March 17 (Testing Continues)

Another week down, another week closer to getting this game out. The beta is still in full swing and I've gotten some great feedback from most of the testers. I've implemented a majority of their suggestions already and I'm happy to report Bit Battles is a better game as a result.

The major hiccup this week was one of the testers found a serious issue with the collision system which allowed players to "warp" through walls. Although only the training levels seemed to suffer from the bug, the possibility existed of it affecting the multiplayer portion as well so fixing it became my top priority. The vehicle collision system in TGE has long been one of it's weak spots and it's been something I've tweaked, hacked and silently cursed over the course of development. While the idea behind it is nice (hey, a nifty data-drive rigid body simulation seems like a great idea!) the concepts that power it have some tricky gotchas that don't mesh with a fast-pace game like Bit Battles. With that said, I felt like I had solved or at least dealt with the typical failings of the vehicle collision system (i.e. the vehicles often "sticking" to geometry, falling through terrain or causing the application to hang in an endless loop) but being able to "warp" through geometry was just weird!

After some late nights I discovered the problem: the hovertank collision hull was just too simple. Because the vehicle collision system relies on discrete physics "steps", it's possible for it to not only fail to register a collision but also to register a collision late. While there's some safeguards to prevent both from happening, I was lucky enough have a test case that still broke things. Except the test case was actually a game in the midst of beta testing with a deadline looming just around the bend! Thankfully, I managed to wrangle things into working. I beefed up the collision hull, tweaked a few datablock properties and we're back in business.

In other news, with the MyDreamRPG contest deadline quickly approaching, I'm pulling overtime trying to get everything ready to go. That means continuing the beta, responding to feedback, building a proper website for Bit Battles (or, actually finishing it) as well as all the last minute stuff involved in getting a build ready for public release.

I think I can, I think I can...