MV3D Development Blog

Or as B&B put it, “Testies, testies, 1.. 2… 3?”

I’ve got a couple of client related bugs to fix, but then I’ll probably send out the second test version. Maybe a few days, though one bug is definitely a wierd one. All of a sudden, the client started crashing whenever it was starting to display the game world. Other than UI related things and stack thrashing, crashes have been incredibly rare since I’m using Python. I traced this one to the import statement that loads the code to handle the client side of the player’s avatar. Putting a statement before it that prints a test message to the window and does nothing more fixes the problem. I’ve seen this sort of thing many times before in multi-threaded applications. The problem is that the MV3D client isn’t multi-threaded. It makes no sense for a problem like this to occur in a single-threaded app, but well, got to figure that one out.

I was able to increase the server performance by a factor of 10, though. Because of the floating point precision issues I mentioned below, ODE physics does not like big things. I knew when I started using it that the robot model was frikkin’ huge, and I thought maybe it may mess up ODE, but I didn’t want to screw around with scaling in Ogre. Anyway, scaling things by 1/10 allowed me to increase the amount of time that the physics engine could move the simulation ahead each iteration and therefore, went from having to run physics 10 times per iteration to having to do it 1 time. Since collision detection in the physics engine was the reason things were going slow, this bumped the speed up by at least 10 times. In fact, the following screen shot shows the client connected to a world with 2410 objects in it:

I haven’t scaled the landscape down to 1/10 scale yet so it’s blocky, but that’s next on the agenda. I should actually go even smaller because I like using 1 meter = 1 game unit. The robot is 8 game units high. He should probably be more like 2-3. Really, I should ditch the Robot. Soon, oh yes. Soon.

I did play with freeze a bit yesterday. I was able to freeze the client app. Freeze crunches up a Python program in to a Unix executable ELF file. I still have to play around because freeze doesn’t include any pyd/so files.. It also doesn’t know about any things that are imported based on what the server tells it to import. I suspect I can do what I do on the Windows version, which is include the source trees for Client and Util so that the executable can just import out of there. No clue if that works for freeze, but I hope so. It may be hard for me to test as well since I don’t have a second Linux box that has a 3d graphics card in it. I may have to blindly ship it out to a tester unfortunately because any results that I get on my desktop could be invalid. I have all the libraries and python stuff already installed, so the app may work fine on my machine, but fail miserably elsewhere.

I’ve also been thinking about ideas for the next version. In particular, terrain features and in game editing. For the terrain, I have to find a good way to allow for things like roads, paths, and rocky vs grassy surfaces. Right now, each large terrain chunk must have a single texture. What would be cool would be to have a base texture and then be able to overlay other textures on top of it in such a way that they blended at the edges. Then of course, on the terrain comes grass/flowers/small bushes/etc. There is already a sample PyOgre program that makes grass, so I’ll use that.. Or just make a generic way to put stuff on the terrain.

The In Game Editor, which I am creatively calling IGE, is going to be a fun one. It has to be very easy to use, very powerful, and very flexible. A tough combo, certainly. Good UIs are not my strongpoint (even though that was the brunt of my first professional programming job). This is going to require a lot of thinking. If anyone who reads this has any suggestions for how they’d like an in game MORPG world editor to work, please comment.
Finally, if you haven’t seen it already, MMORPG fans or gamers in general will get a kick out of this South Park episode from a few weeks ago. Make Love, not Warcraft. So funny.