This week I’ve been looking at how we can get the networking to work and started working on a start menu so that we can get the different clients to connect to eachother. To test this and to get that to work I started working on a chat room. Right now it’s just a basic chat room so that everyone can talk to each other. It now works, it doesn’t look that good however but it’s just a temporary interface.

chatscreen

 

As you can see I’m able to communicate through a server by sending message and you get a notification that someone has joined the channel. All of this however is more or less based on a pre-existing chat. I have changed that you don’t write in a nickname in the chat window and select that in the start menu instead. Reason is to open up for a login system at some point. The start menu doesn’t have all the functionality as it should have, but for the alpha it’s okay, we just need a way to sort the different users apart and have them select the role they want to play. Then we need to sort some kind of priority out so that if 3 people have selected the same role, the one who have the lowest or highest ID gets the role they have selected. Ideally it should be locked, but for the alpha this is not something we want to do. The main focus right now is to get an alpha in a playable state so that we can test the game and modify scale and the feeling of the game.

Anyway, going back to what I’ve been doing, I’m currently looking into how to send custom packets to the server, so that the client can interpret the package received, handle the package and then say that you’re ready or not. Once 4 players are ready the game should start. After that we need to have a way to communicate with the other computers, knowing if the others have loaded the game or not. I’m not sure how to solve this however, in the beginning however what we want to do is to add a timer for when the game starts, so that each client gets into the playing scene, then the game starts after 2 minutes, or if we have a signal that all clients have joined and are ready to play, the timer is shortened to 30 seconds or so. That’s what I want to look into for next week however, this week I need to find a way to be able to send instructions to the other clients, so that we know when we have 4 players ready and get the right scene loaded.

Other than that the game is moving forward, faster than we thought it would at the start, we hope that by the end of next week we will be able to put something together and have something playable, that resembles a moba. Then we need to add the commander interface and actions. Unity is easy to work with, but it takes a little transition to understand all the concepts and I’m still in the learning stage, so coding takes a bit longer than I’m used to.

Tata for now, and next week I’ll hopefully be able to tell you a success story about how we were able to load a level once 4 players are ready.