Now you can grab a gamepad and play against one of your friends on the same screen. It was something I've always
wanted to add to Vektor Prix, but the amount of time it would take to adapt the engine properly wasn't worth it.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could just run two instances of the game, resize them,
and connect to eachother through multiplayer automatically.
So I went that route, all that was left to do was polish the transitions and fix the random bugs that pop up from
doing something so nonstandard. The only issue left is that Fraps is unable to capture both screens on Windows 8,
which means I had to use other tools and deal with a big reduction in recorded video quality. But I'm happy to
report that the feature works!
Note: I had no one around to play as player 2 when I recorded these videos just now.
As for other changes: I've fixed the menu transitions so they run at a constant speed, the heads up display resizes
itself properly for skinny windows, I've slowed down the tutorial bots, fixed resolution options, and fixed a bunch
of misc multiplayer bugs.
This past couple of weeks I've been doing some required final touches.
The first thing I did was zoom the camera out a bit so it is easier to see your surroundings. The camera's zoom
amount is adjustable in the options: zooming in will give you better performance, but zooming out will let you see
a lot more.
I feel like the new camera capabilities will make the game a bit easier to play. I also noticed that people had a
tough time knowing which vehicle was theirs when the race started, so now all of the enemies fade in at the
starting line. This makes self-identification extremely easy.
I've finished implementing the final level's unlockables, and therefore the game is beatable and 'complete'. I
still have more polish and bugfixes to attend to, but it's a great feeling getting the game to this stage.
The past few weeks I've made a ton of smaller changes as well, such as making the bots more intelligent in close
quarters combat, I made the vehicle speed adjustable for custom games, a yolo round where only bots are alive is
now skippable (both online and offline), I fixed the force that explosions give vehicles, and adjusted a bunch of
particle effects.
This past week I've been focusing on the final level and adjustments to make the game easier in easy mode.
For the final level, I've finally finished all of the dialog as well as the mission structure. I have to finish a
couple of the final unlockables, and a bit of polish left to do for the final level, but it is now playable and
beatable. Which is pretty exciting for me, since the last chunk of content is finished. Which means it's polish and
bugfixing time from here on out.
The second thing I've been focusing on is trying to make the game easier to get into. I've noticed a few things
from watching new playtesters and now I'm trying to adjust the game accordingly. The first big change was the speed
of the vehicles during a race, it seems like things are just moving too quick for someone starting out. Now easy,
medium, and hard modes all have slightly different speeds.
I've also noticed how discouraging it can be to fall far behind in easy mode. So now bots will miss a turn
sometimes, crash into walls, and take a worse route if they're in front of the player in easy mode. I've also upped
the damage that a player deals to easy bots.
Happy New Year! The past week I've been focusing on polishing online multiplayer and preparing a presskit to send
out to journalists. The presskit contains videos, WebMs, screenshots, and lots of information. It took me two full
days of work to prepare. If you are a game journalist, or know one that might be interested, please contact me.
I've changed how bots spawn in multiplayer servers. I added a 'minimum players' setting. Let's say it's set to 5,
and there is one person in the game: 4 bots would be spawned. If another player enters, one bot will exit. If a
player exits, a bot will enter. And if there are five clients connected, no bots will spawn. This allows for a more
consistent online experience.
I've improved a few other online things as well, such as UDP disconnection detection, max laps and max kills are
settable, no more slight vehicle drift when you are idle, the timing of certain things has been tweaked for
networking reasons.
There have been a ton of small changes too, such as adding lights to the tutorial levels, adding guide arrows for
the figure eight level, adding different arrows to the final level, adding the antagonist to the final level as
well as coding up a way for him to address the player before returning to his original location.
The past week I've been focusing on a few things. First of all I remixed most of the sound files and I added in
basic sound panning. So now sounds left of center are louder in the left speaker and vice versa. Was a really
simple thing to add, only took a few minutes, and was long overdue.
The next thing I focused on was the final boss battle. I have the basic 'mission' programmed now, and the new
entities required to pull it off have been polished a bit more. I still have quite a bit of work left to do on the
final level, but it is at least playable now.
The third area that I focused on was multiplayer. It had been awhile since I tested online with more than two
people, and was pretty upset to learn that something broke in the meantime. The clients were not syncing position
with one another. I dug into the code and soon discovered that I left out a single colon in the serialization code.
I added the colon back in and everything was operational.
I went on to polish multiplayer some more. I did a lot of testing with a packet tampering program called Clumsy
(which I strongly recommend to anyone doing online multiplayer gamedev). The tool unearthed a few bugs that I
hadn't noticed, bugs which were quickly fixed.
As for other news, Vektor Prix is entering it's second week on greenlight and needs all the support it can get.
Votes, tweets, hype, anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.
The past week I've been working on extra polish. It started out with a small glow effect that I created, I was
pretty happy with it and after applying it to a ton of things I decided to focus on lighting.
I created a relatively simple lighting system and attached it to the in-game lamp models. Then I added a nice glow
effect at the source of the light and repositioned the lamps on every level. By tinting lamps slightly different
colors, I'm able to make different parts of a level stand out.
The lights are dynamic as well. I'm able to destroy them (or any other detail object around the level). I know it's
a small detail, but I always enjoyed being able to shoot the lights out in certain games. Lights are attached to
moving objects as well, vehicles firing weapons, missiles, mines, there are a lot of lights now.
There have been a ton of other changes as well, small things like rebalancing easy mode to actually be easy again,
adding additional display settings, some small progress on the final level, as well as a bucket of bugfixes.
As for other news, I've finally set up a Greenlight page for Vektor Prix! I set it up a few days ago, so it's still
brand new and could really use your votes, tweets, hype, anything really.