Remote Clients
With another Saturday night of blogging while working on our MMO behind me, I am happy to say that I can now fly around in space with both player-controlled remote clients as well as server-controlled AI clients. This is all working in tandem with the overhauled networking framework, and with a bit more progress, the foundation for this game will be in place and ready for framing.
The video above was taken at 2 AM after a fairly intense several-hour programming session, but it is intended to show my local client flying with a remote client (which I am operating via my Surface Pro). It's not much, but it has allowed me to confirm that my traffic numbers are right where I wanted them to be. I am still using a dumbed-down version of interpolation at this point as well, but moving from that to the advanced system I had put together for my networking prototype won't be difficult at all once it becomes a priority.
Procedural Galaxy Generation
On another note, I also started work on a procedural galaxy generation program in Unity, which basically allows me to play around with values in the custom inspector and quickly see the results. The goal here was to help me visualize a potential world in which this game will be taking place as well as testing minimum and maximum distances between star systems, etc.
I'm using various sliders for density and size as well as animation curves to create the arc in the arms, and even added the option to alternate between shorter and longer arms to give a more realistic look to the galaxies produced. Once I was happy with results, I simply entered the position data for a dozen of these star systems into the database manually, and the game client now spawns placeholder objects in those positions (which you can see in the first video).
Going forward
My next two goals are to first fix any remaining issues with remote clients and then to build a warp system that allows me to travel between the generated star systems. This should give me a better idea of where galaxy generation will be heading and should also be a nice break from the incredibly technical networking tasks.
