Sledgehammer to the Network Code, Yo
I've been pretty busy this week. It's my last Spring Break I expect to see in my university career and rather than spend the week vegetating in some tropical spot or some other vacation destination, I've been using the time to gut and then rewrite a good chunk of my game's networking code. I'm not sure if I'm more surprised or unsurprised at this fact, but progress seems to have been pretty good this week so far.
For those not following along at home, I made the decision to migrate from a current WCF (.NET 3.0) based networking stack to XNA 2.0's cross-platform Live!-tastic networking framework. Goodbye dependencies on .NET 3.0 and Windows P2P/Advanced Networking. Hello having to worry about Creator's Club memberships for testers and complaining (but not too hard, keeping it friendly) about the current lack of an Xbox build for FRB, my current "physics" engine of choice (rather than coding directly to the XNA wire).
It's interesting because I think this networking rewrite has been something of the kick in the ass that I needed to get the brain running on some new areas to attack in the game by first sweeping out a lot of old cobwebs. Some of my old network code supposed that I would have to run some of my own infrastructure: gaming handles, avatars, et al. XNA supplies a lot of that from MSFT's Live! stuff and I'm a little less worried about publisher lock-in thanks to Valve's Steamworks announcement. Even if no one else is interested, I'm interested in putting together a Steamworks.NET library to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft's XNA GamerServices and Net namespaces. So freeing myself from worrying about running ...
On Coop Rights
Ozymandias has been working on compiling the best version he can of The Coop Bill of Rights, following Tycho's wandering into the subject earlier... Coop gaming is in the midst of a great comeback, a defining movement in the current generation, and something that I think a lot of people are hoping to see stick around and nearly become a "required" feature. Forget length or graphics, but "Does it have coop? What sort?" Hence the idea of a Bill of Rights to find a lot of good "rules" (of thumb, rather than of law right now) on what should and should not be required for any good coop experience.
I think that coop is something that really shows off if your narrative design really works well interactively or not. Easy contrasts are Gears of War and Halo 3... there are some key narrative moments that my brother and I can talk about in Gears that there aren't parallels of in Halo because I think Epic did a much better job at pushing more of the narrative design into the level design and making sure more of it "popped" in coop just as well (if not better) than in solo play.
Not to say that either has the best approach because there is still a lot to do in order to really draw cool and interesting narratives out of coop structures.
Anyway, just as interesting out of this discussion is my introduction to Co-Optimus, which is a site that has dedicated itself almost entirely to coop gaming across all platforms. I think if anything, such a "fan club" bodes well for the future of cooperative gaming.
