Looks like this game is really getting widespread. I'm pretty glad everything seems to work so good at the moment. :-)

I hate how he says "it's really early on in the making of it". Gamers just don't realise the work that goes into indie projects. They don't realise that the message system they're using to type their chat message took a week to develop.

Is there a group somewhere for "indie developers that have spent much more time on a project than YOU would ever imagine"? If so, I might join.

You want kudos for your glorious chat system from the users because you spent one week for it? Are you kidding???

No. I don't want them to say "it's really early on in the making of it" when Julz has been working on this for what... over a year, when all the essential features work, and when the game already looks polished.

Edit: Also, maybe I didn't emphasize it enough, but the comment was written with a general feeling of "gosh I know the feeling of working on something for ages and then getting people who say 'uh, yeah, I guess that's pretty nice'", rather than a serious comment suggesting gamers should recognize the work going into a game. Because I realize most gamers never will.

Ok, fine that was exactly what I thought as well

Thanks, that's what I thought you meant. It's been about 6 months of development, but I'd still like to think that this isn't "really early on in the making" -- I'd like to be done with big updates and working on prototypes for my next project by the end of this Summer.

At the same time, I really appreciate their enthusiasm towards KarBOOM

Jibb

I feel the same way. Here's a typical conversation between me and my older brothers:

Me: "Look at this thing! It took me 7 months to build. It's very rough around the edges, but can you see how I did XYZ to accomplish ABC and how elegant a solution it was?"

Them: "It's not glorious or exploding with special effects yet, therefore it sucks."



BTW, I just noticed that in that photo of PC Gamer KarBOOM is listed right under Minecraft! You're bound to get attention by just being on the same page as that game.

The registered userbase had stagnated since it had been a while since I had updated KarBOOM. Suddenly on Friday I had 10 more players, one of them citing PCUser UK as the reason they found it, and since then another 15 or so have joined.

I'd be interested to know what section KarBOOM is being shown under. Friends of ours in the UK are sending over a copy.

I'm hosting a game right now for most of the day -- probably until about 9pm EST -- but can't participate myself because I'm studying (5 exams this week). Server offline. Having port issues, and don't have time to resolve them today

I can't wait to finish uni for the year and focus my efforts on KarBOOM again

Jibb

EDIT:
UPnP doesn't always work perfectly, is not necessarily helpful for network savvy users, and will only ever be used by players who host a game. The plugin itself crashes on some systems unless a certain Microsoft C++ redistributable is installed, and this crash happens on game startup, even though many users wouldn't have needed to use it.

It's extremely useful, for sure, but causes enough problems that it could have users give up on KarBOOM without even being able to try it if it crashes on startup.

With these in mind, the next version of KarBOOM will not use the UPnP plugin, but will come with a separate application that does to let the user open and close ports. The plan is for the player to be able to launch this application from KarBOOM when setting up a host (which will use command line options to set appropriate default values); if the application crashes, it won't take KarBOOM down with it.

If at all possible, you should install error handling and return codes into your UPnP application. Then, if KarBOOM tries to run the application but the application crashes, KarBOOM can notify the user that he has the wrong version of the C++ redistributable. Even if the user doesn't understand what that means, he will at least understand that the problem lies in his own computer, and not KarBOOM.

And in my opinion, this will help lessen their initial impression that KarBOOM is bug-ridden software.

That makes sense. I'm not experienced with communication between two different applications, but I'll see what I can do.

I'm hosting again today, and this time it'll stay up much longer, I believe. I still can't participate, because I'm studying for exams.

If you can't find the server online, make sure you're using the latest public version (0.2.4).

Jibb