Early Access Update Trettio (30)

Early Access Update Trettio (30)

build id: 5762EF13

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

I'm Still Here!
As mentioned in the last update my development tempo has been reduced as of late, hence the length of time that has elapsed between updates. However I am still here and still working on the game!

First look at The Library / VCR / Cassettes / Replays
I didn't expect to roll this out so soon, but as it turned out better than expected I am happy to announce the addition of The Library. This is available from the main menu and represents a complete log of all missions played on the local machine, available for your viewing pleasure. The code is called VCR (from Video Cassette Recorder), a nod towards the suitably retro feel of 1980s-era video recording technology.

What is going on here is that the game is now recording all player inputs for every single mission played and storing them as a "Cassette" in the Library. This works for both local and networked games on both LAN and Steam and with 1-4 players, regardless of who hosted the mission. These files are highly optimized and compressed, and so shouldn't take up more than a few hundred kilobytes even for long matches. The can be found along with the other local files written by the game here: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf[/b]

All of this is an initial test of the robustness of recording and playing back replays, and paves the way for sharing replay files amongst the community. The jury is still out on the best back-end solution for this; I was considering Steam Workshop but it doesn't seem like the best logical fit. I will get back to you when I have more info on all of that.

I envision players liking / up-voting popular replays and thereby providing some sort of rating system to better sift through what I expect to be a very large amount of files. There process for both recording and / or uploading should probably be opt-in; currently every mission is stored locally but this can easily be changed if it becomes a problem. The Library gui is also not the prettiest thing at the moment, but be aware that it is possible to scroll up and down using the mousewheel.

On caveat with Cassettes / replays in general is that they are not future proof. Since they are only recording the player inputs and not the entire state of the game, they will break when something changes in the game logic. Things shouldn't crash, but when legacy inputs map to new outputs you will possibly see players "doing weird stuff" like walking into walls and such. Somehow this is funny to me considering how badly actual VCR-cassettes degrade over time. This will of course not happen unless the game code is actually updated.

Technically all of this works for the same reasons as networked games work in SBTF, all based on player inputs and determinism. Seeing replays work this painlessly certainly validates me sticking to my guns concerning the networking architecture in general.

Potentially this also MAY enable improved networking capabilities, because if the game can keep all player inputs around for the duration of the match, then there is theoretically sufficient information available to allow "late join" for players. There may be other things that hinder this that I have yet to discover, but at least it looks promising and there may be much to gain by consolidating replays and the storage of player inputs in the networking system. More to follow.

Miscellaneous
Other than replays I have been doing a bunch of little things:

• I am not aware of any cheating going on in SBTF, but I took the precaution of sanitizing all inputs that arrive over the wire to avoid exploits related to movement speed.
• The Plan option "Big Rooms" has been changed to just "Rooms", and now has the following settings:
  • Empty - This is the same as the legacy setting "big rooms on".
  • Filled - This is the same as the legacy setting "big rooms off". The alternate tileset is used for filling these spaces.
  • Pillars - This was implicitly suggested by the community, and results in a pattern of pillars in these spaces (also with the alternate tileset).

• Pathfinder Upgrades are now randomly rolled instead of being in a fixed order.
  
• There are now new difficulty settings:
  • Random All - All Breaches will both appear and spawn Beasts in an extreme range, from Easier -> Insane.
  • Random Each - Each Breach will have an individual random difficulty setting based on their position, from Easier -> Random All (which in turn is from Easier -> Insane).

• There is now a user option to disable the rotation of the map / tracker. This was suggested by the community. The default settings is on (the legacy behaviour), but as this is a new settings bitflag it will be OFF for anyone who has an existing settings file. As usual all of this can be reset to defaults using the corresponding button.
  
• I have corrected the help section to accurately reflect current keybindings and to include information about the somewhat complex permutations of screen split modes combined with player tracking.
  

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