Dev Log 4: The Thanksgiving Update

Dev Log 4: The Thanksgiving Update

Good Morning Openchamp and Gamedev enthusiasts alike! It's the holiday season here in the US and unfortunately, that comes with a major increase in time constraints for working on anything. This weeks dev log is going to talk about the future of the project and what's in store from here on.

The Good

  • I'll be setting aside a minimum of 10hrs/week for this project exclusively. A lack of motivation has killed many projects, but by forcing time for development we help minimize the risk of the project going dark.
  • The gameserver has been going swimmingly! @Ploinky has detailed a basic AI system that we are going to extend for our minions, jungle camps, buff monsters and other non-player creatures in the game.
  • Our Client UI is coming together nicely! I've moved off of the Server stuff to clean up our client, and seeing everything get cleaner and more intuitive has really helped with keeping motivation.
  • I'm training 3 individuals on the project scope, scale, and systems to potentially have them assist with development. These individuals come from very different backgrounds so you may not see the results from this very quickly, but this leans heavily into the focus of this game being a community on top of the core.

The Bad

  • Unfortunately, there's still not really a "game" yet. We have plenty of systems and ideas, and we're working on creating the UIs to make these systems functional, but art is hard and takes time, so please bear with us while we get everything connected.
  • Development has primarily been on Windows, and figuring out how to get everything working on linux has led to several hours of research and bugfixes to get our EAM Plugin to compile on linux, and it's still not fully there yet.
  • A lack of documentation across the project means a lot of the architecture is living in my head and not somewhere easy for people to pick up. I have strong hopes that as time goes on our documentation will get tighter and more intuitive for new users to hop in and go! See #setup-scripts in Discord as a starting point for users to get all the repositories and begin noodling around in the code

The New(?)

  • I'd love to make devlog videos, but I'm struggling to show off what we're doing since so much of it is not frontend. I know there's an interest in the backend of projects like this, but with the rapid testing and refactoring we've done and will continue to do, I can't provide a timeline of when I feel videos would be appropriate. However...
  • All repositories are now public, feel free to look at the source code across the board. If you have questions, #dev-general is the place to ask and feel free to @me if you're running into issues or see something that doesn't look right
  • I'll be putting some finishing touches on the client, then working on getting a PvP 1v1 mode working to test our networking and server code. While the map is still a work in progress, our TSCN importer means very little needs to be done on the server to add a new mode.
  • XML will be our language of choice for custom data packs. As of now, the server does no checks with the client to verify PatchData, but modifying your patchdata client-side will only make your instance bug out. Eventually we'd like to have the servers update the clients patchdata so when you connect to different hosts, you can pull new patches of the game with ease, but this is out of scope at the moment and will not be something I focus on for now.

Final Thoughts

Thank you all for taking some time out of your day to read this! Remember to reach out if you're interested in helping out and have a great week.

~ Cody Krist

That openchamp guy