A belated “Happy new year!”

On January 2nd, 2020 we had a breakthrough: After almost a solid month of engineering and completely losing playability, we got SpellShokked back to running. This was no small feat, because the new version contains the following changes

• A completely new network layer. Spellshokked was originall built upon UNet, which uses a relay server (which is expensive) and a paid-for third-party matchmaking infrastructure that did not work very well. Technologically, it also used UDP frames that, although fast, don’t work well with demanding games, and (worse) often get filtered by many common firewalls. We now use straight TCP/IP which is not as performant, but additional network latency of 10ms is covered by predictive movement code. The end rsult works much more reliably, and is compatible with most (if not all) firewalls
• Instead of a relay server, we now use Peer-To-Peer connections. This further reduces latency (that’s how we were able to go from UDP to TCP/IP), and we were able to get rid of the legacy and unsupported relay server architecture
• Matchmaking currently is reduced to direct connect open duels, and we’ll introduce our own matchmaking later once there is sufficient demand (currently too few people duel each other to warrant a global leaderboard)
• The original Lobby system we had in place with it’s awkward UI was also scrapped. In place we now have a streamlined system where you can either sign up for an existing duel, or create an open invitation for a duel (see images). choosing which kind of duel to create now is a simple click with your wand. 
• Most importantly, however, the entire networking middleware is more stable. You no longer need to re-start the entire game every other duel because of re-connection issues. The new Lobby and network layer have been extensively battletested and we no longer experience these strange network outages (which we believe were the result of dropped UDP packets)
• We removed some bugs from shaker code, so the ‘humming’ of the wand during casting should be slightly more pronounced, and feel more ‘magic’
• We have temporarily toned down the soft-body physics on the female avatars (you saw an example of that technology on the bouncing gifts that littered the floor of your home room). This may return to full in a later version

That being said, there are still some items left to fix

• There is a lingering issue where a client may not show the corect avatar in a network game.
• Additionally, we are tracking a report of slow-moving player avatar after blinking
• The Valve Index controllers still make for an uncomfortable playstyle due to the fact that they are rotated 45 degrees up; we re looking for a solution here.
• The ‘Bridge’ and ‘Breach’ levels are now playable in that you can lose. Winning conditions still don’t always register correctly in co-op, though.

So, have fun trying out the new version!