8:25 AM] Durandal: Hi Callum, got a minute to talk?
[8:26 AM] Callum: hullo
[8:27 AM] Durandal: I need to talk business with you.
[8:28 AM] Durandal: The entirety of the Discovery development team is currently hedging their bets on Librelancer. I believe it is a good project and it was one which has my full endorsement, but recently we've been noticing some disconcerting trends.
[8:28 AM] Durandal: We want something servicable as soon as possible. That means netcode, NPCs, the ability to drag and drop Discovery over. What we've been observing, is feature creep. Normal maps and new lighting are nice and all, but they aren't integral to a functioning game platform.
[8:29 AM] Durandal: So I wanted to touch base with you and see what's what.
[8:29 AM] Durandal: Are you facing obstacles? Can I allocate talent to help?
[8:29 AM] Callum: Normal map discussion is more of me thinking about loud about how to structure the renderer. However I'll probably be leaving this to forks
[8:30 AM] Callum: i had a look at the maths and decided it was a bit much at the moment(edited)
[8:30 AM] Durandal: I approve. I know a lot of graphically oriented people out there who will happily sweep in and take that over.
[8:33 AM] Callum: My current gameplay blocker is probably the rolling part of things. I'm really not quite sure of the maths around it but you're probably right about refocusing. My next move will probably be to re-do the ini parser to have a more consistent structure + error handling
[8:34 AM] Durandal: Rolling part of things?
[8:34 AM] Callum: Ship rolling
[8:34 AM] Callum: a lot of my behaviour steering-wise matches FL now, the physics values are loaded as they are in ini
[8:34 AM] Callum: just the roll axis(edited)
[8:34 AM] Durandal: What's the hangup?
[8:35 AM] Callum: i'll have to play around a bit more but i think FL applies some sort of levelling factor that i haven't been able to quite get
[8:35 AM] Callum: in relation to the plane
[8:35 AM] Durandal: Honestly,
[8:35 AM] Durandal: I'd be fine with doing away with autolevel.
[8:35 AM] Durandal: And I say that as a vanilla physics purist.
[8:36 AM] Callum: i'm probably going to leave the handling code for a while anyway because it does do the basics of navigation
[8:36 AM] Callum: it isn't technically blocking other things in terms of getting playable stuff out
[8:36 AM] Durandal: I would very much like to see more progress made on NPCs and netcode.
[8:36 AM] Callum: ok so that means
[8:38 AM] Callum: right fleshing out gameplay
[8:38 AM] Callum: those'll be in after a couple more architectural things that should hopefully mean disco opens consistently
[8:38 AM] Durandal: Can you elaborate on that a bit?
[8:39 AM] Callum: when my ini parser doesn't have perfect input in a lot of cases it just throws a shit fit and crashes
[8:39 AM] Durandal: Okay.
[8:39 AM] Callum: so i just gotta re-do it to become one that spits out more warnings instead
[8:39 AM] Callum: not too hard
[8:39 AM] Durandal: So fundamental parsing architecture. That makes sense.
[8:39 AM] Durandal: And then from that, NPCs flow naturally.
[8:40 AM] Callum: and also in general cleaning up that mess that is the ini section so I can add more to it without it getting more spaghetti-like
[8:40 AM] Durandal: That'd be nice.
[8:40 AM] Durandal: What about netcode? What's the sitrep on that?
[8:41 AM] Callum: netcode basically relies on the same thing as NPCs which is me fleshing out the game state a bit more
[8:41 AM] Callum: there's a few hardcoded demo things still left in
[8:41 AM] Durandal: I see. What can I do to assist you or incentivize you in getting this work done?
[8:42 AM] Callum: In terms of getting bits and bytes across a connection I've got a 3rd-party library that does that, and a lot nicer than dplay as well
[8:42 AM] Durandal: And is more secure, I hope.
[8:43 AM] Callum: more secure than vanilla
[8:43 AM] Callum: combat's a very tricky one to keep secure
[8:43 AM] Callum: but the basics of one hardpoint should have one gun can be guaranteed
[8:44 AM] Durandal: It should be trivial to code in the same protection measures that dsace offers now that we no longer need to hook in.
[8:44 AM] Callum: how much of dsace is server and how much client?
[8:44 AM] Durandal: dsace is clientside.
[8:45 AM] Durandal: Nearly all of the AC is clientside.
[8:45 AM] Callum: hm
[8:45 AM] Callum: i'm sure a lot of that could be verified serverside
[8:45 AM] Durandal: All the server does is fuck you up if the client pings the server going "yo shit be fucked"
[8:45 AM] Durandal: Well, theoretically, in a perfect world.
[8:45 AM] Durandal: But since FL's shit is all handled clientside...
[8:45 AM] Durandal: Collissions, fire rates, etc
[8:45 AM] Durandal: You get the idea.
[8:46 AM] Callum: yeah
[8:46 AM] Durandal: But yeah for now.
[8:46 AM] Durandal: I'd like you to focus on getting LL into a more playable state.
[8:46 AM] Callum: For now it'll be, get shit moving on screen
[8:46 AM] Durandal: Is that something we can expect to see, and again, how can I help?
[8:47 AM] Callum: tbh now that i've fixed my build system and got the editor out a lot of crap is out the way
[8:47 AM] Callum: since it actually worked through quite a few bugs
[8:48 AM] Callum: net-side i'm going to have to drop some of yuri's bright sql ideas
[8:49 AM] Callum: oh the only other thing is the chase camera
[8:50 AM] Durandal: What's up with the chase cam?
[8:50 AM] Durandal: Chase cam is uh.. pretty important. :D
[8:50 AM] Callum: haven't done the weird spring stuff yet
[8:50 AM] Durandal: Ah.
[8:51 AM] Callum: there seem to be a few variables in the ship ini that control the spring that i haven't quite worked out
[8:51 AM] Durandal: Yeah I'm not super familiar with cameras but I think they should be easy to figure out?
[8:59 AM] Callum: i did also recently manage to get the renderer in a state where it didn't shit itself on jinx models
[8:59 AM] Callum: which was a task
[9:00 AM] Durandal: I'm sorry.
[9:00 AM] Durandal: No, seriously, that's not sarcasm or humor.
[9:00 AM] Durandal: I apologize for Discovery's fucked up models.