A Full Day Of Integration

Today was the big Multiplayer Integration chat day, in which I get educated how the multiplayer side is working and Ravey gets educated about how the single player resource engine works.  From this we can create an integration plan that reduces mistakes and increases productivity, resulting in a quick turnaround for seeing multiplayer in the main engine.

It took eight hours but we covered all the bases and the plan is now in place. We will be adding some new Multiplayer Start Markers to the IDE and the ability to load in 'bolt-on' entities for the Uber Character that we will need to represent the mutliplayer characters, which will need the ability to wield all weapons and be created dynamically when the game is initialized.

I was set to integrate the new explosion into the engine but the chat has thrown up three key tasks that I need to implement so that Raveys multiplayer engine can hit the ground running.  Hopefully it will not take the whole day which means there is a good chance of explosions before 4PM on Friday!

Simon continues a pace with the ConKit and integration has already begun, which should result in the buildings being consolidated on the spot, meaning a building that takes thousands of objects to represent turns into one object comprising just a few meshes and possibly a single texture set.

Also Rick did a critique of the latest Escape Demo level, and could only find two things to wine about so progress steady on that score!  Apparently the enemies are not aggressive enough so hopefully will find some time to turn up the volume on their hate-o-meter.  If the enemy AI does not present a great battle experience, we will suffer for it when the product gets released and we have the time to get it right, so we should make it a priority.