Zordzman Wiki

Wow, I haven't posted in over a month. Exams, don't blame me. Though to be honest, I spent more time playing video games than anything else. My apologies.
Zordzman is still being worked on, don't worry. I haven't a funny video for you, but I will tell you chat is pretty much done, with support for most locales and UTF-8. UTF-8! HELL YEAH!
I've been working on other things recently such as dasforum and Competitive Minenig maps and guides.
The most visible new feature is the sexy netgraph on the lower right of the screen.

It represents traffic basically. No, more specifically it represents the amount of complete and valid JSON messages received each cycle. If your internet is taking a dump like mine is in the image, you end up receiving the messages in giant chunks, meaning there may be large pauses between logic updates.
3 months of nothing ahead of me, woohoo! CLENCH YOUR FISTS AND PUNCH THE AIR! This means I can pretty much work on Zordzman all the time.

Wow, I get a lot done when I'm not sitting around playing video games.

The amount of things I got done during the past week and this week! New soundtrack added by SneakySnake himself, sounds and fonts can be included in resource packages, servers can take in resource packages (can't do anything with them though...), playing sounds, beginning of chat... and other small things that only developers would care about.
I'm surprised after 8 months I'm still working on this. And right now I'm working on chat! Woo! That multiplayer experience is on it's way. Soon you'll be able to talk about how beautiful (or ugly) the map you're playing looks. Those golden flowers look stunning!
Here's a demo of playing sounds and music together:
Posted by gatsan

Woo, Easter Holidays! So I wanted to focus on art, sounds and music for a bit. Here's some drawings of the main weapon in the game:
I do like the idea of the weapon you wield getting bloodier in battles. Music? I'm working on "Casual". Sounds? rodrun and his brilliant voice acting will surely grace Zordzman and capture the hearts of many players in the future.
Posted by gatsan

So there's good news, and not-so-good news.
The not-so-good news is that Hollinski and SneakySnake no longer work on Zordzman, possibly because the project has grown large and a few arguments and not-so-pleasant experiences were had. They might help with a few things occasionally, but that will be about it. So sad!

The good news is that Resource Management is almost done. It is a complete rework of how resources are managed and this means something for the players and people running servers. Servers can have custom resources sent to the client in the form of "resource packages" that can easily be made.

Microcode (or rodrun, as we affectionally call him) will probably be helping along with Zordzman in the future.

Check out the concept art of Taming Rods and.. Electrikes? Electric? Elect rodrun for president 2016? Anyways, here you go!

After tomorrow will be the start of my 2 week long Easter Holidays! It's quite interesting how these posts started at Halloween, talking about how I hoped Zordzman Multiplayer would be "ready for all" by Christmas. Christmas and New Year have passed, and it's 3 months into 2015! We're making good progress anyways.
Posted by gatsan

Oh, I just realized it's March now. That "March" track I was talking about 2 posts ago? Here it is!
It happens to be the longest track I've made! 30 seconds. (wow)
Apart from that, nothing has happened since the last post.
Configuration files such has JSON huds have been moved to config/. You can now sort of select what server you want to connect to by changing config/config.json.
Have fun!
Posted by gatsan

Nope, still haven't given up. Okay, so entities client side are about done. Sneaky has also fixed the failing CI builds.
This is the stage where I want to start making real content for Zordzman. Art, music, sounds, gameplay...
On Mac, Zordzman still works very well with Steam. Screenshots, Steam overlay, all of that. Of course, it's not official, so you can't join each other's games or anything like that.
If you're bored, here's a cool poster that promotes violence, Japanese weapons, and safe programming languages with borrow checkers.

Slice those bastards up with your new RUSTY KATANA, which HURTS!
Not only is it lightweight* and easy to swing, but it's SAFE too!

The built in BORROW CHECKER will prevent you from heartbleed when you try to STAB YOURSELF FIERCELY TO DEATH in battle**!

*Heavier than most katanas due to rust.
**You will probably still die of goto fail.
Posted by gatsan

Exciting shit!
- New zorroman track, "March". There's also a failed one (but hey, it's still a track amirite?) "Early Morning Competition".
- KTB and cyanboy have boarded the TeamLe-Shop ship.
- KTB shall be maintaining this wiki.
- SneakySnake still works on zordzman, and because of his and Hollinski's efforts it builds on Windows!
- There is now a zordzman-plus-plus wiki (development-oriented)
being written by Hollinski.

I'm still trying to keep the development strong.

Posted by gatsan

Thought I'd given up yet? Nope!
So Hollinski's entity and message-processor branches on his repo have been merged with the main one, and they are quite a nice contribution.
Right now I'm just working on killing the old TCPSocket from the client and using MessageProcessor instead. It's almost Christmas, and I'm on holidays, so I can work on this in peace. At this rate we probably wont get it done for Christmas, so probably by late January/early February.

Music is being composed for Zordzman! There's currently 3 tracks (all very short): dunno, Lively, and Ready, all created in that order.
Ready is the one I created just today. The beat in that track I've done many times in real life using a table, my hand and a pen, so it was made pretty fast compared to the other two. Ready's beat (not the tune) sounds a bit like Space Jam to me.

Posted by gatsan

Whew. Finally replaced all SDLNet code.
If you didn't catch that, we're not using SDLNet anymore. It's full of shit.
We're using system sockets (BSD for Mac and Linux), and possibly WinSock for Winjizzle.
Zordzman will be available as an Application Package in Mac! This means if you're a Mac gamer you can add it to your Steam Library. Have fun!

Posted by gatsan

Happy 500 commits Zordzman! Seriously, we just reached 500 commits yesterday.
We then looked at the past commits and found something interesting.
Over 20% of Zordzman's commits were done in 4 days.
4 days.
It was a fast and lively start, and it seems to be dying off... but I wont give up.
Here's what one of the contributers said:
Posted by gatsan

09:46
-----
I reached 4 days uptime yesterday, but my brother had to turn my computer off because I ate fish.
...
I have to start making some more progress for Zordzman++. Multiplayer is a confusing mess, and right now I'm only working on the server loading a map and having the client and server decide what to do if the client doesn't have the map or the client has a modified map.

Posted by gatsan

I'm supposed to be celebrating Hallowe'en or whatever, but I won't get a lot done before it, so I'll put on a Christmas theme and hope Zordzman Multiplayer is ready for all by then.

Posted by gatsan