Hey everyone, I just wanted to give a quick update on the current status of Freefall, as the last update was at the beginning of October and I realize it's been 2 months since then, without any information about what's going on.
In short, I made a mistake a few months ago when I planned out my development timeline. I significantly underestimated the amount of work that would be needed for important features like multiplayer. Loads of extra stuff has popped up that I didn't originally think would be necessary.
One feature I was excited to work on was Philips Hue color lightbulb integration. I hinted about this a couple of updates ago, and my goal is to allow players to set up their lights to complement the color of the world in Freefall in real-time. This feature has forced me to consider many things, from networking, to user interface design, to designing a better, more robust local config system. It's still coming - I've not given up on it - but it's going to take a bit longer before it's anywhere near ready for everyone to use.
I've also spent quite a long time trying to tidy up the game code, the engine code, and the build system, as I kept hitting blockers between different platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux) that forced me to rethink a lot of stuff. I'm going to get a bit technical for a moment - the game and its engine are both written in C++, and part of what I'm doing right now is simplifying, tidying up, and rewriting big chunks of the code base to use features from the latest version of C++, C++17. I've also been trying to rewrite any unsafe code to eliminate potential bugs from popping up later down the line.
Part of the work I've done for the networked multiplayer system has involved writing a basic physics engine sort of thing, as having something like that will allow me to more easily keep clients in sync without inconsistencies popping up. There's a lot more to be done before networked multiplayer can be a thing in Freefall, but I'll keep you updated on the status of this.
Finally, I’ve begun thinking about how to write a Vulkan renderer for Freefall’s engine. OpenGL is pretty good, but it has its limitations and I’m very interested in Vulkan as it’d allow me to do stuff like caching for the game’s raymarcher, to avoid recalculating everything, every frame. This idea is still in its early stages, so I can’t say much else about it yet.
I'm hoping to get an update pushed out before Christmas, as there are some performance improvements in the current development version. Whether or not some of the bigger things I'm working on will make it into this update is still unclear, but I'll continue working hard to get this stuff finished.