Hi everyone,
I just figured out there as a section on this forum where people can show off what they're working on

Anyways, I've been working on this game for a total of maybe 30 hours, and I'm pretty new to gamestudio. Please don't expect anything all-to-great, as I said, I'm not too familiar with gamestudio yet (Worked with it for about 3 months now).








Please note that these screens were taken at different times throughout the development process. Not all of them show the newest version...
If you're really interested, here's a webpage I set up for the game. I am constantly updating that webpage, so it's easy to follow the progress that is being made, and it contains more info about the game currently and what it's supposed to be.

I am completely open to suggestions, constructive criticism and the like.

~TehV

For a first project, this is great and it seems like you're getting some things done pretty well that newcomers often have trouble with.

My first big project with 3dgs was: Tadaaa... a multiplayer Space Shooter. 4 Years later, I'm still working on it.
My suggestion: Don't start with mutliplayer. It's gonna drive you wild.

And if you really want to do multiplayer, don't start with 3-Dimensional movement. That is, don't start with space.
Movement in Space just sucks, if you wanna make a solid multiplayer game.

And if, after having read this, you still wanna make a space multiplayer, then start with the basics. Get the joining and kicking of players done first. Playernames. Players' Teams. Chat. Menus. Only after these things would I focus on actualy gameplay. Cause when you're in the middle of coding the gameplay and you you suddenly notice that teams aren't reset right if a player leaves the game and another player rejoins in his/her place, things will get VERY messy.

Just my 2 cents...

P.S. Spacecube and particle effects are of on a good start. You might want to work on the models though. But again, work on the basics of multiplayer first, then go on to making models, gameplay, levels, User interface and the like.

Edit: One more thing: For the star-stripes, try using the "STREAK" flag instead of the "BEAM" flag. It's not as fast, but looks much better.

Wow, for a first project this is impressive!

I'd agree with Germanunkol in that you should not start with a multiplayer game. Multiplayer programming is the nastiest beast you'll ever encounter. Instead, I'd start with making the game singleplayer so that you can concentrate on exploring Gamestudio and learning the system.

Thanks
I decided to follow Germanunkols advice and sort out the basics of multiplayer first. I added a simple chat to the game, and tried to fix that jerky movement that occours when a player has high latency. It all works pretty well.

Players can see eachothers ships ingame and can now even speak to eachother. Here's a snapshot of what that currently looks like:



Just a quick question: For the shots, I simply transferred all values that are required to the server - Weapon type, start position and start angle. In total, that is 7 values. The server then spawns a particle effect (which then should be spawned on all clients as well). The position and velocity contain all required info about the shot, and the function that runs on the client computer then should spawn the same shot as well, making the movement for rockets and laser beams run on each client seperately rather than on the server where the position of each beam and rocket is updated constantly. However, this only works reliably in LAN games. Does anyone know why?

What do you mean by "only works reliable"? Do the shots not created when running the game over the internet? Or do they get created at wrong positions?
Or what's the problem?

7 Values: I don't know what your weapon system does.
In my game, a ship can only change weapons when the player respawns. That simplifies things a little, because then the clients already know what weapons the other clients have, so all the server needs to send is "player XY is shooting now" and the rest can be done locally, because usually the positions of the gun are pretty reliable and updated correctly. Also, since collision avoidance is done by the server only (for shots) this method works.

How does it work for you? How does the client choose weapons? Can they change?

Basically, the shots fired by someone in the same network as the server are visible to all other clients, but the shots fired by clients from an external network are not created on the other clients most of the time (Out of 25 fired shots, the clients can only see 1).

The ships currently have 4 weapon slots. These are currently filled with the only weapons I have programmed so far.

When a shot is fired, I set 7 values on the ship - 2 vectors (one for position, the other for orientation) and what weapon it is. The orientation is a vector of length 1 (Direction instead of angles). I then use send_skill to transfer this data to the server - which, in most cases, seems to either not receive, or not process the data when it comes from external networks. I do not know whether the server receives the data, processes it and the data gets lost on its way to the other clients, or if it is processed incorrectly.
As I said, it works fine in a LAN game, just the external networks cause major trouble.

~TehV