Hey everyone.
This update has been a mission and a half, sorry it took so long to get it out, and thank you so much for your incredible, enduring patience!
Just letting you know that there is a new version out now called "Epic Keyboard of Doom #1".
I'll write down the patch notes tomorrow as it's late for me now and I've been working for 14 hours straight today, so I'm exhausted.
The BIGGEST feature of the patch is the network performance improvements to Blue Ballin, Pipemare, Laser Lunacy, Dodgy, Wheely, Get Pucked, Deadly Disco, Coallateral (just the pipes so far, not the bridge segments) and Cognitive Collection.
I have been testing with people hosting in the US and EU, where I end up with a 400-500ms ping, and I'm happy to say that despite having such a large ping, the mini-games were playable.
Essentially, what took the longest time was experimenting with different various methods, which required me to destroy the mini-games network scripting, then rebuild it several times over...for each mini-game, and what I ended up doing was essentially creating a predictable simulation of the random sequence on both server and client....I won't go into the complexities, but ...it works.
There are some caveats to the network performance increases such as players who drop-in mid round are gonna have a terrible time for the remainder of that mini-game, but after that mini-game, everything will be like normal.
Pretty much the only games out there that feature drop-in multiplayer, are ones where the environment can easily be synchronized with the new client, where essentially there's only a few objects in the world that need to be synced up, then the rest are synced as the player moves through the level and those objects become "relevant", where as Metal Heads can have potentially hundreds of objects that are all relevant as they are all on screen at once, such as in Blue Ballin.
So I'm pretty proud of the fact that I got this all working better. Typically this type of thing requires a team of expert multiplayer network programmers...not only can I not afford that, but I wouldn't learn anything by delegating the task anyway.
It's impossible to make it super smooth, especially on player hosted servers (Fall Guys would most likely run like trash on player hosted servers for example), but the fact that I can play on an EU or US server and it's very playable is a win in my eyes :)
The patch addresses a whole bunch of quality of life issues, including adding visual UI elements for keyboard players, even if they are only a temporary solution until I sort out icon switching, they do a good enough job to give keyboard players an idea of what to press now.
Performance should be better too, as the frame rate has been temporarily limited to 60 fps versus the previously uncapped frame rate.
This essentially is just forcing vsync ON, but not actually turning vsync on....anyway, it'll use less resources now, still run fine, physics simulations will be more stable, and if you are streaming, you should no longer get dropped frames.
Something else that you have all been wanting, is the ability to choose your character colour. I have heard your calls, and now you can change colour....and while at first, I was going to make it so you couldn't choose the same colour as another player, the Discord testers and I discovered that we could create some silly fun by all being the same colour and playing something like Cognitive Collection, or Melting Memory where player colour is heavily relied upon.
Perhaps in the future, I'll add in patterns for player indicators and such to help differentiate things such as the safe locations in Melting Memory, but also to help differentiate players.
Speaking of Melting Memory, numbers have been added to the first 3 safe locations to help reduce confusion. :)
Anyway, that's just a few things to give you guys an idea of whats in the update.
There will be patch notes tomorrow, and more fixes in the next few days, then hopefully some new mini-games towards the end of the month :)