Gauntlets of Recursion (+3)
Times, trials, and turbulence.
Milestone 4 open for testing.
Up and Running
After an unreasonable amount of time and effort, I managed to recompile and set up the Master Server on my server box. The router I’m using (thankfully) has a setting to automatically use a dyndns.org account to update with my latest IP, which means that my residential dynamic IP won’t be an issue in long-term hosting of the Master Server.
Milestone 4 Client Available
With Milestone 4 comfortably completed, I’m eager to finally put up a link here so I can get some real feedback on the interface to the Master Server, as well as catching any bugs that are still lingering about. Or just reserve your favourite character name. 😛
Recall that the deployment of the game requires Java 5, and either Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux.
Launch Project Skirmish Milestone 4
Also worth noting is that the Master Server is still in its infancy of long-term testing. It may go down periodically while the kinks are still being hammered out.
You can:
- Create/log-into an account
- Create and delete characters
- Configure user settings (key bindings, interface options, etc.)
You cannot yet:
- Host games
- Join games
It’s true that you can’t do any “playing” yet, but enough infrastructure is now in place that adding these two components are not major additions. Hosting is actually already in place, but removed in this release simply because there’s no real point in it until the game networking is implemented. One might think of this as a, “now all of the boring work is out of the way” release. 😉
There might not be a whole plethora of things to test, but I’d be very grateful for any feedback, comments, questions and suggestions that come to mind while looking at it. As usual, a huge thanks to everyone for the support and encouragement along the way of Skirmish’s lengthy development. 🙂
Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) 
Everything seem to work correctly, only problem I saw was incorrect rendering of buttons http://members.optus.net/lukex/temp/Image2.png
The first time I ran the applet, it didn’t seem to do anything (it looped and didn’t refresh, a black screen was all I saw). The second time it ran flawlessly, and for what it’s worth, my buttons look the same as lukex’ when highlighted. It looks great, my only remark would be some sort of tab order and a means to switch through the controls such as the well-known TAB-key.
Cheers.
Confirm password would be useful.
Other than that it looks good. Just like I saw on TV/screenshots !
Looking great! Didn’t find any problems with it except one: the cursor for entering text looks really weird if you move it so it’s not at the end. It leaves a big space and the text to the right of it moves back and forth.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks everyone, for taking the time to test the client.
@lukex: Good call. It looks like it traces down to the generic DrawRect wrapper I’m using, so this problem must be appearing everywhere else I’m using rectangle outlines (*gah*).
@Toodles: What OS did you test on? I’ve noticed that once and a while it will stay on the black screen for sometimes longer than usual before (finally) displaying the log-in menu. I’ll see about displaying a progress bar or something so its evident whether a freeze has actually occurred. I’ll put tab-ordering onto the list, too.
@Brian: Good point. I’ll have this fixed, too.
@TVM: Guilty as charged. I took a shortcut of using a pipe character rather than drawing in a ‘real’ caret. I’ll clean it up, since I didn’t get away with it. 🙂
My names reserved!
The OS I tested it on is Windows XP SP 2, nothing fancy otherwise.
Yeah works fine on Leopard. Just takes a second or two to display after the blank window comes up.
I tested it on Windows XP SP 2 and even though I’ve got a slightly dated machine, I was getting an average of 3 FPS… Not sure what’s going on with that, but here are my specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.19ghz
768MB RAM
nVidia GeForce 6200 256MB RAM
And for the record, I didn’t have anything running other than Firefox and the Java Application. Version 6 in case it means anything.
@Steve: I’ve seen this on another user’s computer, too. Do you have the latest drivers for your video card? Are you able to run other OpenGL apps/games decently? I’m still trying to determine whether this is a problem on the user’s end, or something on mine.
I don’t think it’s my end. I’ve got the latest drivers and I can run pretty much any game at a decent frame rate. The most recent game I’ve played on this computer is Max Payne 2 and it gets around 60 frames per second at 1024×768 with everything on high detail. But that uses DirectX.
The most recent OpenGL game would be Unreal Tournament which gets around 120 frames per second at 1280×1024 with everything set to the highest detail levels.
@Steve: Something is definitely fishy, then. I’ll add this to my bug list and see what I can figure out.