Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Some Liquid War 6 news

[Christian Mauduit]

Le 17/08/11 23:59, Kasper Hviid a écrit :
> 2011/8/17 Christian Mauduit<address@hidden>:
> > Simple design, slack CSS, perfect, I could even use that to customize the
> > "builtin web server" (something probably nobody tried but me but if you set
> > "--skip-network" to 0 (false) then LW6 will automatically start a web server
> > available on http://localhost:8056/ and it would be cool to have this share
> > the same look&  feel of the official web site.
>
> Aw, another error:
> WARNING! inet_addr() failed, ip="0.0.0.0"
OK, thanks.

> While at the topic, have you got any new thoughts about how the
> network should work? We never discussed it much.
Big subject. Network is probably the reason why I started the rewrite in 
2005, 6 years ago... My opinion is that network in LW5 was a failure 
because you had to be ready on both sides at the same time, and game was 
over as soon as you had "lost", so you had to wait before being playing 
again, chat was clumsy, etc.

The idea, in LW6, is to have something you can connect "any time". Like 
any FPS will allow you to join the frag party whenever you want. 
Basically, the new "respawn" mode was made for this, you can imagine a 
long 1 hour LW session with people joining, leaving, and such. Of course 
one can imagine playing time-limit based games in network mode but I 
suspect deathmatch will be way more popular.

Additionnally, LW6 has a technical "special trick" which is: it has no 
real server. Or, put it another way, everyone is a server. I called them 
"nodes", whenever you start the game in network mode it (by default) 
listens to what happens and people can connect to it. Then to join a 
game, just join any node, every node has the complete game information, 
no server is keeping a "master map" or such things. The price to pay is 
a more complex architecture - hence a long development time - but the 
gain is that you can imagine (that's sort of a dream for me) a game 
starting with player A, B and C. Then D joins. Then E joins. Then A, B 
leave. C leaves too. D and E continue to play. Then F joins. D leaves. A 
and B join again. You end up with game sessions running for arbitrary 
long times, and you can't say that was game between A, B and C. Was just 
a game session, just the way when you talk with friends, any friend can 
leave, come back, it's open. Free.

Of course, in-game chat will be a super-must-have. One of the reasons 
LW6 does not really allow you to customize your keys is that I wish 
letters on the keyboard are all free to chat. I mean, you're playing 
with arrows then just type a few letters, press enter, your message is sent.

Now after all these years coding in the dark, what does work?

The game in itself is message-based, does not look much, but it is, 
everything is controlled with plain text commands, makes it comfortable 
to network it.

Node discovery/listing does work. Nodes will automatically register 
themselves (they need a "seed" to find the first other node, in the 
future I'll run such a seed on ufoot.org), maintain a list of nodes, 
sort them by ping time, check them, get meta information, and so on.

Communication can be established with 3 different channels, both ways. 
More precisely, nodes can communicate in TCP (the default, easiest to 
code), UDP (usually faster but unreliable) and HTTP. The http connection 
is very important, it should allow people to play behind a web proxy, 
that's to say you're at work, you can't play most games, only a few 
flash based games and... Liquid War 6 ;) The professionnal 
procrastinator is our main target!

What I was coding currently is the "multiplex" system that, in a game 
involving A,B and C will transfer a message to B when received from A 
when you're C. Clear? No, well, the idea is that node all nodes need be 
connected, a chain like A <-> B <-> C should allow A and C to play 
together, even if they have no way to communicate.

Next I'll have to finish the "serialization", or how to transmit a level 
through text-based messages.

Then next, I'll have to wrap all this and prepare the interface for it.

So there's a probably a few releases yet before we can *play* (hopefully 
releases happening more than once a year...) in network mode, but it's 
coming, really.

About the game itself, I guess network will be pretty much what the game 
is now, no need to scenarize it I think, play fight is OK, but any idea 
is welcome.

The one thing I don't know is how to propose/offer map changing, how do 
we change the map after the game is over, who chooses it (first chooser 
gets to choose the map, "oldest" connected player?).

> True, black and white risk signalling "underground" or "high-brow
> art". It is hard to make it signal "fun, fast-paced gameplay"
My position -> the video can show that?

> I'll give it a try, then we finds out if it works! I really like
> black'n white graphic, like woodcut, zine layout and the Nōtan idea.
> There are way too few monochrome websites. It could really make the
> site stand out.
;)

> Still, there are website elements which will use colors:
>
>   - The embeded video is in color
>   - Level thumbnails are in color
>   - Links are blue
>   - The download graphic is blue
Yeah, and having those colorfull items will draw the attention on them. 
I'm not sure if the links should stay blue. On one hand it's so standard 
it's nice not to confuse users, OTOH so many sites do it (change link 
colors) and links are not really the one thing we want to push. Video, 
thumbnails and download are the 3 main things we want people to stumble 
upon.

> Okay, that is sort of a deadline, then!
Yep.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

PS: BTW, I'm currently almost done with reading 
http://artofgamedesign.com/ "The art of game design" by Jesse Schell. 
It's really an excellent book IMHO, gave me a ton of new ideas about 
what the future of LW6 could (and should) be. It's not only about 
computer games but games in general. I recommend it ;)

--
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/