[OFFICIAL] First online playtest - July 28th 23:00 BST

Thanks everyone who participated in the play test! It was pretty, uh, interesting... Hopefully that made everyone as hyped as it made me, especially when we were doing the robot job.

Unfortunately I forgot to enable automatic archiving of broadcasts, so VODs of the stream aren't available... I think a few people were recording, so they should upload the videos soon.

The obvious next step is fixing routing - most people were having problems with that. This might take a while to work out perfectly but it will greatly improve the gameplay experience once it works.

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(original post)

Some of you may have already seen this video, but I think it speaks for itself.

I've started shifting all user interactions to a command stream, which can be synchronised over the internet in combination with our deterministic SimAntics VM to facilitate online play. I've fixed the issue that appears in the video and things are syncing alright, apart from the usual object interaction bugs causing the server to crash when they occur. (for example, the hot tub crashes when checking some relationship somewhere. all objects work.)

Right now the server doubles as a fully usable desktop client - but eventually for the server this will become a headless server that can run many instances at once.

Though there won't be much to do, we will have chat and I'll try to fill the lot with as many objects as possible for you to try, and it will all be recorded for historic purposes. 8-| There may or may not be buy/build mode.

Now for the super important fact. As soon as I give the go-ahead in here, at exactly 23:00GMT, you should connect AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! Right now we're syncing off of the blueprint the server syncs off of, then running every tick since it starts. This will take a long time on slower computers, if the server has been running for a long time! Obviously this will be changed when we can serialize VM state, but right now it has to be like this to test multiplayer.

Also - there probably won't be names, and you'll all be bob. I'm foreseeing a lot of bob on bob action, it like literally never stops being a thing.

Hehe, that's not really what I was going for with the name but I guess it works!

Greenwich Mean Time, aka time in the United Kingdom. Here's a clock for anyone confused:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/uk/london

Got confused, I actually meant BST (British Standard Time)

GMT doesn't take into account Daylight Savings Time.

That link I posted is BST.

amount of yaoi in this thread is unbelievably high ._.

well, whatever, I'm sure I'll still be up at midnight MEH LAPTOP IZ READY

It'll be hard to join after 10 minutes, but it can stay open as long as it doesn't somehow crash. (don't use any questionable objects)