Welcome to the War Homepage

"We are building a game of extraordinary magnitude."

• 7:55 PM: You can see that I haven't been good about updating, as usual. Well, you see, I've really been pushing myself hard at school (credit and workload wise). Instead of working on some of the fun projects that I always wish I had time to do, I've been focusing on finishing my ugrad education. Actually, next year (as a senior) I'll actually be doing a Master of Engineering, so I should graduate with a B.S. and M.Eng after four years. But why do you care about this? Well, that explains why my updates have been few and far between. But the good news is...
  
• ...I've added a new page, the download page. Here you'll find out game for download in .zip format. I've put both the server and the client up as two separate downloads. You'll need a running server to play, of course. As it is now, there are prolly still some bugs left in the game. I added projectiles to make it more fun...and I'm still proud of what we did, being only sophomores and all. If it wasn't for the fact that none of us could do graphics (so the graphics look poor), it would have been actually quite good. I've learned so much since we did this game, and prolly would approach things quite differently now. However, we learned so much from doing this, and I would encourage anyone to just sit down and write a game sometime. While I mention that I would do some things different, there are still many things in the code that I am quite proud of...quite a few innovations that turned out to be on the money, etc. I encourage you to download it, try to get it working, have a good laugh, then realize that it was our first game and we were young and inexperienced, and finally realize that it actually is pretty good, and there are some real neat things about it. But that last part is up to you, and I certainly don't expect anyone to feel that way. Feel free to let me know what you think.
  
• I haven't posted the source code. I will ask the others if it is OK with them, and do so if possible. It is possible to learn a bit from it, but it is also a bit hard to decipher. If I can't get it posted, but you still want it then send me an email and we can prolly make a person by person exception.
  
• Good Luck!
  

21 September 1997:

• 11:51 PM: My job keeps taking over my life. I came so close to finishing everything I wanted to and uploading the game. This is my first game effort, so it isn't going to be a game that people are going to play. It was just an excellent learning experience for me. School and work have taken over my life, but I fully intend to someday finish the last few bug fixes and upload WAR. What I really want to do is start work on my next project, which should be *really* cool. I have some great ideas, and want to make this game commercial quality. As soon as I get settled in to this semester I'll start working on it more, although I wouldn't expect to have much by the end of this semester. Just a firm basis. I plan on making this one much better developed from the ground up. But before I do anything major on it, I will upload WAR.
  

• 11:45 PM: We demoed WAR at the end of the school year. All went well. Our advisor seemed pretty impressed. I told him I would clean up the source code a bit and send it to him over the summer. Well, of course, I forgot all about it. In fact, I just remembered and realized that I never even uploaded the game in all the hectic action that surrounds the end of a school year. I apologize. So, instead of just cleaning up the code, I have decided to add some features and stuff. I'll upload the game as soon as I'm finished (I promise) this time.
  
• I've spent most of the summer studying OpenGL. Yup, no more 2d games for me.
  
• In the past two or so days I created a utility that would read in one of our .map files for WAR and create a .pak file. This is basically a compressed .map file which takes up 28K as opposed to the normal 285K. The client can read either format, so you can edit a map and test it until you like it and then packMap it so that it loads quicker, takes up less room, and can't be edited by anyone else. However, the main reason I did this compression scheme is so that I could add dynamic downloading of maps to the game (not done yet).
  
• Fixed a bunch of bugs already. The game is slightly more stable. It really helps to have a fresh look at the code after being away for a while.
  

• 1:12 PM: Looks like I forgot to upload the last update. Sorry.
  
• In the past few days, we've added a bunch of stuff. You can now kill players, and it goes through a death animation sequence (OK, only limited to 3 frames for now). The sound has gotten better, and muchos bugs have been stamped out. It looks like we are on track to finish barely in time.
  
• I've been trying to find time to study up for the next project. I'll give news about that after this is over. I hate to say it, but this game is mostly a learning experience. There is so much more I'd like to do, and so much that I have learned from this. Of course, all that knowledge and drive will be poured into the next effort, which will be radically different and hopefully a bunch more interesting.
  
• By the way, I calculated that I worked 27 hours last week for my job. That plus schoolwork and WAR are killing me. But it's all in fun...
  

21 April:

• 5:01 PM: I haven't updated in a while because we've all been really busy with our classes and WAR. There has been a ton of progress, as we now have sound, and shooting is fully functional. There is now a delay between shots, and it is easier to hit people. Your character has two guns, and we trace a firing trajectory from exactly the point of origin for each gun. The sounds are great, and fade with distance, so you can hear offscreen firefights. There is a lot left to do, but it is mostly adding more sprites and sounds and stuff.
  
• Today I worked on adding the ping thing. Basically, the client predicts a player's movement based on their relative ping, so that, theoretically, things should be smooth. We'll see tomorrow.
  

6 April:

• 10:30 PM: It's been a huge past couple of days. We fixed most of the synching problem, although I still have some tricks up my sleeve to add that should make it near perfect. Shooting is in place, but it is still a rather early version. The gun shoots too fast, causing you to lose ammo like crazy machine gun style. We have to fix up shooting just a bit before we begin beta testing. I'm hoping that we can get about eight people to go down to the NT labs on friday and do some testing.
  
