We made a good start on the new site this week. I’ve been working on the generic multiplayer lobby and Dave has been creating the account system. Of course, we couldn’t just do any old multiplayer lobby and account system so we threw in a few of our own improvements :o) The lobby widget itself works with the SmartFox comms server which has so far proven to be easy to set up and integrate. As well as handling the lobby the widget will also provide the multiplayer API for any games that are loaded into it. We are aiming to test the multiplayer version of DTD at the end of next week. We have also started to syncronise our vision of how the site is going to function and have worked on filling out the key features. Dave’s experience of building large account driven sites is going to come in very handy!
I have also been working on the ‘Deluxe’ version of DTD which will be in downloadable form only. Flash gains extra performance when run locally so it will allow me take advantage of better graphics and larger maps. It will also contain advanced features such as save/load, tower pre-setup and end of game tower stats.
Dave introduced me to Napster this week and now I am hooked! While I am not a fan of the low quality of MP3 audio, the ability to find pretty much any album you want and play it straight away is very very cool. Oh and I also came up with a new TD concept that will use the DTD engine but will be played in an entirely different way. All you people who wanted to manually target the towers will finally get your wish, kinda ;o)
Paul & Dave\'s Novel Concepts 
Looking forward to any TD enhancements :-)
Awesome! cant wait for the downloadable version of the DTD.
one question… what resolution do you want the logo?
Large enough o see what it is, we will re-work any logo to fit in the site anyways.
Do you have an ETA of DTDD
(the extra D is for deluxe)
an average ETA ofc, the longer you take to reply the lower the leniency for taking longer.
Multiplayer DTD, downloadable Deluxe DTD… That’s all great news. Looking forward to it all. I just want to tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you.
Awesome looking forward to the offline version that can be more realistically used at work w/o leaving port 80 tracks everytime the person plays. ;)
I’m interested to know what you’re doing with the new versions. Is the multiplayer version going to be downloadable or still a Flash-in-browser game? And if it is still in Flash as before, how are you handling the client communication? XML over HTTP, some existing server system, or your own?
Hmm re-read that and you’re using SmartFox, so it will be within a Browser still and not downloadable I assume?
Mark
# we will be using smartfox for the communication between clients, in tests it is VERY fast, more than fast enough for our needs.
# our intention is that all games be on the site (not downloads/exe’s) and all you the player needs is the flash plugin and an account on the site.
Thanks for the answer, Dave, that’s interesting.
I’ve coded a socket server myself and sorted the communication between Flash and the server, and it also appears to be fast but I’m not sure just how reliable the speed is (that is, if it’ll maintain the frequency of packets, or suffer lag when the client CPU becomes saturated, etc). More of an issue for me though: my game is real-time and interactive, so lag is noticable! Very interested in what you’re doing with multiplayer, DTD has prevented me achieving much work for the past couple of weeks! ;-) At some point I’ll have to look at SmartFox and the alternatives, to at least see how the performance compares to my server, though I never think mine’ll be generic enough to work for other people!
Looking forard to it MPDTD!
@Mark
TD’s (at least the way we code them) are only semi-interactive and do not require much information to be transferred between players. One of our upcoming games is very much ‘interactive’ so we will have to cope with the lag more directly.
I’ve discovered – to my horror and supprise – that AS3 does not support UDP, which is going to make real-time games significantly harder to develop. I’ve tested some code today and found that, realistically, pushing around 3 – 5 packets/second should be consistently achievable, but that resolution isn’t guaranteed (though it never is anyway) and isn’t suitable for what I had in mind.
Of course – it’s all down to how you use those 3 packets! With client-side prediction and not trying to put too heavy requirements on the server (like networked physics, eugh!!) anything is possible!
Yay!
Hi, I’m just wondering if there’s been a downloadable version of DTD 1.5, or whether it’s been put on hold/scrapped for now. Laptop + on the move = no internet connection = no DTD 1.5 :(.