The Long Vacant Chat Box Game

[Connors]

Maybe I worded it wrong, I don't think it would be awkward, it would just take time to get used to them and it would allow for more interesting tactics. Maybe.

Then again in quick party games sometimes awkward controls make it funny enough that it's worth it.

[Gan]

Connors xD

[Gan]

The chatbox game now has shooting. How should I expand it to make it more enjoyable?

[Zoo]

Well, for one, less spastic bouncy machine gun of death, add some cover, make a few different guns.

[Gan]

How about a shop?

Kills get you gold, gold gets you better weapons.

[Gan]

Guns to add:
Simple Gun - Shoots 2 bullets per second
Machine Gun - Shoots 10 bullets per second
Buck Shot - Shoots a round per second. 6 bullets spread out
Flame Thrower - Slow bullets, expanded, gets larger
Rocket Launcher - Throws big slow bullets, on hit does a radius of damage, damage porportional to distance from center
Laser - Raycasts, continuous red laser, stops when hitting something but has max range of 5000. Does continuous damage

[Gan]

The mini game class alone is up to 331 lines of code. I'm probably going to spend time modularizing it. Break it up into more classes to make it easier to code and add in new features like guns.
I've come to the conclusion that recoding something when it gets messy is a bad idea. Rather, the actual solution to your problem isn't to try to clean or recode it but rather to split it up into smaller chunks across multiple files.
A lot of what you code is either redundant or you don't edit it much after writing it. So that code is best to modularize and stick elsewhere so when you're editting, you never have to bother looking at it again.

TL;DR, when it gets hard to program, break up your code.

[Zoo]

Well, it's certainly broken, but it isn't up. You're halfway there.

[Gan]

Power went out last night.

[Zoo]

Weird! So did ours!

[Gan]

Chatbox temporarily running at 120fps to test how well it does.
I'm thinking of calibrating the server to run dynamically.
That is, it'll try to max out the FPS as much as possible
Under heavy load, the FPS will decrease.
But because it'll be dynamic, it'll use a delta time to calculate distance between frames
That way 250 fps and 20fps will behave the same minus precision. 250fps has greater precision in collisions, with 20fps you're more likely to have bullets going through walls
The goal is to make the game more instantaneous and consistent.

[GMG Kurt]

mac  10.6
firefox
http://f.cl.ly/items/371R1E44242m3f3z3F1m/chatboxgamefirefox.png

[Gan]

The dreaded firefox.
Making layouts compatible with firefox is a pain. But I'll give it a try.

However I am impressed with your willingness to learn C++.

[Zoo]

The simplest solution to your problem? Use Google Chrome.