Questions:
The truck sounds in the patch, are those going to be for some sort of new mission involving driving a truck? If so is this the new use for diesel fuel you have mentioned?
Do you plan on doing anything with hardcore since it is so completely out of whack? Something to balance it out so there is actual competition between clans? If so is there anything you want to share about it? smaller size caps, food degradation linked to fort amount, padlock changes, raiders leaving, whatever it might be.
will the matching spawns ever come back for zombies? so everyone shares the same zombies? I’ve heard people complaining about this recently when talking about swamp. Mainly new players starting the game.
Is there anything you are working on that isn’t well known? Something You’d like to hint at or put out there for people to get excited about?
Whether for Swamp or not, just anything new that’s in the works?
And of course, what is going on with the new game engine you made? any plans for it?
Answers:
The new truck sounds are not intended for a mission type, but are going to be a new way for players to use diesel fuel. As always, plans may change, but the current plan is a different way to get between maps for players who would rather spend diesel than run the entire distance. Obviously diesel has some value to it, so this new way to get between maps will have a bit more to it than just pressing enter and arriving where you wanted to go.
Balancing hardcore has been on my mind lately, but so far nothing has been decided. It’s a complicated problem, and could be accidentally made worse just as easily as it could be improved, so changes have to be very Very carefully planned out.
Matching spawns? All of the zombies should start out (spawn) in the same locations for everybody. Poor syncing between the clients will cause the zombies to then gradually get further from each other for different players, depending on what decisions they make. Once a long enough amount of time has passed, you will start regularly seeing zombies show up in a room that your fellow players still see outside in the hallway, or stuck in a completely different room on the other side of the building.
When Swamp was first being built, I gathered computer specs and internet speed data from it’s players. In a mainstream game everything is simple… if players have computers that are a little too slow, don’t let them connect to multiplayer. If they live too far away from the server (causes latency issues), don’t let them connect. If their internet speed is lower than you want, don’t let them play. Basically mainstream games have so many players, and they are concentrated so strongly, that you can simply be exclusive and kick out anyone who doesn’t nicely fit into the processing power and internet speeds you build your game for.
Audio games are a very different thing, because there are not enough players to start kicking everyone out. There also are not many concentrated on the globe, so you can’t run a server that will kick out anyone who isn’t within 100 miles of it. In the early multiplayer days of Swamp (2011), I was surprised to learn that a significant percentage of it’s players were running windows 95, and it was very common to have players on 56k connections. It is also common to have players running modern day operating systems with high speed internet. How do you make everyone have a similar gaming experience when you’re connecting this huge range of systems and speeds?
While we do still have players on terribly slow computers and connections, as the years go by more and more people seem to be on faster connections and more modern computers. I have plans to rewrite many parts of the game, to take advantage of that change. Syncing zombies is one of the first things players would notice.
When it comes to new things, new maps are high up on my list. I’ve read rumors the players share about new maps, new weapons, and new zombies. I think those players will be pleased.
The new game engine is one of those “someday” things. I have worked on that engine, been forced to set it down, and returned to it over and over for what feels like forever. I look forward to the day when I can finally get it used in a game, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime real soon. I have a few other projects that are half finished, and new messages every day with people asking me to update games I’ve already made, so it’s hard to find the time.
I did recently try to at least use some of that new engine code in something. I took some of the navigational AI from the new engine, and copied it into the Swamp server. With some tweaks to make it work with Swamp, and code for behavior, that gave rise to the team of Capture the flag bots. So in some very small way I’ve been able to share a piece of the new engine with the Swamp players.
