www.gltron.org
I thought: "well, clean it up a bit, make sure it compiles cleanly, and put it on a webpage", which I did. I got a few comments by E-Mail, and generall y people thought that it was nice for such a small download, but probabl y a bit too simple. Over the time, I improved it, released / announced / got feedback and rel eased again. I added textures , I received a soundtrack, a lightcycle model, better textures, tons of ideas etc. Now that you read so much about GLtron's history, you're probably curious what's it about. Well, as the name suggests, it's inspired by the movie TRON. Or more exactly, by all the games that where inspired by the movi e TRON. The goal is to force the other players to drive into a wall. I'm determined to continue working on GLtron from time to time for a whil e, at least until I can play some of you guys online!
Mac OS X news: I've made an effort to day to learn my way around ProjectB uilder, so I can build the OS X binaries myself. The good news first: I managed to build an OS X version. The bad news: It has an annoying bug (two cycles crash instantly, when you start the g ame, so all you can play is one-on-one). I haven't figured out the Proje ctBuilder Debugger yet (probably should have used gdb from the console), it keeps complaining that it can't find the source files. So, it's runn ing, it looks good, it has a bug that I haven't fixed yet (I have still no clue why it behaves differently from the win32 version). A few people have already tested it a bit, so I don't expect many proble ms.
I just need to finish the framing of the other HUD elements, and sort out some issues with different screen resolutions. Might be nice to have a second texture (or use the alpha channel) to actually have only part of the floor tiles reflective. All in all, it's coming along ok, I just need to find some more time for the project.
Announc ement mailing list, I'll let you know when the release is here. Another issue: I seem to have accidently deleted some mail recently, so i f you didn't get an answer, please try again. I'll 'high priority' all G Ltron mail I get from today until August 1, and try to have it answered ASAP. Since we postponed our honeymoon un til October (for various reasons), that leaves me with plenty of time to catch up on all the stuff that accumulated while we were preparing for the wedding. Oh, and after that is done, I might have some time to answe r all the e-mail about GLtron, and to post to some threads in the forum, and maybe, even do some coding. It also says: the r elease dates are only optimistic guesses. The current state is: Arbitrary level geometry is supported, we have (kinda) neat reflections o n the floor, and I've been thinking about how to integrate this with cus tom models. What's missing is the AI improvements (it still plays quite an evasive ga me, and only tries to cut you off when you get too close to it), the HUD , and the tools set. Without tools, it's kinda ugly to design new levels (you need to be good with a text editor). Unfortunately, I don't have much time right now to devote to GLtron. Ther e's a few things that proved to be quite a distraction.
ini file (versioning & protection against partly written files), a simplified GUI, and various other bugfixes Also, a lot of changes were done to the code, to simplify further improve ments. You can expect eg arbitrarily shaped arenas soon, or the long a waited 'escape through a hole in the arena wall' feature. If we allow playing at speeds the seem normal for local machine play, lik e even the normal speed, the internet lag will cause alot of deaths that will frustrate everyone. the guy you were riding next to all the sudden turns in front of you and a wall magically takes a bend in your path an d you are dead already... so I'm working on both minimizing lag with a u dp star network, while retaining the TCP connection to the main server. This is utterly complex and will require a rework of what we have now, w hich is plain TCP to server. LAN games will have the benefit of the minimum lag that is required for h igh speed play. What I'm going to do is to base the top speed on the wor st player ping. At that point the play should be fair to all players, an d the walls shouldn't magically appear too late to react to. Another thing I'm reworking is the initial time sychronization of clients to the server. This is difficult, I practically have to rewrite a small version of ntpd, but I have a good algorithm and am coding it. It will account for jitter and thus hopefully arrive at a time that is less than 10ms off. This is quite a large margin for the high speed games, which is why the above mentioned speed limits will help a bit. Right now all the work is done in the sdltron tree, which is a little 2D gltron. when that 2D version is ready for at least LAN games, we will st art some sort of invitation to LAN testing, and perhaps integrate the co re of the net stuff into gltron. The netplay also doesn't have the cycles variable speed motion, they all move with a line ar velocity. Due to the flimsyness of time sync, thess options are the b est for now. Perhaps we will add these features in for LAN games, but I don't see them in the internet games. STATUS: Server Tracker: 100%, Server: 75%, Client: 70% Comments are welcome, but please restrain from the "when" questions.
I pulled the OS poll now, but the results are kinda interesting. Mac OS 9 won by a fair margin, but I suspect there was some ballot stuffing goin g on. The other three operating systems (OSX, Win XP, Linux) are head to head. Conclusion: I'm going to support all four equally for the near fu ture. Status: I've been sick last week, and have been catching up with other re sponsibilities this week, but I'll give the AI a go tomorrow. I was away last week, caught a bad cold over the weekend, and spent most of this week i n bed, sneezing, coughing, a little feverish and with a pounding headach e Enough whining for now, here is the list of issues with the Beta, and how to deal with them: All platforms * Booster not working for some people. I didn't realize this was such an i ssue, I was just trying to slim down the menu a little. lua file (win32 users will find it most likely in c:\program files\gltron\scripts (open with wordpad, *not* notepad); There seems to be an issue, if I do that I crash about 1/10 times. But if I only so slightly press one of the keys first, I can't seem to reproduce the crash. Let's say this maneuver voids the warranty of your lightcycle. Mac OS X specific * MP3 playback has still some issues with some mp3 files. That's becaus e it uses SDL_sounds built-in mpglib instead of SMPEG like the other platform builds. app/Contents/MacOS/GLTron * Switching artpacks broken - that one is my screw up, sorry. lua That sums it up for 070 beta-1 for now, thanks to everyone who responded . If you find anything besides the mentioned problems here, don't hesita te to contact me. Thi s release still has a few issues, namely: * Preference files - in order for the new features to work correctly, y ou'll need to remove any previously created preference files. The computer players don't take advantage of the new acceler ation features, and hence are relatively easily beaten by a clever player. The new features in this release include: * Turbo (already present in the previously only for win32 released 070 alpha-1). Press and hold down the turbo key (default 'e') to accelerate for a limited amount of time (your turbo recharges when you release the key). The engine noise should give you a clue how fast you're going. But watch out, they might try to cut you off while you're closing in. This feature isn't enabled by default, but you can change that in the Game -> Game Rules -> Game Type menu. As always, your feedback is very much appreciated and essentila for me to successfully continue to develop this game. Let me know if you like/hat e the new features (the more adventurous of you might even want to tweak the settings in the preferences files), and of course let me know if yo u find bugs.
Secondly: testing the new codebase, since I made quite a few changes under the hood. That is, I wa...
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