Iceball Project

[HeadHunter]

I've randomly joined rakiru's server and saw Mat^2 playing in it.

Ask him if he likes it and for his opinion on Jagex.

After I joined he instantly left...

[TB_]

how was the gaming night? I couldn't attend it, unfortunately.

[rakiru]

Sadly, neither could most of the devs, in the end. It was nice to play against people I hadn't played before though, and we found a few new bugs, which is good.

[HoboHob]

I wasn't able to make it either.

[GreaseMonkey]

Yeah, and I think all of the clearly defined bugs are fixed, including the NAMES LIST BUG.

mat^2 was doing pretty well, actually :)
I'm looking at the footage I took, his two main critiques were 1. we should use UDP instead of TCP (he suggested enet), and 2. the water sounds are a bit crap (they're slowed down versions of the normal walk sounds after all).

Not necessarily. Multicore support has just been added, but it's disabled by default.

Actually, multicore is enabled, but there is a part I was trying to parallelise which has been disabled due to the parallelised version being too damn slow. Multicore is used for the cubemap-to-screen part.

[Sonarpulse]

Are you considering using enet then? this would be an excellent time to document engineer the existing protocol too. :D

[rakiru]

Oh, my bad. I must've misread your release/commit message or whatever.

I've been wanting to use UDP since the start, but there's been more important matters to focus on. I think now might be a good time to discuss the networking. BR and I have talked briefly before about how the networking code should be rewritten to make it easier for mods to add extra packets and stuff.

[Sonarpulse]

That sounds like a good idea. As always, I think backwards compatability with pyspades should be a crucial step in smoothing out iceball's adaption. If that can be done entirely in Lua, all the better.

[ThisFrickinSite]

That sounds like a good idea. As always, I think backwards compatability with pyspades should be a crucial step in smoothing out iceball's adaption. If that can be done entirely in Lua, all the better.

Sounds like more work than it would be worth. Converting the scripts would probably be easier than that. plus it would eventually implement limitations in one way or another.

[Handles]

I dont know wether it could all be done in Lua but i personally doubt it.

[Sonarpulse]

If we don't do backwards compatability, we have to convince all the users to download a new game, and the server owers to run a new server. This will be very hard. The benifts of backwards compatability are:

1. People can adapt iceball at their own rate. We need no "critical mass" for it to take off. The choice is simply play AoS servers if they are more populated, or play iceball servers for more features.
2. We can offer compatability with multiple versions of AoS, which will dovetail with Stack's upcoming tool to install multiple versions. This will suport 0.76, and keep iceball on par vs alpha clients.
3. More people playing iceball while it's still incomplete--and certainly doesn't have critical mass as explained in 1---means more people testing it.
4. non-windows people get some wholly better than AoS+wine even when iceball isn't fully polished.
5. Yes, existing scripts will work, though i agree that native iceball should support everything pysnip does now.

1 is the real killer feature. Again It's just not realistic that people will migrate to iceball en masse at somepoint; not everybody reads the forums.

[HeadHunter]

No offense but the Block collapsing sound sounds like the headcrab jump sound from Half-Life.

[rakiru]

@HeadHunter: Feel free to create new sounds.

@Sonarpulse: The main problem with making an Iceball client that can connect to Ace of Spades servers (other than writing the actual client code) is we'll need to add some way of running a local game rather than grabbing the game files from the server. Either that or write a plugin for pyspades that sends the necessary files to Iceball clients (which would probably be better as it would be harder to write hacks then).

[Sonarpulse]

I guess you could even try to teach pyspades iceball's protocol to take that idea to the extreme. That would probably put extra load on the server though.

I would hack it in client side (people might want multiplayer without the massive "eval" too for security reasons) as that should mean more rapid developement, and then properly do it as you said, just having pysnip drop of the lua code and then go back to bussiness as usual. This will also make it easier to iceball to support multiple versions of AoS, as whatever need to be done client side will probably be enough for all versions of the protocol, and pysnip can take care of the slight balance differences.

In any event, getting people to use a new version of pysnip is still easier than getting them to use new server software altogether.

[Vucgy]

Here some bugs , and other things.
1. When a grenade is blocked(a block putted on it) it destroys just the one block o_O
2. The player can pass trough one block. The one shooting hole in bunker walls .
3. Sometimes when digging a tunnel , the players just get warped up for 1,2 blocks and gets blocked.
4. The players can go sometimes trough walls o_O
6. Players can go like half in into blocks , very very irritating.
7. Sometimes some blocks are invisible

Spoiler:

Here some thing that are not bugs but are annoying.
1. The 4 grenades , Just as known in AoS .75 They have a to big griefing power.
2. The grenades can easily be spammed and re-filled via tent , making big holes at spawn that are hell annoying.
3. The grenades should have larger throw range , now its like 1/3 of the AOS grenade
4. The player models!!! Should be like in AOS please remove that ugly , blocky , 2d , shit , simpson , incest
5. Remove the drunken-cam it so irritating to dig with it , and to aim down cause as more you aim down your sensitivity goes f*** 100x up so digging down is a hell pain in the arse. Or at least make it Disabled as deafult
6. Why is there drunken cam when Aos proved that its of no good for a game.