Mirrored Tanks

Warning! This is coming in real hot! It's probably kind of buggy but then again that's also multiplayer games in general am I right? 

I might edit and add to this description tomorrow when I'm more well rested. I'll find out tomorrow morning how much I regret this, but there's a few important things you should know:

1. This is like the third(?) time I've tried to do multiplayer, but also by far the most complete and complex.
2. The vehicles were a big deal to me, and I think they're actually really fun to drive, but they are missing some important details like engine sounds because my attention halfway through turned to fixing a bunch of crazy networking bugs.
3. This is meant to be a very, very simple game. It's not going to be balanced. It's not going to be well designed. I was much more focused on everything just being functional. Except the vehicles, I think they're pretty fun.
4. Shockingly, this might be the first time I make a normal FPS game, and I gotta say making this reminded me that I actually really like shooters and I think the shooting in this, despite how basic it is, feels pretty nice!

Full disclosure, like half of the good game feel in this is coming from SFX lifted from Half-Life and Halo. Obviously I wouldn't do this for a real game, but this entire thing was thrown together in about a week so I didn't want to waste any time on SFX.

Gameplay! Objectives!

This is a very simple team versus team game. The first team to 15 points, or the team with the highest points when the time runs out, wins the game.

• Killing another player gives your team +1 point
• Capturing the intel gives your team +5 points

To capture intel, you must use a Jeep. Drive over the intel to pick it up, then deliver it back to your base.

Big important note on the bullets!

I didn't have time to make really nice client side predicted bullets, so when you fire your bullets or tank shells you are getting the full server-authoritative experience. 

On the bright side, this means that if you see a bullet hit something, it very probably did hit that thing, because you are seeing the server's bullets.

Unfortunately, this also means that if you have bad latency, your bullets can lag quite a bit behind where you were aiming and where you were. At like <50 ms it honestly looks totally fine. However at 200 ms the delay can be pretty humorous.

I'm sorry!

Does this even work?

I don't actually know! As of this writing, I didn't even test this build! 

While developing I was never able to test this over the internet, but I did use clumsy to help emulate what realistic(ish) missing packets and latency would look like and test against that. It guided a lot of the design decisions for how vehicles networked. The vehicle networking is far from perfect, but it's as responsive as I can make it with as few quirks as I was able to get given the circumstances.

I learned a lot working on this. A lot of "quirks and features" are just a consequence of a early and very uninformed architectural decisions I made while learning the fundamentals Mirror. Based on what I know now, there is so much I would do differently.

There is no NAT punch through or anything like that so you're on your own with regards to getting people to join your servers and stuff.