NextWorldGames
patreon
March Developer Update
🕑 Added 2025-03-28 14:49:02 +0000 UTCHi everyone, glad to finally be back with another developer update!
I missed last month's as I spent the last week of the month sick, so wanted to focus on getting some patches out first once I was fresh again.
So since last update, the new Themed Quiz of the Day have been released, and I've done a couple of bug fixing + minor improvement patches.
The Themed Quiz of the Day development ended up taking longer than expected, which was the reason for the lack of patches doing the first couple of months of the year.
This was mainly due to the challenge of adding support for teams in the mode, as I had to combine two different systems, the slot system and team system, which I originally thought would be rather straight forward, but turned out to be surprisingly complex.
On the technical side of things, the slot system is what calculate what players to show in what slots. This is extra complex in Quiz of the Day, as it also have to manage different multiple different views, due to some players being hidden by mods (while they validate that they aren't cheating), meaning there have to be a view without them (for most players), and one with them (for the player themselves). All of these views needs to be updated during the quizzes, as more players join, players might get hidden etc.
Now we then add the team system into the mix. This first of all doubled the amount of views, as a view was needed with and without teams (for the toggle), which also needed to be created for every single hidden player view. Next up when a player is hidden, not just them, but the entire team need to be hidden from the scoreboard from the regular view, which causes the order and layout to have to be recalculated, as I can't just move every team one position up, as they might not fit into the next slot, as slots can only show 8 players.
I could continue with more cases, that made this really annoying to do, but think I've done enough tech rambling for this post 😅
Tl;dr: Adding teams to Quiz of the Day was a lot more complex than I was expecting.
With the yesterday patch I cleaned up both the code, making it easier to maintain, and completely redid how the team layouts in slots were done, as this was also causing issues when lobbies had a lot of players. This again turned out to be really complicated, I'll spare you the details, but the code calculating the positions, ended up being over 300 lines long, due to all the edge cases it has to handle >.<
Beside the Themed update, we've had a couple of bug fixing and improvements patches. These are pretty much all requests or reports from the Discords, got a long list of all the suggestions and bugs reported over there. The current plan is to go through the majority of them before I start the next big feature, so expect to see several rapid patches in the coming months as I'm going through the list.
This is pretty much all for this update, keep the eye out for future patches, might be something fun happening on Tuesday.
