Weekly update #6 – Technical difficulties

This week I wasn’t really sure what to write about, because on Monday everything was working fine. I worked on a buff system. Which I got working on Monday. Then on Tuesday we got a new map, I downloaded the map and after that weird things started happening. First the soldiers (or creeps as they are called in other MOBA games) started warping around the map. I tried to fix that by trying to get the Astar path finding script reset. So I started working on that, but then Unity started crashing. I got the bug report window up and nothing really worked. Everytime I selected Astar in the scene it crashed. So I took a backup of my project, created a new blank project and downloaded the files again. Same thing happened.

I decided to try something else, to revert back to the latest update where I knew it worked, and I still had the same problem. The other programmers however didn’t have this problem, which was really weird. I had the same problem during Wednesday, even tried copying another programmers project to see if that worked. Late on Thursday however I managed to solve the problem, that said, I have no clue what really solved the problem, because we tried so many things. Firstly we had one of the programmers that had a working copy uploading what he had. It solved the problem, what what in that project that he uploaded solved it is what I’m not sure about.

The rest of the week was going into getting what I had done on Monday and Tuesday into the project as well as troubleshooting why the game lags so much when you have multiple players connected. Lagging occurs after more than 2 people connect to the server. So far we’ve disabled physics on the client side, disabled box colliders and the problem we had with the physics engine getting overran has been fixed, but the game is still lagging. One theory we had for why the physics engine went haywire was that the objects have their own physics properties on the client side, so when the server told the client where the bodies should go the client side physics didn’t like that. In any case disabling collision detection on the client side worked well for that particular problem.

We still have the problem for lag on the client side, we don’t yet know what it is, but right now the clients are waiting for the graphics to be presented. I’m not entirely convinced, but we have a theory that it might be related to graphics and missing shader components. That said, since it seems to be working better on the server side and all the assets are the same for both sides, I’m more inclined to think that it might be the networking that is causing the problems for us. We’re not sure though so this is something we need to figure out.

Luckily not everything has been at a standstill though, so the game has been progressing this week as well. Attaching some screenshots from the latest graphics that, although isn’t directly in the game right now, it will be looking like the screenshots below: