make them something special. Perhaps in a future update, we could build an entirely new map all of our own creation and take out my frustrations that way.

Jet Set Willy Online Intergrated Server BrowserA couple of other new additions courtesy of Stu - the much requested intergrated server browser makes an appearance now, which is synced with a portal Andy H (t’other Ovine) has built. So come the next build you’ll be able to view any games currently in process either on the portal or from within the game, there’s also the ability to password games if you just want a private run around with you and your friends (and you can also choose not to register the game with the portal if thats your want.).

Jet Set Willy Online Ingame ScoreboardThe second major code addition comes in the shape of the ingame ping monitor and scoreboard. By pressing TAB on the keyboard you can now call up a visual representation of peoples scores/pings/percentage of rooms visited in a nice overlay. Coupled with spying now being available in all game modes (and the really dodgy spying bug fixed) it adds an extra level of voyeurism to the game - as well as being able to see which one of the folks on your server is lagging like a laggy thing in lag town.

So, its a pretty major update and fingers crossed if all goes smoothly with this - everyone can get back to normal business for a while. Ovine have some pretty nifty plans for new games and I’ve got 2 on the back burner (as well as a tiny game for the RR mini competition which I’ve finished) as well as getting back to G-Force the instant I get a spare minute. Not that JSWO has been the main hold up with G-Force, more life and having to chuck more money and stuff at the RR server to stop it falling over every day since our traffic exploded.

STomps has done some fantastic work today to compliment the upgrade and its nippy as f00k now, need to upgrade our Wordpress installation here and on RR over the next few days now 2.1 is out then I think we can rest easy for a bit.

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