from Stonebone:

What’s new:

* Network protocol rewritten
* Support 8 players
* Fix displaying highscores

Me and Gustav spent some time during the summer to rewrite the network protocol. Every packet is now smaller which means we can send them much more often. Every client now only sends the changes to the playfield (delta) and also the last seen version of the other players’ fields (ack). The whole field is sent if a new player joins or the delta is so big that it is more efficient to send the whole field. It also sends a new packet directly after reciving a packet from the player on the left. Before it simply sent packets at a fixed interval. The improvement is very noticable with two players.

Unfortunately the improvement is most apparent when using dswifi (”Internet”). It seems liblobby (”Local”) is not as fast.

My friends requested that you could see your own field on the upper screen. This is useful after the round is over to look at what you could have done to survive. This would have reduced the number of players to 4, but I’ve added a button (X) to switch the upper screen to show players 5-8. I noticed this doesn’t work very well on Nintendo DS after packaging this release, because I’ve only tested 8 players in the SDL version. Sorry about that. But if you do get 8 people together please let me know.