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Intersect Beta 6 Released!


jcsnider

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Beta 6 Released

9/7/2019

 

 

What's New?

We're at the finish line now! B6 brings a new UI, performance enhancements, networking optimizations, tons of bug fixes, new assets, and a lot more!

 

 

Performance Enhancements

Instead of rendering the map to off screen images, and then drawing those every frame (like we were doing), and instead of rendering every singe tile of every layer every frame (like most engines do), we're rendering using vertex buffers on the player's graphic card. Map data is transmitted to the graphic card once, and drawn rapidly from memory every frame granting massive FPS boosts on most graphic cards and reducing memory consumption significantly across the board.

Read more.

 

 

Texture Packing

When rendering graphics in a video game you can 'batch' draw calls. If you draw several consecutive sprites/objects/animations/ui elements/etc from the same texture all of those drawing commands can be combined and sent to the graphic card at one time.  The fewer batches that get sent the higher your fps. Texture packing increases performance by combining lots of your small textures into just a few larger ones. 

Read more.

 

 

Networking Optimizations

This is a huge step forward for programmers who will want to expand upon the engine. Packets are easier to create and process now, they are also significantly smaller than before, meaning less bandwidth is required for each client.

 

 

New UI

Intersect has a whole new look now, which we think you all will really like!

 

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Read more.

 

 

New Asset Pack

The Intersect Official Assets Pack is ready to go! All of the assets in this pack are free to use legally in your projects, even commercially.

 

Intersect will be the first free 2d mmorpg engine of its kind to be distributed in a state that's ready to create commercial projects. 

Read more.

 

 

Combined Switches & Variables

The coding behind switches and variables was a little insane... they were basically the same thing but handled separately, and in order to clean up we've combined the two. The new variables can now store true/false (boolean values) or numeric (integer values). We've set the foundation so that one day variables can also store different data types like text (strings).

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Searching and Folders in all Editors

All editors now have the ability to organize your game objects into folders! Group weapons together, or specific types of spells, groups of events, variables, etc. If you can't find what you're looking for you can also search for specific objects too!

 

Searching:

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Folders:

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Custom Class EXP Tables

Want to fine tune the amount of experience it takes to level up in your game? Now you can with custom exp tables!

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Password Reset

If you connect your server to a mailing service (like gmail) you players can request password reset codes that allow them to get back into accounts they have lost access to.

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API

Allow third party apps, websites, and other services connect communicate with your server. Programmers utilizing the API should be able to create and share:

Visual server control panels

Cash shops

Leaderboard systems

Website login integrations

Viewing player stats online

etc

 

Read more.

 

 

Combat and Event Additions

Kibz added new event commands for changing player name colors, forcing items to equip, percentage based buffs on both spells and equipment, shield spells and more.

Dev Blog. 

 

 

Bugs Fixed

On top of 100+ Beta 5 bug fixes, the private testing team that has been working with Beta 6 for all of August reported over 120 bugs that have been patched leading up to this release. Beta 6 should be one of the most stable versions of Intersect ever, and moving forward we are focusing less on features and more on stability while we create final release candidates and prep our services and the community for a full open source release :) 

 

Special thanks to @Khaikaa, @davidsaid06, @Mcadams, @BiGG, @hiroman, @Ainz Ooal Gown, and @Niko for their help during the 4 brutal rounds of testing they endured leading up to this release.

 

 

 

Download Links

Full

Upgrade

 

If upgrading from Beta 5 chose the upgrade archive, and be sure to read the Upgrading pdf located within.

 

 

 

Have fun!

 

 

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We did our best to keep b6 as bugs-free as possible, I'm sure there will be bugs but I think we all should be able to enjoy it with no major issues. It was so fun to play with the b6 builds, hope now you all can have even more fun with an stable version of b6.

