Wow…. post IGC…

Wow… IGC ’03 is over. Damn. Another year until the next one. Of course, that’s probably a good thing – processing all the stuff I picked up at IGC ’03 will take a while, and my body is gonna be a while recovering from all the beer, bad eating habits and beer 😉
Met a hell of a lot of people this year again – to anyone who gave me feedback on TZ, I just gotta say THANKS! It’s much appreciated, and the game will be better because of it! However, most of the feedback told me something very important – the game style and design is valid. There’s only three important things to change:
Adding a Shot Cam. Fire a shot, and a Picture in Picture window pops up in the corner, chasing the shot. Gives you a MUCH clearer picture of what’s going on.
More stuff to blow up! We use a lot of .dif’s in the game, and it looks like we’ll have ta’ change ’em out for .dts models instead. Bascially, people want to blow up EVERYTHING 🙂 I’ll probably also be submitting some patches for making the FxReplicator capable of having stuff blown up – IE, burn down trees, burn the grass, etc. 
A scripted help mode – basically, a quick walkthrough of the game the first time you fire it up. The game isn’t complicated, but people are FPS trained – when they see something that looks like it’s an FPS game, they think like it’s an FPS game, and that doesn’t work.
TZ blew up during the LAN game. I wasn’t the only one that had problems occur, but, it was a bit frustrating at the time. But I got a heck of a lot of feedback from the amount of time it did run, and from setting down and showing it off to people.
As soon as I get my new changes in there, I’ll post new pics, and make the first official beta. If you haven’t already, head over to midnightryder.com, make an account, and send me a message using the site’s messaging system. We’re really close to beta – probably two more weeks (I’m merging with HEAD again. I know what to expect this time, I’ve just got a few more issues to pound out yet to make it work the way it needs to!) (and yes, I know you’ve already signed up Ron 😉
It was great talking to everyone – huge thanks to the GG crew for once again putting this one. Considering the amount of effort that goes into it, it’s amazing they did it twice, and plan on doing it again! (Jay Moore is probably gonna sleep for a week now that it’s over I’m sure 😉
I look forward ta’ seein’ ya all again next year!
One interesting side-effect of IGC ’03 – my wife was thinking of joining the company before, and IGC pushed her over the edge. She’s joining Midnight Ryder Technologies – this is a wonderful thing 🙂 (My wife and I work well together 99% of the time – so I’m looking forward to it!)
Edward Smith   (Oct 14, 2003 at 08:00)
Oh why can’t there be an IGC in Australia? 🙁
Sounds good! blowin stuff up is fun! d:-P
What was the problem which made TZ blow up?
John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)   (Oct 14, 2003 at 13:58)
Glad to hear things went well. I really wish I could have been there to checkout the demo, as always though you guys have my support.
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Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr   (Oct 14, 2003 at 15:08)  
@ Edward: Email Jay and sponsor one in the .Au 😉 Of course, that would require quite a bit o’ money. 
Well, it looks like stuff blew up because of the network. I wasn’t the only one who experienced problems, unluckly. Routers had problems, multiple machines had the same name (which Torque uses during LAN games apparently), Some of the XP machines had firewalling turned on, and lord knows what else! No one thought of checkin’ ’em out ahead of time. I suppose next year, there will probably be some sort of testing way ahead of time 😉
In my .plan, I said we’d make everything destructable. After talkin’ with Eric, we decided against that – some things will be, but definitely not everything. We would have to delay the project too long for that one.
@John: Sign up for beta 😉
Yeah, when I first looked at HEAD, I was overwhelmed with fear – every file was different. I finally figured out that I didn’t have to deal with that – only specific files were of interest: Terrain stuff, particle stuff, and shapenamehud. After I figured that out, it became much less painful 😉 I shouldn’t have tried it just before IGC – I should have waited until after I got back! Live and learn 🙂
The big thing is figuring out the client-crash-on-connect problem. It works fine with the old version, and crashes in HEAD, so it’s not like a map missing a texture or something. And I’ve never managed to find what did it. Gonna try again, and see if I get better results.
Edward Smith   (Oct 15, 2003 at 00:16)
mmm, need to rob a few banks then.
Interesting that TGE uses the name in LAN, would that be a good idea to do?
good point… I think I’ll sign up for a beta :-D.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr   (Oct 15, 2003 at 00:25)  
I intend to try and replicate the problem here at the mega-LAN party Nov. 15th. – I’m shooting for havin’ around 30 machines playing all at once, just to totally stress test TZ (and seeing about getting all the beta testers to come in from the outside world too, just to find out what the realistic max connects for the game is. If we actually manage to have tons of people playing reasonably all at once, I’m going to be taking snapshots and video galore just to show it off ;-) 
Anyway – I don’t know for sure that was the problem. In fact, I’m not familiar enough to know for sure how much of a problem it really should have been :-) 
Sure – go sign up 🙂
Oh, and if you are gonna rob banks – might as well just come on over to the US one anyway, where the rest of us will be. Plus you’ll have escaped the country that way 😉
Matthew “Scandalon” Parsons   (Oct 17, 2003 at 17:01)
Hehe, Ned Kelly rides again! 😉
Edward Smith   (Oct 17, 2003 at 23:59)
lol or Teddy Smith.

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