Doug Binks - 12 Mar 2001 - edited 30 Oct 2013
[This is an archive post about the first version of Avoyd which we now call Avoyd 1999. The full game is now free to download.]
It's been a great week, nervously surfing the web to see how many downloads we've made, responding to emails and posts in the forum, and tracking down strange behaviour from the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. So far, we're doing very well for a small independent developer, with over four thousand downloads from our site in the first week and about twenty thousand visitors to the site. With the other sites which are hosting the demo, we probably made over five thousand downloads in the first week. What that means is anyone's guess, but it does make Avoyd one of the most downloaded 'small' action games. Without feedback from players it's difficult to form any opinion, but most comments we have had have been very positive about the concept. So, many thanks, and I encourage you all to post what you think in our forums.
It would have been great if our testing had found all the problems and bugs with the game, but it seems two made it through. If you're having problems with LAN play, this could be because the network update rate is higher than the average frame rate, so try lowering it (the network update rate can be set on both clients and servers). The other bug comes into effect after around 65535/(network update rate) seconds, causing players to apparently freeze. We've found what causes the bugs, and the fixes will be in release 1.1 which should come out next monday. This release will also include a host of new features.
For those of you interested in technical details, we've been encountering problems with Microsoft's implementation of the C++ Standard Template Library causing memory access violations in simple string and list opperations. Hopefully, service pack 5 will fix the problem (which appears to be a known bug in repeated small memory reallocation), and we're downloading it now (after around ten hours downloading with my 28kbps connection it'll be finished in an hour or two).