On Week 11
<i>This post was originally made by <b>skyjake</b> on the dengDevs blog. It was posted under the category: Blog.</i>
<strong>skyjake:</strong>
<ul>
<li>Debugging the network games continued this week. It seems that the last time I was working on the network code, a number of changes were began but never finished. For instance, there is a mechanism that allows clients to request certain actions to occur (like player attack), but it lacked such essential actions like requesting a weapon change. So, the work goes rather beyond simple debugging and into the realm of completing unfinished stuff. For example, what is completely missing is a proper spline-based movement path interpolator for visualising the movement of remote players based on their recent coordinates and inertia.</li>
<li>Although I didn't have too much time to spend on it, progress did occur: the game session is no longer aborted due to illegal deltas, and the client is able to change weapons and actually attack enemies successfully.</li>
<li>A significant portion of my time was spent on working on the document processor Amethyst. I have a vision that it will allow us to maintain a high-quality set of offline user guide/readme type documentation for all the supported platforms in all required formats (plain/rich text, Mediawiki, and Unix manual page) with very little effort.</li>
<li>Next week I expect my time to be split between developing the multiplayer code and working on Amethyst and the documentation preparations.</li>
</ul>
<strong>danij:</strong>
<ul>
<li>Again this week my focus has been on ringzero and texture management. After a couple of aborted attempts at merging Texture Atlases earlier in the week, I came to realize that a new approach was needed. The new code being too revolutionary to simply drop-in to the present architecture; I'm now refactoring-to/merging-in a few distinct concepts/features at a time.</li>
<li>Although atlases are still on the cutting-room floor, there has been some real progress made in the process. Texture variant specifications are now shared among all textures, improving GL-texture sharing and reducing their memory footprint greatly. All texture resource names/paths throughout the engine and public API standardized using URI representation. Clean up and naming convention standardization for associated object hierarchies.</li>
<li>Over the coming week I intend to continue with the texture management work.</li>
</ul>
<strong>skyjake:</strong>
<ul>
<li>Debugging the network games continued this week. It seems that the last time I was working on the network code, a number of changes were began but never finished. For instance, there is a mechanism that allows clients to request certain actions to occur (like player attack), but it lacked such essential actions like requesting a weapon change. So, the work goes rather beyond simple debugging and into the realm of completing unfinished stuff. For example, what is completely missing is a proper spline-based movement path interpolator for visualising the movement of remote players based on their recent coordinates and inertia.</li>
<li>Although I didn't have too much time to spend on it, progress did occur: the game session is no longer aborted due to illegal deltas, and the client is able to change weapons and actually attack enemies successfully.</li>
<li>A significant portion of my time was spent on working on the document processor Amethyst. I have a vision that it will allow us to maintain a high-quality set of offline user guide/readme type documentation for all the supported platforms in all required formats (plain/rich text, Mediawiki, and Unix manual page) with very little effort.</li>
<li>Next week I expect my time to be split between developing the multiplayer code and working on Amethyst and the documentation preparations.</li>
</ul>
<strong>danij:</strong>
<ul>
<li>Again this week my focus has been on ringzero and texture management. After a couple of aborted attempts at merging Texture Atlases earlier in the week, I came to realize that a new approach was needed. The new code being too revolutionary to simply drop-in to the present architecture; I'm now refactoring-to/merging-in a few distinct concepts/features at a time.</li>
<li>Although atlases are still on the cutting-room floor, there has been some real progress made in the process. Texture variant specifications are now shared among all textures, improving GL-texture sharing and reducing their memory footprint greatly. All texture resource names/paths throughout the engine and public API standardized using URI representation. Clean up and naming convention standardization for associated object hierarchies.</li>
<li>Over the coming week I intend to continue with the texture management work.</li>
</ul>