Tutorial map & Master server

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Tutorial map & Master server


Tutorial map

Every game needs some sort of instructions on how to play. In Dog Fight we just had some images explaining the gist of the game. But Trains & Things is a more complex game. I also wanted to provide some form of basic scenario/campaign system so those that are keen could make single player event driven maps.

My initial attempt at a tutorial was all hand coded into a single script file, but I eventually cleaned it up and have broken it down into a nicer event system which can allow for a script to "listened to". It is still quite basic but provides a simple framework for setting up a campaign. Knowing how to program in GDScript is required however.
 
Today I managed to sit down and leave my coder hat for my bro and I stole his artist hat and put together a tutorial level. With a brief introduction to blender, by my bro, I was away and modeling cliffs as you can see in the picture below.

Tutorial Level

Master server: Matrix & Social buttons

I've also been concerned about the performance of the master server. We have no idea how many people will play our game and I have had much trouble trying to get the Matrix master server system to connect in a reasonable amount of time.

Previously the master server has always logged in to Matrix using a guest account, and I want a system where this is not the case. This means that in the future when/if we add a friends list for example, come 12 months down the track after some re-install your friends can still find you.

Now when the game first loads, it will ask you to login to Matrix using your username and password, the game can then remember this and automatically log you in in the same way your web browser remembers your email login.

Additionally, I have allowed for guest logins as I know when I have attempted to play some games and I have got to a login screen and given up right there as sometimes it is just to darn hard to fight an obfuscated login system.

If you have not made a Matrix account yet, you can do that over at the Riot website ready for when we release. If you do that you may as well come and join our Matrix channel as well #bitshift:matrix.org. 

To that end I sat down and debugged Riot using my web browser and found that it actually is doing far less than what my Matrix code is doing! I also found some bugs caused by multi-threading which I have in place to try to hide the connection time and not cause it to block the loading of the menu. What used to take up to 30 seconds to connect to a test channel that had 14,000 users and would crash consistently now happens in 10 seconds and does not crash.

New Matrix login screen
You will also a set of new social media icons under the news feed that takes you to the appropriate site to allow for you to quickly get the latest news or share our game with others.



Over and out,
the bitshift team.


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