Most of my time over the past few weeks has been spent on a major reworking of the code for all of the tools in the game (builder, material, painter, etc.) in order to improve the building experience for networked client players in multi-player games.
Previously the tool code that responded to player inputs in order to perform various actions (such as attaching a part, breaking an attachment, applying paint, and so on) would always run on the server for all players, with each client simply sending their inputs to the server for it to deal with. This setup made it relatively easy for the server to handle things like arbitration between players, seeing as they were effectively all running locally as far it was concerned.
However this approach was flawed, the most significant problem being the latency between client player input and an action happening, which made building really awkward to say the least.
So I've now re-implemented every tool so that player input is processed locally on each client. In some cases the client must still request the server to complete certain actions, so that the server can validate and arbitrate where needed (for example, while one player is attaching one part to a second one, at the same time another player could be deleting that second part; the server needs to have the final say on the outcome in this scenario). In many situations however, it is not necessary for the client to check with the server first (e.g. moving or resizing a selected part, painting a part, etc.), instead the client just informs the server of the change made so that it can be broadcast out to the rest of the clients.
The result is that the building experience for networked clients is now basically the same as it is in single player games. The other benefit of these changes is that because input is processed locally for each player, it simplifies the code and makes it a bit easier to modify and improve the tools.
Builder tool tweaks
On which subject, I've made a couple of minor improvements to the builder tool thanks to some suggestions I've received.
- Remove actions (delete part, destroy construction, etc.) are now delayed, during which time the action key has to be held down. This should hopefully prevent annoying accidental deletions from mis-clicks!
- I changed the default key binding for duplication from "Q" to "Left Alt + LMB", by default "Q" is now dedicated just to opening the tool menu.
The usability of the builder tool controls is still an ongoing concern, and something I'll have to keep plugging away at over time, but at least now it'll be easier to implement any further improvements I need to make.
New demo coming soon
Finally, I'm getting close to releasing another demo build, and I've been fixing a bunch of bugs in preparation for this. There have been a ton of changes to the code since the last demo, so I'm slightly paranoid that some as yet undiscovered bugs might have been introduced. Time to do some more testing I think, hopefully I don't encounter any last minute issues!
