Kirby Is Stateside!

Kirby Air Ride is finally available in the states. The Warp Pipe Project team is happy, as we will be able to conduct further testing with a wide range of people. As for the status of the project, Nathan our lead developer has some words he would like to share:

As lead programmer for the WarpPipe daemon i'd like to apologize for the slowness of development. I was working on it 8hrs a day until I became employed. Then time became scarce. I know i'm making excuses but I hope you can wait just a tad longer for more improvements. I become un-employed this friday the 17th so development will resume full speed.

Now to answer some questions floating around here.

1) we've hit a bit over 20fps, but as of right now performance is heavily dependent on your connection to the net. Kirby sends data every frame in a ring so packets need to make that loop in 1/60th of a second. I have some ideas i'm going to try to hopefully reduce the packet load and allow the game to reach closer to 60fps, but you'll have to wait just a bit longer for these.

2) Sorry about no code/files being released. That's also my fault. The code is now on CVS on SourceForge. I added a readme explaining how it works and what needs to be done to use it.

As for moving forward, we are porting the current daemon code to libpcap (winpcap for windows) to make our daemon portable, modular, and a bit easier to read the code. We welcome all developer support, as Nathan will be in charge of merging changes into CVS. We are aiming for a stable build of the daemon with a simple GUI for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows in time for the release of Mario Kart: Double Dash. We have a dedicated GUI team and a dedicated server team and we hope to have a feature rich product that enables you to meet and challenge other GCN players around Christmastime/ New Year.

We are always looking for great developers. If you are interested, send me (the project manager) a message via our Sourceforge page.