so I’ve been working on the arena for some time now and thought i’d update you guys with some information about how it works, what it’s capable of and where it’s going in the future.
as you can see in this video there is an npc that opens a dialogue, when you open that dialogue you can create the lobby or browse a lobby. once a lobby is created other players can join in. after everyone selects ready and a map is chosen you can start the session and everyone is ported to their respective entry, odd players go to entry1 even players go to entry 2. after 10 seconds the gates open and they can begin fighting. warcraft has a 20 minute timer(I believe, it could be 25 minuters though?). I would like to have a timer like that eventually, right now everyone is in the same party which could produce problems down the line, but it works for now. The big feature here is synchronizing the maps over the network instead of locally. This means I can add any map and it should work regardless of size or shape. So seeded procedural arenas are a possibility. With that said, this is a huge breakthough for our team and I am proud to announce the arrival of networked arenas to GameZero.
There are 3 scripts that make this work. A player arena npc teleport script which handles all the group management and teleportation, an instance manager which handles synchronizing the instances over the network, and an arenamanager which handles the selection of instances and definition of which instance has been selected during the selection process. Over 400 lines of code were added to the ummorpg data structure to make this a reality. I hope you enjoy the video.