New networking is on the horizon.

Hello all!

I've been absent from the forums for lots of reasons -- some good, some bad (bad = sick). The good reasons are way more fun so I'm going to talk about those!

So, as of today, we have some exciting news about a reworked networking model which allows us to ignore nearly all firewall and configuration issues!

We have a successful implementation of a publish/subscribe networking system in play which we'll be rolling out to the early access folks later this week and into public beta next week.

The updates provide the framework for an upcoming Game Lobby solution as well as the framework to allow for idle and recover type sessions. Do you have a spotty network at home? Are you hosting and keep losing your players only to have to reinitialize all the time? Well, this fixes that. If you lose your connection and no one has snagged your session name (see screenshots below) then you can resume your session and reconnect your players seamlessly.

If you're a player with a GM who's lost their connection or simply rage quit, you'll have the option to return to the launcher without having to relocate/relaunch the app manually -- whee!



During our internal testing, these were very zippy and we saw a marked increase in lighting and shadow casting performance as well.

The reason for this is that part of the networking pass also includes a massive update to the serialization model. The downside to this is that existing games and session will not run in the test version we'll be putting out there.

We're working on updaters which will bring older games into the fold and will have these ready before we go live.

So BE WARNED! older save games will likely fail and make you sad if you load them into the test version. All of these changes are centered around the creature classes, so you can evade these issues by saving out creatures and players to the library then adding them back to the maps.

Despite this issue, we're still extremely excited to be able to announce the upcoming update!

- Owlbear and team.

 

Silly Kril, fonts colors are for kids!