MV3D Development Blog

So after some frustrations with getting the physics engine to cooperate, there is now some semblance of normal player movement. You can walk, and turn and when you bump into things, you push them instead of falling over. In fact, you don’t fall over (which is good, and making it work like that was the source of a lot of frustration). The client does get a little wonky when you collide into another player at high speed (need to limit the walking speed still), but if you disconnect and reconnect, it’s normal again.

At this point, you can run the client (still only on linux) then enter your host name, login, and password. Click connect and (if you didn’t mess up the login info) it’ll let you select a character to connect to (since one account can have multiple characters). The server creates any number of characters (I have it set to 10 for now) and it creates a single account that can connect to all of them. Select a character and click “Connect” and you will start playing as that character. You get to see out of the character’s eyes and steer it around with the arrow keys.

The server running on NightEyes was up for 4 days before I took it down. And I only took it down to upgrade it to the newest version. Connecting to it (rather than a server hosted on my desktop machine) doesn’t give any noticeable amount of latency either! So this is good. The question is just what’s the latency connecting to it over the internet? It may be very laggy since I think it updates the position of every moving object 10x per second. In any case, the new version of the server isn’t taking any more CPU time than the old one, so that’s good.

I don’t believe I have that many more things that I need to do for the Alpha Test to start.According to the list, I think I just need to add Chat, In Game Editing, make sure that saving the game world to DB really works, and then setup the Asset downloading mechanism. Oh yeah, and the most important but probably most painful– get it working on Windows. Anyway, I think this means I’m ready to ask the question:

Who wants to be an Alpha Tester? Really, at this point, you will be a QA person. Your mission will be to break things on the server & client and report bugs. The game is not fun. It’s not even a game at this point. I would love to get up to 5 people to start. It would be nice to have people who run on several OS’s (Windows, Mac, Linux). However, Linux people who have 3D cards and know their way around a command line will be the first I’ll need. I actually suspect that the game will work on Mac out of the box-ish, but whoever volunteers for that will need to compile and install things on their system since I won’t be able to produce binaries. So here’s the requirements:

• Fairly decent (P4) Linux, Windows, or Mac system
• 3D Card bought in the past 5 years
• For Mac and Linux, some programming experience (or at least knowledge of how to compile and install software)
• A lot of patience

And here’s what you’ll have to do:

• List your system specs
• Install the software according to instructions
• Run the Unit Tests for the software on your system and report results
• Run the client and report any bugs
• There will probably be several server load tests where we will need to arrange a time for all testers to connect to the server
• Submit bug reports when you find them
• Help narrowing down bugs to determine what the smallest set of actions is to cause them

Any volunteers? I’m only looking for people who are serious about testing. I suspect the test will start officially in a few weeks, but Linux (and maybe Mac) people can probably get in on it earlier.

I may need to turn people down as testers if I get too many (or too many on one OS or whatever). I’ll also be looking at people I know first. Don’t be disappointed. As things progress, I’ll let more and more testers in. Also please forgive me if it’s more than two weeks until the test starts, or if you have an insanely hard time getting the software to work on your system. This is a very early stage test, so there’s going to be lots of bugs and strange problems.

I almost forgot my screenshot!