Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 39/310 (2/8/10)
I just now got doors opening and closing this morning. This will allow for portaled spaces and less zoning within "interior" spaces--doors can be opened and closed under script control to "lock" and "unlock" them allowing passage. It is fairly easy to create one-way doors, too (the first thing I did was trap myself behind the door in a passage).

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 37/310 (2/6/10)
My beloved companion of nearly twenty years, Cherry Plumetail Bentwhisker, went to sleep forever this morning. Your curiousity, good cheer and constant purr will be sorely missed, little puff.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 33/310 (2/2/10)
Tapped into the chatHUD routines this weekend, and found a way to bottleneck speech and take it out of the world server and pass it to the Java server for interpretation, and then pass it back. My Torque archaeology continues--it's very obvious that Torque as written by a very large number of hands, many of whom worked without a style guideline. It is perfectly possible to see, for example, the way CON objects are laid out in one .cpp file, and then see exactly similar routines in the next .cpp file using an idiosyncratic approach. They yield the same result, when compiled, but one is vastly more readable, especially when the code is read by someone who is not the author.

The chatHUD is yet a whole 'nother ball of wax. The routines in C++ handling message passing are so tightly wedded to their GUIObjectControl that they are almost hermetically sealed, almost as though the author wanted to make SURE no one would fail to appreciate their art--by rendering it nearly impossible to extend easily. Not at all the type of mind designing the .cpp files I mentioned, and definitely someone else again writing that part.

In any case, Dispatch now communicates and updates the time to all world servers, and keeps them in sync. Last night I added the network calls needed for the sky to match the Hour of the Day.

What's really giving me fits is the GUI, and the GUI tools--they are so fragile, that one can destroy ones own work inadventently. Keeping that many backups in toto adds a lot of overhead as the files are copied to a safe location.

That could be solved by adding a couple of hard drives, but all purchasing has to be frozen--certain events, right after another, have tapped all the profit I would have made this quarter, and its going to be skint at least until the end of April around here. The cat is very, very sick, and the vet is very, very expensive (but very, very kind--yesterday they taught me how to give injections and hook up a glucose drip to keep her hydrated). $599 for another server just won't be happening for me.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Daystar, 24/310 (1/24/10)
I've completed implenting complete control over clouds, networkable, for as many servers as I want to have providing ghosting. It's primitive, but I have all the cloud control components accessible now, and can abstract the scripts to triggers which can animate the blends between weather conditions, as well as allow me to set them manually via a browser interface.

I really borked it up mid-week and broke the whole thing; looking at my code this morning I found so many logical errors its no wonder I thought it was broken. It's been a hugely stressful week with a number of strains on many fronts, but the gapping I'm experiencing is frightening. I am simply not seeing errors--variables not changed out, even after several proofing attempts, and the like.

Yesterday, I wound up at work on Saturday from about 8 in the morning, when I started scripting, until 10, when I got called into the office, to 6:30 long after dark in the rain, and was just absolutely hating it by the time I got out of there. Hating it, to the point I was well aware it was past the point of irrationality. Then I came home and sat down and logged in remotely and kept at it until 4:15 in the morning until something that had come up in the course of the day was solved.

One of my determinations for the new year was to slow it down and make the time to relax, and so far I haven't managed it. But I did get all the cloud controls implented, so that's a little better overall.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Rogue, 19/310 (1/19/10)
Dynamic server-wide adjustable weather. My first test of the server network--DMZ talks to Data talks to Dispatch talks to tempGameWorldServer, which talks to clients, which changes the cloud coverage. Soon to be extrapolated to finer levels of detail, but an important step.

Also, I wrote my first C++ tonight, and it worked. Awesome.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 5/310 (1/5/10)
Hope everyone had a great holiday! Mine were a little hectic, but good. Spent all the time I could in front of the computers, modifying the network, and studying Torque. Bought the latest version of the particle animation software for the engine, and am now studying the documentation on that. And modeling.

Really need to find a modeling package that does everything in one step--unfortunately, good modeling packages start at $1000 and rapidly go up, so for now I'm stuck with modeling in one free program, importing and retexturing in another $35 one, and then reexporting, in order to get a reliable solid without missing polygons. And I haven't been able to consistently size textures during the retexturing. On the plus side, I'm getting really great collision detection with this method.

First Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 362/309 (12/28/09)
Finished formatting a third machine to join the AI and data servers. This will run the apache daemon and serve as frontside glue for the other services required. Then I merely need save up $599 for the remaining piece of the equation--the game world server itself. The latest Mini model from Apple, equipped with a 9400M, should do it and physically match the other three servers, for the unquantifiable benefit of a brace of matched power indicators winking in the dark.

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 358/309 (12/24/09)
The dual server setup pumps about 18 Gb overnight back and forth between them. Idling.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 357/309 (12/23/09)
The dedicated AI and data servers have been set up and are working! Two Intel minis, each at 1.83 GHz, dedicated to new server development. I got them used from work when we decommissioned a rack.

