My Modern Battlezone Pet-Project...

[General BlackDragon]

When can we play?

[bigbadbogie]

Looking good, TJ.

This new engine is like perfection incarnate.

[TheJamsh]

This post is turning into a dev blog lol. I can't remember if I posted the vid before this one...

Did a major rehaul of the weapon class to reduce memory allocations. Working on some kind of ordnance / projectile pooling system as well to reduce that even further. It'll definitely help later on when a group of tanks are unloading miniguns on everything... BZ probably doesn't need to go to that extreme but unreal actors aren't very cheap to spawn and delete all the time

Also added an initial spool-up time for weapons too, always wanted that in BZ (I think we got it in a patch eventually though?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw5X6BzXyBs

[Red Devil]

looks really nice.

i'm hearing the spool-up, but the weapons fire while it's spooling up. were you going for the gatling effect where the barrels spin up before firing or something else?

[bigbadbogie]

This post is turning into a dev blog lol. I can't remember if I posted the vid before this one...

Did a major rehaul of the weapon class to reduce memory allocations. Working on some kind of ordnance / projectile pooling system as well to reduce that even further. It'll definitely help later on when a group of tanks are unloading miniguns on everything... BZ probably doesn't need to go to that extreme but unreal actors aren't very cheap to spawn and delete all the time

I'm mostly using ray-trace weapons thanks to the projectile FPS drop.

Epic really should improve on that.

I don't know if it's actor spawning that's the issue. It could also just be the number of actors in the world at a time - especially ones with sub-stepped collision detection.

It's weird that a brand new and modern engine struggles to keep up with BZ2 in that area.

If only GSH worked for Epic...

[TheJamsh]

@RD - Yeah there's a short spool-up time then they start firing. The other buildup sound is the heat but it's a nasty effect atm... it might not make it in to the weapon at all but it'd be a nice thing for modders if not.

@BBB - It's just designed differently that's all, BZ2 is deterministic and lockstep - that's it's key (and the multiworld system, which I *think* I understand now). Unreal won't ever go down that route because it makes no sense to do that for most games. It's classes are probably soooooooo light compared to Unreals too, but that's because of all the bells and whistles. You can't have everything :p

The man reason for the ordnance pooling is to prevent memory fragmentation over time. Actors are a pretty heavy weight class and spawning them in so often and destroying them / leaving them for the garbage collector will cause me problems later. As GSH once said, you have to plan for this kind of stuff in advance in the case of tens or hundreds of units.

The biggest obstacle I face isn't even that though, it's the bandwidth. There's no way I'll be able to use UE's replication for projectiles later on, it's too heavy to replicate an objects transform, velocity & other data over the network. It'd be much faster if I could just say "I spawned a projectile at this time in this position facing this direction, now do your stuff". In theory that parts not too hard, it's just ensuring the simulation runs exactly the same way on the client as the server. Get's a little more difficult when things like MCurtains and MITS mines are involved...

The key is determinism, the simulation always needs to run exactly the same on the client as it does on the Server and account for latency too. Haven't even handled it for the hovertanks yet... they need a big rework. But... that's why I'm doing it in the first place, for dat knowledge!

Edit: I just realised, I haven't linked this here yet. Here's a public trello of what I'm workng on, if you wanna follow the development. As you can see, I've got my work cut out for me just to get to 'Deathmatch' level... https://trello.com/b/xNJGZT4N/hovertank-game

[TheJamsh]

Music player because... bored.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuJ_dqto18

[TheJamsh]

Experimenting with my own ideas now. Plus new netcode / weapons etc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPb70PUf7KE

[Red Devil]

very nice, TJ

[DeusExCeteri]

Small nitpick, but if you're going to have afterburners shouldn't they be blue, with normal thrusters being orange? Since, y'know, afterburners are hotter than normal thrust?

Very cool, though.

[General BlackDragon]

I was thinking "why is orange faster if blue is hotter" too.

[DeusExCeteri]

For maximum cool points make the afterburn purple.

[Red Devil]

reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPfcwT4Fcy8

[TheJamsh]

Haha I wanted them Purple originally but the accidental orange looked pretty good, although that is a valid observation! Luckily it's just a simple colour parameter to tweaks the colours!

[SSA]

I really hope you finish this it looks great!
Is this going to be a new game with new game play or is this going to be normal BZII in unreal?
Keep up the good work!