Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Improved Spawning Code Completed

During our current development we had had an issue with one of the spawn locations on the test map where the games code would fail to find a valid location to spawn the players of that particular team and would spit them out in the middle of the map way up in the air. This provided for a spectacular view of the map while you were in free fall, but unfortunately as the saying goes "its not the fall that kills you but the sudden stop at the end".

Knowing what was causing the issue Markus took some time out of his schedule today to look into the problem which turned out to be a flaw in the current implementation of Torque's spawning system. The basic problem is that the code looks for a valid location on the terrain (within the radius of the spawn sphere) to drop the player, but the code was setup so that if it found an interior at that location too it wouldn't use that spot and would eventually bail out if it couldn't find anything at all and use the center of the mission world to spawn the player. Most teams get around this in one of two ways, either spawn the players no where near an interior (which sucks and wouldn't really work in the long run) or increase the spawn sphere to such a radius that it latches onto a point outside of the interior you are on (which also sucks). Knowing that we needed a better solution Markus went and rewrote this code so that we don't have to use either of these comprimises and can instead drop the players onto or into interiors that fall within the radius of the spawn sphere thus ensuring that in the long run we won't be limited with what we can do with this game. Great work Markus!

4 Comments:

Sean said...

Hey I was wondering if the servers work on the windows game download. When I clicked on the server button, there were no servers.

10:52 AM

 
McLaud said...

As far as I know we are currently not hosting a permanent RealmWars2 server.

This should change, once Milestone1 (MS1) is released.

2:08 PM

 
Logan Foster said...

Sean, you will only see servers for games that are being hosted and currently run for the version of Realm Wars that you are running.

As Markus has said we do intend on having a dedicated host server running for when we release a public build when the time comes.

12:29 PM

 
Sean said...

Ok, good luck on the MS1 game, can't wait to download it!

12:01 PM

 

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