A bit of a setback when I discovered that a third, which was to be a dedicated server for the "world", can't run the server even headless--without an appropriate graphics array, even without a monitor attached, the kernel won't launch. I'm sure I'll find something else to do with it. Keeping a spare on hand is never a bad thing either. In the meantime, I'll start saving for what I need for the next piece--I'd been hoping to open it up so I could test remote performance on my lunch time during the week, but that will have to come later.

I had to port the AI server from JAM to ANT over the weekend, too, so that everything could be set up under Snow Leopard and be as modern as possible to develop on... All the changes XCode needed to target a 64-bit OS required some reassembly of the Java-based source project.

Still, the resources are slowly coming together to do something. I'll save for another machine with at least a 9400M in it--I will limp along with my old PC for now and test on my laptop. I can certainly port the code I developed for handling the socket between the AI server and the 3D server and get that done and tested. Then there's the server rewrite, as the needs to be handled are somewhat different than in the predecessor of the codebase...

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 351/309 (12/17/09)
Still enjoying the incredible improvements of the tools! Trying to keep focused on the game-building--my head keeps running off and telling me to redesign the website. However, I also think that taking time to do that is taking time away from what needs really to be done... I am coming to the understanding that I have time to do one thing, but not both. Infinite stretches of hours just aren't plentiful for me anymore!

In other news, I'm finalizing the size of the first important zone. I have a magnificent couple of mockups with various approaches taken to staging. The moving target of hardware capability is difficult--coming to an innate understanding of what factors combine to create acceptable performance on a platform is an opinion, not a fact. So I've built several sized stages from similar heightmaps, and am placing large quantities of simple objects on them, and then running around while watching the framerate. Obviously, I'd like the map to be as large as possible, but I am trying to heed the obvious: no one enjoys a low framerate and lagging video performance.

In the second month of the year, I invested in a low-end laptop, with a 9400M card. I bought it for several reasons--one, I could dual-boot it and test on Mac OSX and Windows platforms both--very important on the tight budget of the hobbyist! The other was the assumption that the 9400M would be a very standard low-end hardware configuration in a couple of years and by building with that platform as the "lowest of the low" now, the eventual production would run decently on the systems of normal users. Anything that works on "normal" equipment also works, by default, on the best of the best equipment, as well.

There are still a lot of judgement calls to make, of course, in deciding what is just right, what needs to fit on the map without zoning, what a "common area" is and what should be cordoned off via instancing but it is fairly exciting to have learned enough over the last year to take these first steps.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Warrior, 341/309 (12/7/09)
Working with the new tools keeps getting better and better. Building test levels is far easier than in previous go-rounds. The new terrain materials are beautiful, too, with very smooth transitions between textures. The design document is fleshed-out nicely, with finalized numbers for experience, leveling, etc. I'm trying to think through all the permutations needed to build so there are no surprises in production. It's also kind of neat--albeit a little self-indulgent--to see it all laid out at once (at last!)

Many experiments still to run--information as to what works best in terms of texture size, polygon count, just how many trees makes a workable forest, whether the starting map should be broken into many smaller zones or one ginormous map--just whether it feels right or not, versus potential lag and the way further levels will be built. I am leaning towards breaking them up, so that each area can be larger in its own right than it could be, but I am still thinking about it.

First Tikid, Hour of the Horse, 269/309 (9/26/09)
Working the preliminaries. The toolset I have chosen to use to build the first 3D environment in is the last phase of beta, and should be available soon. I have written out many formal documents as design guidelines to adhere to... previous experience has shown me that being able to solve most problems as they come up is not the same thing as knowing where you are heading next. I intend to lay these out in a final design document over the last several weeks, drawing up on skills I have not used in more than a decade--when I started out after college I was in magazine publishing, doing editorial and layout with the first-generation layout tools PageMaker, and later, Quark XPress.

In other news, my low energy was traced to a gluten intolerance, and I've been on a gluten-free diet since July this year. I'm slowly getting better, although my energy levels are still quite low.

First Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 224/309 (8/12/09)
Hopefully all the site downtime lately will subside. First the server location was being replastered over a couple of weekends, and then there were problems with a power supply switching itself off at times. Hopefully all is good now, though I am burned out this week. A tiny bit more energy and I will move the server. It's where it is for various reasons, but I have the capacity to host it elsewhere and am thinking of cutting out ties to where the setup stands as much as possible.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 196/309 (7/15/09)
Hot again round these parts, and the sky is clear and blue and bright. Reading an article this morning, on medieval spice myths, and it triggered those warm, comfortable thoughts of a snug home and good smells in the kitchen, with the sure knowledge that tomorrow would be pretty much as today.

Such a hobbit.

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