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Thank you so much JC and everyone involved! I can't say enough to express my gratitude for this engine and everyone in this community. I feel like joining this community was just yesterday and its been a long ride. I think this engine is finally worth using for me personally based on my high standards and requirements. The 1.0 release and open source will be a dream come true and unlock the full potential of the greastest 2D ORPG engine. I can't wait to dig my hands into beta 6 and await the exciting release of open source! Thank you again and I wish you all the best.  <3

 

@jcsnider
I'm also excited for the networking improvements, especially when it comes to adding new packets as a developer. Does the networking improvements also mean there will be better latency and/or smoother networked gameplay? I personally never noticed any abnormal lag with Intersect, but I'm sure there's always room to improve networking in any aspect of games. I like networked games to feel as realtime as possible. I've played some popular MMOs where there is a considerable amount of lag between actions thats not noticable unless you run both clients at once and then the results is depressing how out of sync they are. Is there also client side prediction with the movement so it happens before the server receives it, or does the movement get handled entirely server-side? Any details is greatly appreciated. Sorry if this is the wrong thread to ask on. But I thought it'd be appropriate since the "Network Optimizations" doesn't specify if theres gameplay improvements directly.

Also, I absolutely love that its possible to "unlock equipment slot locations for the character menu". Can you give any details on how it works? I assume there's no setting to toggle it on/off and its just editing the JSON file to move around positions and add slots. Is that correct? Maybe a sample JSON file that shows how this specific screen is laid out, would be beneficial to people that are new to JSON. :)

 

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Thanks for all your hard work! Im very excited!

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On 9/9/2019 at 6:09 AM, Alexoune001 said:

Hello, Great for this new beta! I just wanted to know, however, how to access the forgotten password? Because I wanted to test the function (I configured it on the server side) In any case, congratulations to the developers for this beta which is great!

Wrote some docs for it, but it is broken in B6 and the button will never show up. Will be fixed in B6.1.

 

On 9/9/2019 at 12:08 AM, Shilo said:

Also, I absolutely love that its possible to "unlock equipment slot locations for the character menu". Can you give any details on how it works? I assume there's no setting to toggle it on/off and its just editing the JSON file to move around positions and add slots. Is that correct? Maybe a sample JSON file that shows how this specific screen is laid out, would be beneficial to people that are new to JSON.

I gave a very short description on how this is done here. Gonna tag @Gibier who has been writing lots of our UI tutorials recently.

 

On 9/9/2019 at 12:08 AM, Shilo said:

I'm also excited for the networking improvements, especially when it comes to adding new packets as a developer. Does the networking improvements also mean there will be better latency and/or smoother networked gameplay? I personally never noticed any abnormal lag with Intersect, but I'm sure there's always room to improve networking in any aspect of games. I like networked games to feel as realtime as possible. I've played some popular MMOs where there is a considerable amount of lag between actions thats not noticable unless you run both clients at once and then the results is depressing how out of sync they are. Is there also client side prediction with the movement so it happens before the server receives it, or does the movement get handled entirely server-side? Any details is greatly appreciated. Sorry if this is the wrong thread to ask on. But I thought it'd be appropriate since the "Network Optimizations" doesn't specify if theres gameplay improvements directly.

There won't be much change in latency.. I don't think we can really do anything about that. Packets that are smaller can arrive quicker, and will deserialize quicker so both the client and server can handle and display that information faster. I don't know if it will ever be visually noticable but every little bit helps. We do not currently have any sort of predictive movement or anything that's a lot more prevalent in games not restricted to such large tiles on a map. The current movement works by the client moving immediately and informing the server, and then the server will send corrections if the client ever moves to quick or steps somewhere they shouldn't.  Definitely still lots of room for improvement, but the biggest victory with the B6 changes is the ease to make and work with packet classes instead of manually writing/reading from a stream buffer and being forced to keep track of sizing and order of everything.

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As an analyst I loved your graphs, lol. Have you considered compiling the minimum, and recommended requirements for the engine as a base line for users who create their projects? Sorry if I missed it, or if its later down the road with a Q&A group. Awesome work guys. Pretty excited to try this build out with the API for cash shops/player rankings.

 

EDIT: Both links for the download go to the upgrade option, under the Download links. FYI.

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