State of the project 2023

[katajakasa]

Updated May 2. 2023

So where are we now ?

What we have right now is kinda-sorta working single player mode. That is, /most/ of the moves work, controls are kinda okay, scoring sorta works (though not correctly), movement speeds and heights are somewhat correct etc. Network play works most of the time, but there are still major bugs with eg. projectiles.

There is a lot of work done on tournament mode, and it mostly works now. Still some missing screens though, and bugs are expected.

Also, some time ago we merged our parser library (libshadowdive) to the openomf repository, along with the CLI tools. This is because there was no need to keep them separate, and this allows us to use the openomf data types in libsd functions. Although the current codebase now compiles and works, there is still work to be done to fully integrate the codebases (and make the improvements).

So why are there no new releases ?

This is because we don't want to release something that has less features than the previous release :) Eg. networking should be fixed again for a release to happen. Also, since there is a ton of bugs open, as soon as we released, we would be getting a bunch of bug reports for bugs we already know -- not fun. Especially as we already don't have enough time to work on this thing :)

What has been happening lately ?

Some noteworthy things that have been completed lately:

1. Tournament mode was merged (by @Vagabond)

So what next ?

These are the things we are working on, in priority order:

1, OpenGL 3.3 renderer for correct graphics (@katajakasa)
2. Sort out pilot and har stats and their effect on the gameplay
3. Fully integrate libshadowdive (https://github.com/omf2097/openomf/projects/4).
4. Figure out more animation tags (https://github.com/omf2097/openomf/projects/3) -- this is an ongoing effort, and is mostly discussed on our discord server. We are utilising Ghidra to reverse-engineer the old project to see what it does. This is slow and very, very, VERY tedious tediousness.
5. Fix network play
6. Complete tournament mode

[Santorayo3]

Just wanted to state my support here. I love this project and really looking forward to the tournament mode. Also I'd love to see a port for the OpenDingux OS to play it on my Anbernic.

[katajakasa]

Oof, unfortunately we can't really do the ports -- we'd need to have the actual devices, and then some time to work on them... and we are already short on time just getting the game working on common hardware ;)

Still, if people want to put time to it and offer pull requests, we'll probably merge them. As long as they don't make development harder or break other platforms ;)

[Santorayo3]

Ok, thanks for the info. :)

[Santorayo3]

Also this video might be helpful to figure out what the stats in the original game do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVtDAr7dcjM

[katajakasa]

I like the comparisons on the video, it might be useful when testing out changes.

What we really REALLY need on the stats front now however are the precise formulas and numbers. For example, how do we apply agility numbers to the base numbers (and what are those base numbers anyways ?), what are the modifiers, etc.