UNET to Photon

Early on in the development of the game before we took on the other two members. Deus Vault’s network architecture ran on Unity’s system called UNET. This worked well for majority of the development but the current state of UNET was quite old. It hadn’t been updated by unity in a long time and the documentations were either outdated or unhelpfully vague. Most importantly there was a development halting bug in the UNET system that made it unusable. The problem was a bug in the UNET network animator that didn’t allow syncing of multiple animation layers. It was capable of syncing the first layer but anything else wasn’t sent over the network. This meant that the game’s animator couldn’t have blend trees and of course multiple layers! It was pivotal to Deus Vaults development to have this functionality because the games animation systems was quite complex. It was technically achievable to do everything on the one layer but it meant that there would be an exponentially greater work load on our animator Tom. It was just more efficient to port the code over to Photon.  There was also better current documentation for Photon, the system was being continually updated and a lot of great Unity multiplayer games were made using Photon. It was the logical choice to switch Deus Vault’s network architecture. Although it meant we didn’t exactly progress very far this week; as soon as everything is smoothed out the development of the game can really kick off.

Transitioning Over

Up until now our programmer Rupert had been spending the past four weeks working hard translating our UNET code to Photon’s system. Before our first upcoming playtest he had a stable version or our game on Photon ready. However because the other team member had been working on our own parts of the game he had an outdated version. This meant that in order to get a cohesive version ready for the playtest we had to merge his work into ours. So a lot of time this week was spent helping him port over his new photon version to our current UNET version. We had to ensure that all our new and existing systems worked in this new Photon environment.  It was a laborious and difficult process but now we have a cohesive project and will hopefully be more stable and better off in the future.

Preparing for a Playtest

Once the project was stable and working on the new Photon environment the next target that we had to work toward was getting a working build ready for play testing later in the week. This meant making tweaks and ironing out bugs in our existing systems. I also made further smaller changes to player movement that other team members suggested and implemented a new system. This new system was a dodge mechanic however there was a slight design clash. There was a divide in how the dodge controls would function. One style was double clicking a directional key and the other was pressing shift and then pressing a directional key. In order to come to a definite conclusion we decided to take it to players and let them decide in player testing. 

- Liam McIntosh -