OK, lets be honest here, most of you have already left. Very little has occurred, and the overruling reason is that most of the developers have been busy or bored. I’d tell you to deal with it, but if you’re reading this, you already have.
Fortunately, my own work and enthusiasm has returned, and since this is going to be a smaller, closer-knit group than we had in later releases of Pokemon Global and PokeNet, I’m going to feel free to drop some of the overprofessional tone I took in some of my previous posts.
So what’s the plan? Well, we have login and walking working again – kind of. However, we feel that now would be an excellent time to overhaul some of the basic functions like walking and maps. For those unfamiliar with why this needs to be done, allow me to explain. First of all, we have used Tiled for map creation, which is quite good for the mappers, as lastplacer can explain. However, it has several core weaknesses in our particular use of it.
Firstly, the server does not really need to know a whole lot about the map, such as how it looks. All it needs to know is whether the player can or cannot move in a particular direction, from a particular spot. In the currently implementation, it has to load *all* of the map data, regardless of whether or not it needs it. This slows down collision checks, which leads to the slower march-style walking of previous versions of Global.
How did we get the faster walking in PokeNet VV then? Well, we cheated. We frankly just told the client to go ahead and forget whether the server said something was legal to walk or not, inbuilt some collision checks clientside, and let the server catch up. This is perfectly fine, but this system has its own weakness(jumping during a battle sequence, as some of you noted), that require some additional work with.
Furthermore, on the client end, each tile is loaded separately, quite a workout for your computers. Rendering would be sped up quite a bit if we could load the entire map, or at least individual layers, as separate images.
Some of you may or may not have known that we were considering using an engine made by Sienide to help correct some of these problems. We have decided against it. To clarify, Sienide has never worked for Crystalis Online, despite the misperception that he is. He *has* offered to let us use his engine, but we have decided that its weaknesses (and the fact that it is not designed for an MMO) make it a better choice for us to go on our own.
OK, if you’ve suffered through this long a post, you deserve to know what on earth this all means. Rough translation – we will not be working on coding the actual game for a few weeks yet. We are just working on optimizing the ability to do core functions like walk, move around, and eventually animate layers (so that we can have moving water, etc), while at the same time, Wyverii (who by the way is quite an amazingly diligent worker), and the concept artists like Shanti and Ethice will be designing our actual, you know…mons.
Also, I’d like to put out a call for any of our old battler crowd to help pitch in (PhoenixClaw, HeadHunter, you still hang out here?) with the development of battle strategies and to tweak the new battle system plan. If you are interested, and consider yourself a good battler, PM Fshy94 in the forum and I’ll see if you meet the criteria. Drawig and myself thus far have been planning this out, but more people is good when developing a battle system of this scale.
Finally, I’d like to thank you all again for sticking by us – its a long road, and it’ll be longer still to the end. So thank you.
– Fshy
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