jitspoe's .plan

[jitspoe]

I've been bouncing back and forth between various things lately.  I blame it on my ADD.

I'm starting to make the bot library record player input.  The plan is to have the bot navigation paths built up from actual player movement, so bots will move like players do and be able to access paths that players take.  I haven't gotten very far with that, but hopefully it will work well.

I've made a couple more HR4 textures.

I'm working on a new HR4 night sky.  I decided to have some fun with it and actually make it accurate.  I've actually downloaded a database of like 150,000+ known star coordinates, magnitudes, etc., and I'm rendering them as 3D particles.  Too bad it's too slow and memory intensive to do in realtime, because it looks kind of cool (the distant ones tend to twinkle as you move around).

There are still a few things I need to do to make it look better: Use a better particle texture, use additive blending, use the colorindexes.  I also need to make something that will take 6 screenshots at 90 degree angles to use for the skybox.

On a side note, I've discovered I suck at astronomy.  Took me way too long to figure out if I actually implemented the coordinates correctly.

I'll try to post screenshots and/or video later.

[jitspoe]

I decided to spend some time on account related issues, since there are a lot of people who have had problems.  When registering an account fails (ex: somebody already has the name registered), the failure notification is more obvious and informative.  Some people had not been reading closely and thought the account created when it didn't.

The other issue is that people get kicked for using names and clan tags that are registered to other players.  I ended up pretty much completely revamping the name system.  Now it will force strip clan tags and rename players that are using registered tags/names that don't belong to them.  It should hopefully prevent potential exploits and rename spam as well.

I've done some work on the bots as well, but like most things programming-related.  As you progress, you find 100 more things you have to do that you didn't think about.  The beginnings of a player path recording system are in.  I just have to make the bots properly follow them, handle loading and saving, map switches, navigation between paths, compression, failure cases, ...

Lots of little misc. things as well, like fixing the autobalance spam at the end of matches, adding a "showspawns" debug command (useful for mappers and map judges ).  Made the "nextmap" command actually confirm that you used it.  Fixed the delay that sometimes happens showing the scoreboard.  Fixed a crash with maps that have over 32k surfaces.  Fixed jpeg loading code to support more formats.  Tweaked min/max rate values to be higher.

I have a feeling it's still going to take a while before the next build is releasable with the new bots, and even then, they'll be in a pretty rough state, but hopefully better than the old bots at least.

[jitspoe]

I should apologize.  I haven't really been working on anything Paintball2 related recently.  Seems I have a million things I want to do in life, and I've been spread so thin lately that I haven't been able get anything done.  I've been spending a lot more time away from the computer working on things around the house and such.  I know it's not what you guys want to hear, but I figured you at least deserved an update.

Hopefully I'll get a bunch of this other stuff squared away soon so I can focus on Paintball2 again.

TODO lists only ever seem to get longer...

[jitspoe]

Just a small update:  I'm still trying to catch up on forum PM's from last year.  I was out of town for the holidays, so I couldn't really keep up, and it seems a lot of stuff has been happening recently.  It's sometimes slow going, because I have to address each one in order, to avoid missing anybody, and a lot of them require a fair amount of time to investigate.  If you're waiting on a response from me, hopefully I'll get to it soon (protip: sending me 10 forum PM's in a day isn't going to make anything go faster -- just makes for more messages to sort through.  If something is really urgent, you can PM on IRC).

On a more interesting note, in case you missed it, I posted a video in this thread demonstrating some of the bot waypoint generation and path finding.

[jitspoe]

Been a long time since I've updated this thing.  Figured I'd post a small update here.  I'm currently going through the extremely painful process of trying to migrate the CVS repository to git since SF completely dropped CVS support.  Everything about this is awful.  Once that's done, I'll be able to make updates again and make sure I have the latest contributions.  Or maybe I'll just give up and start a fresh repo.  In any case, it would be nice to finally start putting out updates again.

[jitspoe]

Wow, I sure don't post many updates.  Last time I posted an update, it was a painful migration.  This time is also a painful migration.  Trying to get everything moved to a new server because the old datacenter that dplogin.com was hosted at before is shutting down.  This has probably been the most miserable experience in development I've ever had.  Weeks of problems upon problems upon problems.  The new host has less desk space, so I've moved the forums to digitalpaint.org where the rest of the website is hosted.  Once upon a time, the website host did not support databases or something, so I was doing all the dynamic stuff on dplogin, but that has changed now.  Hopefully the old urls redirect properly and search engines don't get things all messed up.

I had to upgrade the forum version to work with the new host (let's not even get into everything that went wrong with that...), so the old theme and mods no longer work.  Sorry to those of you in poorly lit rooms.  I know it's bright!  I'll try to address it after dealing with some other things that are completely non-functional, like the feature vote.

Social Saturdays have been going well.  I guess they're Social Distancing Saturdays, now.  A great chance to test out new maps that people have been working on recently.

More Paintball2 updates are in the works, too!  I'm still working on it here and there when I can find time, though my focus is primarily working on Fist of the Forgotten, my new solo indie project, which features some of the movement mechanics you know and love in the context of a platformer.

Next update will feature some new map triggers for round/game start/end/etc. so mappers can get creative.  It will also force-cycle maps to prevent the faulty framerate exceeded messages and severe lag that happens due to floating point precision when a map has been left loaded for too long.  Lots of other misc. stuff, too.

[jitspoe]

Finally getting around to putting together Build 44.  I wanted to fix a major issue that was preventing a number of people from playing before I put it out.  Paintball2 is in a weird state right now.  It's difficult to justify putting a lot of effort into engine improvements when it would probably be better to rebuild it in a modern engine, but that would be a ton of work.  It would also probably not quite feel the same in another engine, which would turn off a lot of the oldschool players and possibly create a divide in the already small community.  I'll probably focus on gameplay things and improving the bots.  I'd like to get the bots to the point where they're on par with (and difficult to distinguish from) new to average players so they can auto-fill empty servers and maybe keep real people online longer.  Also give new players some targets to shoot that won't completely obliterate them.  I think the most important thing right now is getting some fresh blood.  The people who used to play every day now have families and such.