Last December, Reality Jump delivered to the Dreamcast group a present on Christmas Eve within the type of the primary playable Driving Strikers demo. In the months which have adopted, the sport has been additional developed and expanded into what’s now the primary ever indie Dreamcast launch to assist on-line multiplayer gaming!

DCJY: Hi Luke, thanks for chatting to us once more! So, what impressed you to first begin work on Driving Strikers?

Following the discharge of Tunnels, we regarded on the calendar and figured {that a} Christmas demo could be nice. We threw collectively some concepts and Dave advised a 2.5D Rocket League-style sport. So we frantically spent November and early December 2021 placing collectively a fast and soiled multiplayer sport.

Almost like Christmas NiGHTS… nearly. What have been the most important challenges with the event of Driving Strikers?

There are so many! Firstly, physics. Writing the physics of the sport, the place every automotive has suspension, and many others, is difficult sufficient on a contemporary sport engine, on a contemporary PC. But whenever you’re attempting to do it on a 200mhz CPU from 1998 – that’s an entire different stage!

Second to the physics although is RAM. During growth almost each week we’ve hit an out of reminiscence bug attributable to the truth that the Dreamcast solely has 16M to play with, and nearly 4M of that has gone earlier than the app even begins! Optimising for restricted RAM has been an enormous chunk of labor – massive elements of Simulant have needed to be rewritten (typically a few occasions) to optimise reminiscence utilization. Even now the sport foyer is scraping the ceiling of the RAM restrict because of the sheer variety of UI widgets in play on that display screen. Particularly the keyboard, the on-screen keyboard wants one more rewrite to unlock extra RAM.

Thirdly, framerate. When Tunnels launched the frame-rate for that was round 20-22 fps. Like Driving Strikers it was utilizing a full physics engine. Driving Strikers has extra physics-based objects although; you’ve received the 4 automobiles, every with 4 wheels, every with calculations for friction, suspension, and many others, and the ball. Trying to maintain the framerate at round 30 fps has been actually arduous. I’m certain if we had been engaged on this full time, we might refactor and profile, and optimise issues to get it as much as 60 fps however that’s completely unachievable whenever you’re coding issues each night after work!

We’ve additionally had issues with GD-ROM drives failing, serial cables breaking, DreamPi line voltage inducers breaking, elements of KallistiOS being stress-tested for the primary time. One of essentially the most irritating issues was when my GD-ROM stopped studying issues accurately and the one symptom was some graphical corruption on the menu screens. It took me a few week to understand the place the true drawback was!

Thanks for that technical breakdown on the challenges of Dreamcast growth. What is your favorite characteristic of the sport?

I like the multiplayer facet – not simply the net stuff which has been a monumental problem – however the native multiplayer. I believe Driving Strikers is a superb social gathering sport!

What impressed you to make the primary indie Dreamcast sport to characteristic on-line multiplayer?

Feedback! When we launched the Christmas demo final 12 months, the objective was to launch the complete sport earlier than the next March. But by far the most important piece of suggestions we received was “could you make this an online game?”.

Up till that time it had crossed my thoughts however I had a reasonably good thought how a lot time it might take and tried to keep away from fascinated with it. But then I figured if I did it the precise means, it could possibly be reusable and I might make a number of on-line video games with the code I developed. I assume honestly I couldn’t resist the problem!

What have been the most important challenges with creating on-line multiplayer for a 22 12 months previous system?

I believe it’s necessary that individuals perceive what number of completely different shifting elements there are to make a web based multiplayer sport work.

You want a matchmaking server, someplace to register video games, seek for video games and many others. and since you have to shield in opposition to individuals doing dangerous issues, you want an authentication system. All of this must be constructed utilizing net applied sciences, it must be hosted someplace and many others.

But even when you’ve your matchmaking server, you want to have the ability to speak to it. The Dreamcast doesn’t have any built-in code to speak to net servers, so I needed to write all that from scratch. So, earlier than you even start fascinated with the sport itself you’ve received a set of net companies, and the plumbing to let the console speak to them – that’s weeks/months of labor proper there.

Then you take a look at the precise sport – you have to resolve how the sport shoppers speak to one another. The modem velocity is a massively limiting issue. If Driving Strikers was Dreamcast solely, and I might assure that it might solely be constructed with a selected toolchain, then I might simply ship controller inputs throughout the web and hope every part stays in sync. But I at all times needed cross-play to work so as an alternative it’s a must to ship the whole state of the sport to all of the shoppers round 20 occasions a second. That’s high quality for those who’re on broadband however on a modem you have to work out methods to get that compressed down as a lot as attainable. That was an enormous problem.

We then had issues within the KallistiOS SDK, as a result of individuals haven’t actually closely used say, the modem driver, or the networking stack. We had one bug the place the modem would simply cease working and it turned out to be an excellent low stage driver drawback – and we solely caught it as a result of somebody occurred to be on the Discord server who had actually simply been studying in regards to the modem specs – that was the luckiest coincidence ever!

The final problem was getting each edge case working. If you take into account all of the completely different locations {that a} participant may lose a connection for instance. They may disconnect throughout the loading display screen, they could disconnect within the foyer, they could disconnect throughout the sport, or as a objective is scored, or because the match finishes, or after the match earlier than you come to the foyer – all of those instances must be dealt with. Testing and bug fixing these items is extremely time consuming and arduous work. It took weeks of play testing to get issues secure sufficient to launch the demo!

It’s actually fascinating to find extra about what goes on below the hood of those on-line video games – thanks for sharing that. Do you assume you’ve opened the door for future indie on-line multiplayer Dreamcast video games?

I hope so! We’ve confirmed it really works a minimum of – we all know it’s attainable and what it entails. I’m hoping to merge a lot of the code I’ve written for networking into Simulant – and if any gamedev on the market needs to leverage the matchmaking server then that’s additionally attainable.

And in fact, I’m planning extra video games after this one, and now placing them on-line is a a lot simpler factor to do now.

When will we see the ultimate launch of Driving Strikers?

Q1 2023. I’d hoped it might be this 12 months – hell, I hoped it might be May 2022 however issues took a bit longer than anticipated! I’d prefer to “finish” the sport earlier than Christmas, prepared for launch within the New Year or early 2023. 

We stay up for that with baited breath! Finally – will there be a bodily launch of Driving Strikers?

There shall be if all goes properly!

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So there you’ve it – some nice perception into the thoughts of an knowledgeable indie developer! Thank you a lot to Luke for taking the time to reply my questions and hopefully give the group some background on this nice sport.