Category Archives: Post

Free version available at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jandric.seacraftfree and http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=seacraft+multiplayer.

Not so free on WP8: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/seacraft/117254d4-c29d-45bf-bcb4-99bd283aa65f

I think we have beta. Hopefully stable too. Time to start testing in tuning. I realised that I have 5 different Android devices laying around the house and tested it on each one. Also, now old iPad – the original – was able to provide pretty good performance. Also three different Windows machines ran it smoothly. Server side seems stable, which is also good. Subversion says it is now revision number 278! I moved AWS machine to Ireland, it had much lower latency from here. But I am still kinda sceptic about quality of service I get, considering how cheap it is (with fixed IP about 5$/month). I found Contabo and they seem legit, and am considering them for production after publishing. But now, time to spam friends and family and get first reactions. I wish I have done better job of 2D art, if not all of it, and am even considering outsourcing it and these guys seem really talented. Kinda mixed feelings, looking forward to feedbacks, bat at the same time worried about it all as well. The bugs, performances, server, network,…Still, very glad I actually did it, and now there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Flags! Flags everywhere. I need to stop with Buzz meme. Empires as starting points, and their colours. Plundering and conquering now working! Fight for yie empire. TIL that you can reduce texture by ¾ by disabling mipmapping. And yet by another ⅓ by using rgb565 instead rgb888. Circumnavigation finally. So many things to keep in mind when showing last and first regions at the same time. Towns really fire back. Semi retarded, but still dangerous. Four catchy music themes are going in. All from incompetech. Bit remixed and shortened. Also sound effects seem ready. God I hope raw files will be compressed by derbh.

EDIT – It does but not by much. 30%. AAC and MP3 are out of package. AAC is better but not working on win/ipad1. But sound is so essential. I’m enjoying playing it! :P

Bugs. Bugs everywhere. How is this thing even working so long without exploding. We now have three threads: main / GL, slow but light / network, and slow and heavy (terrain generation stuff). Nothing can go wrong now once we are in thread shared dynamic memory world. Once all is working – optimisations. So many reasons to produce jerks, lags, twitches. Bots are back in with half retarded AI. We are not lonely anymore.

Looting! :D Let the necessary violence begins. Floating barrels and chests. Anchoring. Ship swapping seems to be working. Better birds and dolphins. Fade in out screens. Pretty. Network issues and disconnects handled with warning and reconnects. Putting more prep work in main screen and town screen.

So much fun and so much win with terrain textures. GL is used in main rendering thread so all texture shading is done with cpu. Weighted functions for perfect transitions. Will have 16 different textures mapped in world. Oh, and unplanned – sand beaches! It really is starting to look…charming.

Intown completed. Idea came: unique royal titles per city for each player. Around 4k towns with around 7 royal titles to grant. Experience plays a role. Still wondering about whole guilds and city attacks gameplay. I think I’ve found all sounds and music I need – thanks incompetech!

Market completed. It..works. Not sure about prices and margins being well adjusted. Moving to shipyard, tavern and mayor. I don’t think I like non-3D game development that much.

In town work. Backgrounds. Controls and items. Made bunch of own UI classes, seems to be working fine. Probable reinvented the wheel but that seems what all of this comes to. Market well under way.

This is dragging so long, I already needed to change major versions of Marmalade SDK and Node and even GCC! Learned to save money by using Amazon Spot instances and trial licences.