Hey everyone!
Things have been fairly busy with many small things on our end, so I will just give you a quick overview of last week’s developments:
First of all, John made a new model for the Charcoal Hut (so far, we had been using a model I quickly put together myself). You can see the result in today’s picture. The Charcoal Hut is part of the new Ammo making mechanics, but we are also thinking of integrating Coal as a possible fuel source for Smelters and similar buildings.
Secondly, I was able to implement multi-waypoints for soldiers. This now means that you can give your soldiers instructions on how to get to their destination on the strategy map, set up flanking in the tactical map, or simply use a bit more finesse for your order in the standard view.
Another bigger development was a change in saving and loading for multiplayer games. Previously, our saves were small enough that the host could simply request the local data from other players when saving, which would create one single save file on the host’s computer. When loading, this save file was then sent to all of the players in the lobby, and each player could load the data for the faction they were assigned to.
Considering all of the developments of the past few months (especially the maps), the file size of our save games has increased quite a lot, and our networking solution doesn’t allow the sending of files as big as we require now. As a result, the host now requests that each player saves their data locally, which can be loaded locally when starting the game. As a result, saving and loading is much more efficient, but it won’t be possible to swap a player out halfway through the game - which we are sure is something that happens almost never anyway.
Finally, our tests of the various new mechanics have led to many bugfixes, as well as a slight rebalancing in the Ammo mechanics, and a yet more emphasised progression than what I had talked about last week.
Until next week!