We've been talking big about lots of projects recently (Life, "simulation" and "simulation arcade"...), and we have some other projects planned too (a platformer, a shooter). But, we started P&R with just the one game in mind, which was our flagship (pun intended), good old TurnShip. Why haven't we been talking about the development for it?
This would be why.
Yes, if you click on that image you will see, it is two instances of TurnShip running, and both are blank. No map or ships, just a cursor.
We're splitting the people playing on a server, so it's possible to spectate, and you go back to a lobby after a game (like, say, Left4Dead). Here's the lobby at the moment:
So, two players choose what side they want to play, or let the other person choose, or get randomly assigned a team. The problem I've been having lies in splitting players off from clients (people who are connected and not playing). It works, but the two people in the player slots get a blank screen while any spectators get the normal match:
Obviously I'm still testing this and trying to work out what's going on, but the fact is, running and constantly restarting a server and three TurnShips is a right pain in the northbridge:
That's my CPU and memory. I have a 2 GHz processor and 4GB memory. I mean yes, Firefox is awful for memory consumption, but I usually have about 15 tabs open. It's simpler than bookmarking.
Unfortunately because TurnShip is in Python (and is going to stay that way or we'll NEVER manage to get it finished) there's not much we can do about it, except streamline it where we can. For now, though, it just means I have to fart about restarting processes all the time to get any testing done. I'm going to carefully touch some wood and say we
just might manage to get playable demos of TurnShip and some others done by.. summer. Maybe.
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