Whew, lots of updates! I had a play test with Tony and Ericka, which gave me a bunch of great feedback. Some interesting ideas for possible experiments! Then today I got the selectable UI in, and a couple actions, kick and stop for the networked balls. I also added a boost ability, with cooldown, for the player. Works great, although i have yet to test it over the network, but i think these should be fine, as they are just like any other physics related interaction. Pickup and Drop are still the biggies, and, maybe, i will tackle those next.
Did a play-test with Adam and Thom yesterday. Discovered an issue when you have more than 2 players connected, the 3rd player's avatar does not sync up with the other 2 players! Luckily it was a pretty easy fix, having to do with initial values for the different authorization sequences. I also was concerned about the jitter i was seeing when playing, but i realized i was playing as a HOST, and the rigidbody sync system is not setup for HOST style play, only SERVER and CLIENT. The SERVER does no smoothing to the objects, which is why it looked so bad for me.
Now i can move forward onto the in-world item selection stuff.
In the past week got the rigidbody controller working across the network. Updated the test scene to include a "soccer stadium". Just an enclosed space which re-positions the ball if it gets out of bounds. The controller is working quite well. The visual representation is still quite basic, with just rotating to point in the direction of travel (or velocity of the rigidbody). Works great in most cases. Not so good when you get on a moving platform! Also, the visrep updates are not propagated across the network, so on other clients your avatar does not rotate.
Next steps are to do a minimum pass on the visrep rotation issues, and to get them updating on other clients. Then on to object selection, and the UI/Display for that. Was talking to Adam about it, and he gave some good examples. The way Sonic Adventures 2 displays the button and action that can be taken is great. What is not great about it is that there is no indication in-world of what object currently is going to be affected by the action. Rim-light or outline will take care of that. Also, the description of the actions available appear in the upper right of the screen, divorced from the object itself. While i like the consistency of location, it takes your eyes away from what you are concentrating on. So, will try something where that info is located beside the currently selected object. While Adam's other reference for how it might look was this:
Aspirational UI Design
I'm not sure i'll be able to get there on version one!