• Items are completely in place and working perfectly. I set the respawn time to about 30 seconds (for all items right now), and it is a thrill to pick up items and watch them respawn later. There are a few bugs with keeping track of ammo, etc. on the client that will be fixed easily and shortly. We played for a few minutes, just shooting each other and fighting for ammo.
  
• I'm working on a map that should be more interesting than the one we have now. Hopefully it will be done in time for testing, so that people have something real to play with. :-)
  
• My girlfriend gets mad at me 'cause I work on this game too much. I'm sorry, Vanessa...you're a SuperStar!
  

2 April:

• 6:46 PM: We've been working feverishly on WAR. The smooth scrolling was finished, and then we managed to optimize it an additional 20% or so. It now runs perfect on my computer (yes, the low end one), even though I think we can squeeze out another 5% or so. We are now drawing the other players and everything, but have to rework synching a bit.
  
• Elaine redid all of the graphics (although some came out dithered again), so the game looks much better. It is so much better than it used to be that sometimes I can't believe it. Also, the new server modifications make it so that all computers are on equal footing, and Warren's Pentium Pro can't hog the server anymore. Of course, that just means that he's going down when we add shooting...
  
• I added the ability to set up your own config file to keep a list of servers, and on friday we will be doing shooting. Once shooting is in we will be handing it over to beta testers for a bit to work out bugs before we begin implementing gameplay and such.
  

26 March:

• 7:28 PM: Things are really heating up. I spent all day and much of the night yesterday working on WAR. We managed to fix all of the smooth scrolling and turning bugs, so smooth scrolling is about 95% functional. We just need to implement the new sprites, which are being drawn by Elaine even as I write this. We also have to draw the other players, which might be a temporary hack until we move to the new method.
  
• So, to sum up, you can now turn and walk any direction, and the background will scroll smoothly and nicely all the way.
  
• Another recent addition, in the midst of all this, is that Anu added some code to play whatever audio CD is in the CD player, so that we can all listen to Manson while we play.
  

25 March:

• 10:45 AM: There was a significant breakthrough last night. After weeks of working on a smooth scrolling scheme, we decided to scrap the whole thing. We decided to adopt a new smooth scrolling method which I like better anyway. The best part about it, is that it is about 85% working after only one night's work on it. We worked like crazy yesterday, and now have smooth scrolling, which makes the game look 10x better. Elaine will be working on new graphics today, so hopefully soon I will be able to post a decent screenshot.
  
• Now that smooth scrolling is almost done, I can safely begin work on the new server. Yup, I'm going to totally revamp the whole thing again. That just shows how much of a learning process this whole thing is. This revision should take a long time, but it shouldn't affect testing. It should speed up things considerably on the client end, and provide better response when there are multiple players online.
  
• Check out Lost Highway. It was one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time, and the only movie soundtrack I now own.
  

11 March:

• 10:30 AM: Nothing new yet. After the final wave of prelims, expect big things to go down wednesday and thursday. I found out about a Win95 easter egg thing that is rather boring. If anyone wants to know how to do it, just send me an email.
  

9 March:

• 4:50 PM: Yup. It's been a while. It was one of those months. I don't expect to have any more like that. I've pretty much gotten everything together, and should be more than on top of things real soon. WAR has had a brief period of stagnation, but that will end as soon as we finish up the smooth scrolling. Oh, maybe I need to upadate some more first...
  
• Ok, so we decided that we want smooth scrolling instead of tile by tile movement. Sure, it doesn't sound much harder, but it is. Warren and Anu have been working on it for quite a bit, but we all had to drop everything for an intense two and a half weeks of prelims and projects. Anu still has some major tests this coming week, but I've been told that smooth scrolling will definitely be done by spring break. That is good, because I will be staying spring break and should be able to get a lot of work done.
  
• In the important news, we got chat working. Simply press t, as in most games nowadays, and we start up a new thread that receives keyboard input for chatting. What is cool about our chat is that you can still play the game while in chat mode, and it doesn't slow down much if you have a Pentium Pro 200. Seriously, tho, it is still possible to move around and shoot and stuff while chatting. Oops...did I mention shoot? :-)
  

4 February:

• 3:08 PM: I'm making some changes to the server that I expect will increase performance, although the benefit won't come until we start testing with more users. This should work on the client side too. Going from O(n) to O(1) in a crucial operation. We hope to add chat real soon, mainly so that we don't have to yell back and forth.

21 January:

• 4:03 PM: I'm sort of starting with a clean slate today. As you should be able to see, I've cleaned up the main page and moved all the old stuff into the logs. If you missed anything, be sure to read it!
  
• Installed DirectX 3 today so that I can finally test the client. I had to do some hard drive tricks, but it worked eventually. It runs fine on my slower machine, but it still has that flickering status bar problem.
  
• My plan was to get the split version compiled today, but I already have crazy reading from my classes. We haven't started much due to the disorder of this first week of classes. Things should settle down by the end of the week and I should start reporting real progress again. Oh, expect some small changes to the pages soon...
  

Be sure to check out the logs for past week's news!

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