Hi everyone!
This is a quick update, mostly to let you know this project is pretty much alive! After release 3037 I got lots of bug reports (duh! where've you been before!), requests and suggestions. But since stability is the first priority, I go bug-hunting first.
Tried to make players pay more attention to the MOTD by using a little delay before allowing the window to close. It couldn't just start working of course (shot 1).
Weapon system needed a major retouch as I tried to implement client-side code. There's also a nice new feature: on ladder you cannot shoot, but should be able to change weapon (take off ladder with something else in your hands). Also carried weapons should be inaccessible to "garbage collector", black holes, network clients. And on top of that, I have no reliable way (in standard HL mechanism) to track destroy items that were added by default (like crowbar in multiplayer) but were not accepted by the player. But if they were, it's hard to track their existence to not to drop them when player dies. Screenshot #2 demonstrates that.
But the real nightmare starts when network testing begins. Monsters in HL were NOT meant to be played with online. And beams. And trains. And everything that do something besides standing in one place. Although XHL uses far less traffic than HL does, these delicate situations do happen. Shot #3.
And playtesting. Lost and lots of it. I feel like I'm constantly being trolled: by exceptionally bad mappers, by outstandingly stupid HL bugs and limits, by bots. :( Also by monsters, as barnacles now eat all projectiles I shoot :( There were more than 4000 multiplayer maps gathered in my collection. And we've tested ALL of them! >:)
By the way, ATI video cards are the WORST for Half-Life. More likely, their drivers. I hate AMD for adopting that shit. But whn it comes to CPUs, AMD rocks! Check out this map compilation graph:
A very huge map is being compiled here. HLVIS (from VHLT) uses all NUMA cores, which is very nice. As you can see, 24 TIMES faster than single-threaded!! HLRAD used only one NUMA node which is 6 cores in my case. Anyway, very cool thing to observe.
Next time I'll try to post the changelog. It's really big this time!
PS: If anyone has FMOD 3.63 linux SDK, I could make XHL completely cross-platform. But right now - no music, sorry.
