it is now more than a month ago since I put something on the news category. The reason is that I am working on lots and lots of backend stuff which is not that fancy to show off. If you are watching the Pixel Tennis Progress topic, you already saw some "//2018xxxx" entries which pointed out some new things. All of them are quite relevant, but were not that important for a dedicated news.
As it is about time to keep you updated, I am going to summarize the latest development of Pixel Tennis.
Gameserver
The most basic version of a gameserver is "already" finished. It can take care of player logins and matchmaking (lobby/room system). As stated in the FAQ, your forum account will serve as your login. You can have more than one character assigned to your account in Milestone 1 (M1).
- Pixel-Tennis-Preview-Login-20180406.png (21.37 KiB) Viewed 45546 times
User interface
Finally, there is something like a main menu where players can navigate through. It is compatible with 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratio. The screenshot below shows the lobby where you can list, create and join rooms created by players. There is also a way to text-chat with all players waiting in the lobby, although it is not fully functional right now.
- Pixel-Tennis-Preview-Lobby-20180406.png (35.59 KiB) Viewed 45546 times
The UI for a player room is also more or less functional. Switching slots is working and there is one room master which can initiate a match when everyone is ready. The "Tic Tacs" are just dummies for the non-existing character models.
- Pixel-Tennis-Preview-Room-20180406.png (49.1 KiB) Viewed 45546 times
I think you know that, but I still like to point it out. Everything shown in this topic is still in a very early stage and most likely to change in the future. Many functions are still missing or in a "just working somehow" state :). At least, this is an indicator for you to see in which direction the game will develop.
Arena Court visual update
Thanks to matt090, I was able to upgrade the visuals of Pixel Tennis' copy cat arena court. The high resolution net post wings and the decorated court marks really look nice!
- Pixel-Tennis-Preview-Arena-20180406.jpg (146.27 KiB) Viewed 45546 times
Waiting room music
A very big "thanks" also goes to our user Hibris who created a music track for Pixel Tennis. He made it up from the scratch and also provided me several variations including a faster version. When I listened to it for the first time, I got hit by a nostalgia flash - dunno why... :)
The full track will definitely appear in M1!
Internal live tests
With the changes mentioned above, there was an early internal live test in the past week where the gameserver was booted up on my external hosted Linux machine. Together with Hibris, we were able to create a match and play against each other online via peer to peer.
In general, this is a great progress, but it also shows me, that there are still many issues like balancing and lag compensation I need to resolve before a match actually makes fun.
That's it for now. I guess, the next [devblog] update will take a while as there is a huge requirement on backend work including network communication. I will keep the Pixel Tennis Progress topic updated from time to time, so check it out every week or so.
As always, this project heavily relies on your feedback, so feel free to comment on everything you want. This time, I am also very interested in your opinion on matt090's and Hibris' contributions!
. Is it working/ planned to work full P2P with one of the player hosting the match?
I could hand in a displacement to Wong however.
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