Wow, a month has passed since my last update.

Project's still going, but it feels like there's not much to show for it. Why? Because there's been a lot of back-end code being written, and a lot of db & comms testing. Still it's not been without a few little wins along the way. Most significant o…

Current status of the game project: motoring along, albeit slowly.


The screenshot below shows the visually underwhelming result of a few days work on the servers. Yet to me, it's a significant step forward.




Previously, the game's servers were all implemented as console applications - a watchdog, a ga…

The last week or two have been hectic, but productive. The program is now talking to the database; frameworks for the watchdog, authentication and chat servers are written and getting closer to testing, the scriptable UI is nearing completion. It sounds like progress - but of course the project is …

I have a friend who is a full-time author, publishing multiple novels a year. From the outside it would seem he has an inhuman ability to focus - to spend every waking hour at his profession, focusing on a single outcome, writing his novels in irrepressible fits of creativity.
The reality is a littl…

Over the last week I've been refactoring my entire application in a number of areas, as well as adding a few new features:

• It now uses a comprehensive component/entity system for all mob/player functionality
• The component system is asymmetrical, allowing for server-side rule enforcement, client-side …

The kids have given me a few spare minutes this weekend (and I've taken a few more besides) to work on my client/server state data.

Previously, I had some rudimentary state information in there and was concentrating on getting the basics of the terrain communicating back and forth. Fine for terrain …

So I spent too many hours lately fixing bugs introduced when I rearranged a whole bunch of structure code and messed up the order of initialisation of a couple of objects. Sigh.

Progress on the client-server movement will take at least a couple of days, and there's plenty more to do besides. But hey…

Up until now I've been rendering everything wireframe. And even then, I've been only rendering the 'top' faces of my terrain heightmap. Last night I decided to spend a bit of time on the cosmetics - in the hope that it'll make development a little more fun in future iterations. So there were four m…

So I clicked Save instead of Publish on the last post... I'm such a noob sometimes.

Last development session felt very productive. I fixed a highly annoying networking bug - it finally irritated me so much I couldn't ignore it any longer. Turns out I'd missed setting an event somewhere and coinciden…

According to TortoiseHg my project is 5 weeks old. A fair amount has gone into it in that time, more than I can cover here. Instead, I intend to simply record what was achieved in my last development session(s) between journal posts. At least this way I, and you, can see that 'stuff is being done'.…