December progress update

So, after little more than two weeks I again have a playable (but still buggy due to sync issues) version of the game on mobile phones. The BIG difference now is that, since now most of the simulation code is deterministic and only input is being send to players I was able to make an otherwise unplayable game with slow connections to something that feels a little bit laggy. It's hard to make a game feel smooth after 300+ milliseconds of delay but I'm fine with that for now. I added an artificial delay on the way back for slow connections to catch up. It's incredible what a two-week period with great focus and motivation can do to move forward things.

I'm happy and optimistic about the near future because there's still a lot of room for optimization. Also, I've reached the point where I can safely continue development of new features and do optimizations on the go. Synchronization issues still need to be addressed ASAP though, but once I have the "rollback to a key snapshot" feature in place I will be able to recover even from that and keep going. Game state is not that complicated compared to other big games and I feel like sync issues should be extremely rare. The rollback feature will still be used to make extremely lagged players be able to catch up once their connection goes back to normal.

So... what's next game wise? Mostly internal tools to help me speed up development. I've relied so much on them these past month that I really regret I took this long to realize how important they are.

It's the last month of the year and I have all the intention of squeezing every single moment I can to code and move one step closer to the finish line because it's still a long way...

Thanks for reading.