So, yeah, I have decided to participate in the GAMEJAM that is being held this month. The Famicase cover I’ve selected is this one:
As I was interested in trying out our new multiplayer-tech I thought these four characters could be the perfect foundation. I have a very brief idea of what the game should be like and I would say that right now it would be best compared to Bomberman… well, we’ll see. I will stream some of the dev over at LiveCoding.tv as I find time.
Let the jam begin!
Ok, so the dev has started and I have stumbled upon several problems already 
As I’ve never coded fast paced network multiplayer before I got much to learn. Also not using UDP but TCP instead makes it harder and I need to be smarter in the way I predict actions and compensate for latency.
So. Here is what I try to accomplish:
Having a player running in a grid-based dungeon. I want the player to walk until he snaps on the center of the grid. Otherwise it would be superhard to change direction as the passage is just as narrow as the player.
Now meanwhile having that snapping I want the player to be able at any time move to opposite direction (so we dont have to wait for it to snap).
After some struggle I manage to get this and it felt like intuitive controls.
Now trying to simulate this over network seems harder.
I figured that if I created one local player and one that listened to what my local player did I would be able to see exactly how big difference the gameplay would be.
This is what it looks like right now. The normal soldier is the local player I control and the purple “ghost” is what it is interpreted as when sending data to the server in london and back to stockholm.
Problems as you can see is of course the changes of direction.
I guess some of that teleporting I have to live with as it is tcp and I guess I will get rid of that grid-snapping thing and instead try some “cut corner” style of control like the classic bomberman.
Oh yeah. The art is placeholder. Not done by me. Just needed something to play animations with.
Not much has happened except now using multiple runtimes and created a small lobby.
It do stutters way to much with 4p so I will probably need to look for an udp solution anyway. Been looking into Photonengine (a third party networking engine) and might be able to try it out. Meanwhile waiting for that to be solved (in discussion with them) I will start working on the game mechanics for one player.
Maybe use dead reckoning + cell based path finding for smoother appearing movement?
Right now, dead reckoning is used but I don’t see how any pathfinding would be suitable as the controllers will be only steering and not “click the destination tile”.
Or do you have something in mind?
What I mean is for smoothing the movement - only predict as far in terms of chunks as they have input for. It looks like there is some position jumping going on. Have an AI try to get to where the player is going to and don’t use the raw input. Only jump if the distance is crazy different. What matters is that for each person playing the game that other player movement looks smooth. Every game fakes this, and the ones that don’t do not look smooth.
Nice talks about netcode
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First-Networking