Today is a special day as it is Rivalry's first Early Access Steam Release Anniversary! It is good to see how far the game has progressed since last year with the replay feature being added, Social Media sharing and a complete UI makeover, and I am hoping for an even more productive 2017!.. if school work allows it... During this week I have changed the way stickiness works with different parts of weapons. I have changed how it affects both the part of your weapon you are hitting with, and which part of your opponent's weapon you are hitting. This means that individual parts of your weapon could be more sticky than other parts. For example, if you hit someone with the handle of a Morning Star then it will not stick into them. However if you hit them with one of the sharp points of the Morning Star than you will have a much greater chance of it sticking into them.
The Morning Star's handle was bashed into the arm of the opponent, failing to stick into the arm and instead bouncing back
But When the Morning Star's head was bashed into the arm of the opponent it stuck, enabling the opponent to be suspended into the air Also, different parts of your opponent's weapon are more susceptible to being stuck into. For example, if you hit your Morning Star into the head of a Spear it will bounce right off, but if you smash it into the wooden staff of a spear it will have a much greater chance of sticking. Both these details adds more strategy to disarming an opponent and claiming victory.
The Morning Star is bashed into the steel head of the spear causing it to bounce off without sticking
However this time the Morning Star is bashed into the wooden staff of the spear causing it to stick also enabling the opponent to be suspended into the air I have also done some more work on the Networking UI by changing the location of some of the components and information. For example the "Create Game/Join Game button" is now located in the top right instead of the bottom middle. I did this so it would correlate with other similar UI's in Rivalry like "Choose Weapons UI". I have also changed the location of the game's description to the top where it continues to be close to the "Create Game/Join Game button". The colour scheme has also changed to better fit other color standards found throughout the game. Some of these may change as I fine tune the colours to be more clearer or aesthetically pleasing.
This weekend I got the network protocol null issue resolved which was introduced by the optimisations to the telemetry recording I introduced over the last month. I'm now designing the extended protocol to allow the transmission of game state such as dragging. My first attempt is to have only one of the players be the 'host'. This means all the physics happens on one machine. I'm designing a protocol that allows this to be accurate and efficient, as well as fun :) I'm going to start by only transmitting mouse information but I suspect I may need to also transmit some of the game state as well. Today was spent going through all the old networking code written before PAX, getting it in good working order and deciding how to proceed next. If you play the beta you will notice that data only moves one way, from the host to all the clients. Next weekend the aim is to get data flowing the other way. If anyone wishes to experience these new features, they will be available on the public Beta. Next week I will be working on features like "Weapon Pushing" and more on the network protocol until hopefully I can actually have a fight over network.