So, it’s programmer mumbo-jumbo time again! Sorry, I wanted to do another one of these much sooner, but there always seems to be so much else to do, too… anyway, there has been a lot going on behind the scenes during the past couple of weeks. In fact, one of these things concerns coming out from behind said scenes a bit: since creating an open source GlitchEleven game server has been the plan all along, we finally started moving parts of our code to GitHub. What you can see there right now is actually the humble beginning of the “real” game server — no more throwaway prototype code.
Now, before you fire up Git: this is still in early stages, and does not support the actual game client yet. You can marvel at unit test results if that’s your thing, though! Besides, it is just one of several components we are working on; another big one being the webapp, parts of which you have already seen in screenshots or demos (the new vanity/wardrobe and the skills interface). An important next step will be integrating these components and having them talk to each other. This game sure needs a lot of stuff!
Unit tests can be fun, too.
Also, a couple of new people have joined the dev team recently, and I want to specifically mention two of them who already contributed some great work. Amabaku has been making steady progress on the long-neglected topic of NPC movement, and it makes working on other parts of the system so much more enjoyable when you get to see the world coming more and more to life in the background. Meanwhile, Egiantine started looking into creating a better AMF library for Node.js (AMF being the data format of the messages exchanged between game server and client). The existing options all turned out to be lacking in one area or another, but her initial benchmark results look very promising. With the library we are currently using, the server process simply cannot keep up with the messages from more than a handful of clients, so this really is a key piece of infrastructure.
While it is still easier to try and test these and other new features in the existing prototype server (being able to fire up the game and all), step by step they will be ported over to the “real” server in the coming weeks and months. Moving forward 🙂
I’m hoping that this will mean we are one step closer to seeing a beta sometime in 2015 since this is essentially marking it as one step closer
Every time a new blog post is up my heart leaps! (Not literally, of course. That would be weird)
Same for me! Can’t wait until I get to play again 🙂
Ah, that was me above! I guess I messed up my email address. Anyhow, here’s a shout out to my old friends Kristen Marie and Sirentist for your hard work!
Sees the word “weeks” – smiles…sees the word “months” – crawls back into fetal position.
Glad to see you guys are making progress and release code! Looking forward to when you have the server and client communicating so I can start coding myself. 🙂 (Not enough free time to dive in and figure out that low-level stuff right now.)
I’m so happy about this, when I saw the news I started crying, even knowing that there’s still a long mountain to climb.
Hey Eleven, any updates??
Glitch must come back alive!!
-Piece of Pixieboots
is the website eventually gonna be in the ‘glitchy’ style that we all know and love? (like COU has it all glitchy n shit)
(also: update pls im so fucking homesick)
The website will continue to change and evolve as we move forward, so who knows what the final design will look like. 🙂