Third Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 180/309 (6/29/09)
The temperature went up 25 degrees from Friday to Saturday round these parts... I got some scripting done on the character generator during the cool hours of the early morning, but after a certain point I shut the computers down so they wouldn't melt. Then I kind of melted... it was too hot to read by the afternoon, so I hauled out my paint pots and spent a few hours adding a milliliter of water to each to prevent them from drying out. Exciting, I know.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 166/309 (6/15/09)
Got the password login working yesterday. Now plowing through mockups of the character creation process GUIs. The new character creation process is going to be just a little bit more complicated than it used to be. You will be able to build your character from an allocation of points, instead of random rolls being done automatically for each stat. Each character will begin with a base pool of 50 points, to be allocated among five stats. Perfectly average characters will have ten points in each stat, but players will be allowed to raise some stats to the loss of others now, as they choose.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 165/309 (6/14/09)
Wrestling with enabling the character creation and saved character access screens today. Lots of tricksey work now that the password isn't being handled as an adjunct to the website.

Previously, you logged into the website, and if you were logged in, you could access the client and it would talk to the website and know who you were. Now with the standalone, the GUI has to handle password authentication, so there are several start and stops to be added. I don't want to start the session until you create the character or choose your saved character, but I want the password authenticated before you can log into either, so sockets on the servers don't just sit there tied up forever while someone spends six hours minmaxing their first character (you know who you are).

This means there are actually several connections needed in the process, so I just banged out the additional connection scripting needed this morning. Then I thought I would stop and make a backup while everything was working.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 163/309 (6/12/09)
By this point, all the npcs, nnpcs, mpcs and items are placing into the scene graph. I got the time-based sky working, although that took longer than it should have; there was a problem with signals racing on arrival at the client, so I had to track down a callback and make it trigger the secondary setup in a scenegraph.

Ran a client test yesterday morning from a remote location--from a Mac, no less--and everything worked, except for a minor bug where a second empty window is opened at launch, and which is related to TGB itself. I need about five more CPUs so I can run a public test with the first functional client--all the chat functions, including NPC "listening" and responding, was picked up automatically when I hooked up the server; as that is all handled server-side it was already "done". I noticed a bug in the MPC attack routine as all MPC attacks after the first fail--MPCs, even though their graphics may or may not yet be converted, are attacking if one is spawned as you move through the city; it is shown in the server logs scrolling by!

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 154/309 (6/3/09)
I managed to talk the engine into populating NPCs into the scene view this morning about 6:45. So that's more progress. A similar mechanism will populate items, and with a little thought, scenes. I may keep writing wrappers for scenes so they remain standalone files, but it is possible to do it programmatically now as well. The sky can now be added as well, I just thought of that.

The largest problem at hand is deciding whether to just redevelop the old client, or make all the changes as I learn more about what's possible. The old client was done to the point where I was writing quests and assigning badges. However, some of the new options, such as phone gaming, are really interesting--but obviously don't work with a mouse-based client.

In any case, having the client for the 2D engine running--whether on PCs and laptops or phones or whatever--is an immensely helpful reference for building any future versions, even if they are radically different. It's also good for writing and dreaming, two other activities I think are important. So I'd like to just get a version up and running, even if it is just a 2D client for PCs (and Macs, of course), for that reason as well.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 151/309 (5/31/09)
After some self-wrasslin', I hunkered down and cranked, slavishly imitating the old client. Why, you might ask, when I can come up with newer, better ways of doing the same old thing? Because the same old thing has been thought out all the way through. I don't know if it is really possible for me to convey the confusion and hours lost to experimentation should I veer the slightest from the established Path of the Client...

The other week, as I downloaded the T3D beta 2, it occurred to me I was perhaps being even more stupid than usual. I decided to take a look at TGB, instead, and grabbed that demo while I waited (it's much smaller). Then came the idea that maybe I could learn the TorqueScript I was struggling with in T3D by leveraging the art assets already created for the Flash client.

So I took a look at it, and bought the release version (gotta have the source code. It's the law) a few days later.

So anyway, T3D was in beta, and I was struggling with Blender to create some simple art assets again, and miserable (really, I can't even explain how disruptive it was to learn that the DIF art assets I just spent six months learning to build and texture are being tossed as an art format).

Then I kind of liked TGB. It was a pretty much working game engine that I grokked, as it was very much like the toolset I'd laboriously invented for the Flash client. I loaded some assets into it, and after playing around, decided it might be possible to connect it to the WOAServer.

That's how I spent the next few days (evenings, rather, I work days). It was actually trivial to get a socket up and running in TorqueScript, so then it was learning about GUI controls, and behaviors, and scenes, and the other local TGB conventions. Now it's Sunday, and I've got a socket up, communication happening with the WOAServer, navigation clicks working, and some other things I could never, ever get working well in Flash:
• A clean socket close and reopen, under direct user control, meaning you can log out and log in again without reopening the client
• Mouse response is RELIABLE. I repeat, mouse response is RELIABLE
• Creating and mapping new scenes is trivial compared to the Flash pipeline
• The client will be a standalone executable instead of browser-embedded, for top-notch response and performance.

Suddenly, I have a huge library of assets, and a template to follow. There's still tons of work (all the assets have to be manually converted to PNG from GIF and Flash, for one thing, and there are tens of thousands of them!) but I think it can be done. Best of all, the TorqueScripts I'm writing to control socket read/write and other functions are directly portable to T3D, but I can work on learning the language while I wait for T3D to get out of beta and become stable and usable.

It's still a long way to Game.

First Tikid, Hour of the Horse, 148/309 (5/28/09)
I've succeeded in getting the new client to talk to the server on a full-duplex communications link. Always good to finally grok enough of a new language to accomplish something useful in it!

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 100/309 (4/10/09)
Well, I see a lot of old friends and familiar faces have dropped by lately! That's a nice thing to see. Hope 2009 is going well for all. I'm wrapping up a big, big project at work at the moment (which has had me at the office seven days a week since September last!) then will again be turning my full attention to Antra. I've been purchasing tools and working hard on new skills in my few spare hours, and have some new approaches which I believe are quite exciting... needless to say, though, we won't be doing any more Flash-based development around here!

I'm pleased to see that the site still works in large fashion... I was a bit afeared of returning to a collapsed morass of JavaScript, but the wards have held in my absence. I'll toss out one picture above just to be mysterious (along with the disclaimer that it was art from a test run more than a month ago!)

The old game is dead. Long live the game!

Have fun exploring in the meantime!

Netwyrm