PAST Prototype Walkthrough

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http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=15175649

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Finally captured 1 gig of video and managed to reduce it to 100MB in a WMV with no sound.

You should still be able to read the text though what is said doesn't really matter except to prove that the Local, Global, and IM chat work.

There is no sound to this video and it was done in pseudo-WAN conditions (out of the office but only one hop). When we capture multiple hop video, we will post it to show that it responds exactly as you see.

Here are some screenshos from the video so you can see what it really looks like.


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wow! This is really impressive, this game has really eveolved and gotten really better sind the first time I saw your first video.
Im curious: Do you have any intrested "clients" for this education(?) software yet?

Thanks and I know what you mean! The first video is still on myspace and the change is dramatic in vision and function!

Just got a business plan drawn up with the help of some business consultants last week. We have a plan but it won't be enacted for at least another 6 months. Full commercial release will probably be in a years time. In that year we will be field testing with local private schools and unversities. They will form our "core" client base upon which we will grow our commercial clients.

I second what michael sayd. Impressive. Great to see you are making progress!

Before you go commercial, I would put some effort into improving the user interface. Both usability and graphics.

I think I remember this too, the progress is indeed quite remarkable !!
The level design looks good so far, I'm not commenting on that because it's still in development. The chatting looks decent and fluent but that depends from sever to server I guess and the gameplay is something I can judge from the moment I've played it

Cheers

Frazzle

The last two comments are the reason why this is a "prototype" and not a "demo":
Things work but don't necesseraly have to look pretty!

Frazzle, we are trying our best to get our office network topology set up for a true outside test. At that point, you can play around our world (though "gameplay" may be a bit too kind for what you can do in world right now... we don't have the "game" scaffolding up yet.)

Nice to see your game running.

Some questions that came up when viewing the demonstration:

How much of the game is run on the server, and how much on the client?
For example the particles, indicating the flightpath of the ball, do you
send that information to the client, or is this just calculated by the clients version of the ball?

Do you controll your entities by using 3dgs "autmatic" methods, or by using send_skill,
or even using only arrays ?
Also, are there still potential problems of clients that could (on purpose) crash the server?

3dgs used to have that problem when using incorrect skript on the client (as much as I remember)

Can you easily "exclude" serverspecific code from the client-release,
or how much needs to bedefined the same on both sides.

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How much of the game is run on the server, and how much on the client?

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The server runs 100% of the game. The client is merely a dumb terminal processing the visual cues from the server. So the particles are controlled by the server in that the balls position is sent by the server and the client traces particles from that.

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Do you controll your entities by using 3dgs "autmatic" methods, or by using send_skill,
or even using only arrays ?

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Amusingly enough to me, we use var arrays! I started using send_skill to control entities but now we only use that to send info down to the server, not up to the client.

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Also, are there still potential problems of clients that could (on purpose) crash the server?

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While we both know that security is a weak link in the 3DGS network protocol, normal usuage of the client software does not lead to crashing no matter what you do. You could I suppose create a script that would crash it but I don't know what that would look like.

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Can you easily "exclude" serverspecific code from the client-release,
or how much needs to bedefined the same on both sides.

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So easily, it's already done! The server has zero client code and the client zero server code. Remember that with proper network object indexing, you don't need to share code. So the only thing that is shared are the script position of network vars and strings and such and that would be deep in the WRS file so not open to the public.