August update and progress

I'm back. Looks like it didn't get finished in August :P

I've started working on it again, and I'm getting back into the swing of things. I was putting off working on the game because I only wanted to work on it at my home computer since the screen was bigger, which made it easier to switch between 2 instances of the game while I was testing networking (as opposed to my smaller laptop). I realised this was just going to slow down development too much, and even if I had time to sit down at my home computer, I would do other stuff like play Melee instead.

So I've decided to just chip away at it each day on the train to work with my laptop until its done. Even if I work on something small or just implement something minor, it's better than nothing.

I'm working on Multiplayer at the moment. It's currently in the works. There's just a big checklist of things I'm ticking off, and once everything works I'm releasing it.

I don't think I'll make it a beta either, it will be the final version. I'll have a server running for as long as I can so that people can browse games publically. I'll also do minor updates for bug fixes, but apart from that I'll be done with the game. I've got some other projects I want to work on, and I wanted to have this done a lot longer ago. So I really don't want to drag on with this too much longer.

Currently you can:

• Host a networked game
• Join a networked game
• Send towers over the network
• Receive towers
• Simulate the game on both ends
• Wait for players to finish building towers

Thats just a high-level view of what it can do, there's a lot more going on under all of that. 

Off the top of my head, here's what is yet to be done:

• Chat
• Server browser (master server, querying for games, lobby chat etc.)
• ELO system (user profiles, this is going to be as simple as possible)
• Joining by IP (currently it's just hosting and joining on the same machine, but this is an easy change)
• Placing towers in your 'zone' (currently you can place them anywhere)
• Handling all networking states and conditions
  • Checking if players are done placing towers when the timer runs out/when the click the start button
  • Joining games, checking if the games have already been joined while trying to join them
  • Various networking error states
  • etc. (too many to write out)
• Anti-cheat
  • This involves a fair amount of work, so I'm going to try and cover as many bases as I can and just have something 'good enough'

The code base at the moment is very untidy, I wouldn't wish for anyone to look at it and understand it :P If I could go back and start again, I'd plan everything out from the very beginning. And until I had accounted for about 80% of the game, only then would I start programming. It would make everything else much easier. As I approach the end of the project, my coding gets a bit sloppier since I just want to finish it.

Expect some updates soon.