Hey Baby, I Wanna Know (What Have I Been Up to)!

Seems like it has been a while since I have done my last post. This is with good reason, my fingers are blistering from refactoring the server side engine. What is it that I am doing? Something maniacal in a time crunch - every programmers dream come true.

Currently I am in the middle of a major overhaul of the server side engine to be more authoritative in regards to gameplay. The key word here is gameplay. So far, the engine works great in regards to GUI systems calling server events and data. Such things would be high scores, creating games, joining games, ship configuration, and so on and so forth. The part that needs work is the actual code that handles the game logic simulation such as collisions and player positions. As it stands right now, the server just forwards all this information with no replication. This can lead to easy cheating and abuse of networking. So, I decided to fight this by doing the following:

• Player input is sent to server for processing
• Server calculates position
• Server updates game world on itself, then sends data to players
• Server handles collisions
• Server handles player elements - health, life, death, ammo, cooldown, etc.

On another note, I have also been working on the special effects in the game to make it more visually appealing. More on that on another date.