MMORPG Contest - Home stretch

Although the contest will continue through the rest of January, this week will be the last week of development. I'm going on a sailing vacation in the British Virgin Islands Jan 19th - Jan 28th, so I have a little more than a week left to finish up.

The most important things left includes integrating the various branches into the stable trunk, one item at a time. All of these components work well alone, but the merging is going slowly. If a few things break here and there... well, it could get messy so I'm taking my time.

Thanks to the unique implementation of the NPC / Quest systems, GM's will be able to continue creating quests and adding NPC's while I'm gone.... well, that's the plan anyway... lol

New website!

Thanks to Mr Bloodworth and his awesome artistic abilities, we have a new look to our forums and a new skin on our home page.





The main website is powered by WordPress... I'd been evaluating all sorts of content management systems, and even though WordPress is mostly a blogging tool, it actually had all of the features I wanted, so I'm using it for our home pages and eventually for hosting screen-shots.

Client Install

Also, thanks to such incredible products from Indigo Rose, the client installer, updater and binary patch system is working flawlessly. The initial 0.0.0.1 install was published yesterday along with a test patch.



This install system is awesome! Within just a few short minutes, I had an installer including full registration. The installer asks for the User Name, Serial Number, E-mail, etc and posts the data to a PHP script hosted on the main web site. It also asks the user for their preferred password, so it doubles as a complete registration system.

The updater is included in the initial installer and automatically checks and installs updates before launching the client.

The binary patcher is just as impressive. By default it does a full binary comparison of all distributed versions and creates a single downloadable executable that can upgrade any version to any other version. Combined with some additional scripting logic from the updater and multiple patch.exe's can be created to distinguish between minor updates and major updates, allowing us to minimize the amount of bandwidth used for installation and patching.

After it was all set up (it took me about an hour to complete it, other than some of the PHP scripting, which took me a bit longer) then making and distributing a new patch takes just a few minutes.

I'm impressed with the quality of work provided by Indigo Rose... if you're looking for a professional level software deployment solution, make sure you check them out.

This week we started a small, closed alpha test and so far so good. Every day I'm rolling out a new feature and if all goes well then the full-featured client will be thoroughly tested by the end of this week.

Today's patch included the IRC Chat HUD, which was mostly taken from Sean Pollock aka DarkRaven's (many many thanks!) GuiLobby code, but modified to work with my chat server (loosely based on IRC, but with a few added features).

Other than a few bugs involving spaces / special characters inside Toon names, it went off without a hitch. Lets hope the rest of the implemented features all come together as easily as this one.



We've also hired an author to help get the back-story off the ground. He also happens to be a great concept artist, so hopefully we can get some nice looking drawings of the future direction of the world, NPC's and a great back-story before the end of the contest.... I'll post some of his work over the next week or so.

There's not much left for coding, but we're definately lacking in the toon model department. I hope to have the final client finished soon enough so I can concentrate on making more toon / NPC models... if not then we're going to have to stick with the stock toons that came with the MMO Kit... not exactly what I want to do, but, well... I'll have to admit it... 90 days simply isn't enough time for a small part-time team to have a game completely finished, polished and ready for distribution... lol

But, I'm extremely happy with what we have finished in such a short period of time, and I'm ecstatic when I think about the fact that we're nearly to the point of finishing the first iteration and we can start play-testing, fine-tuning and adding more great features.

I want to thank Nathan Snell, Allyn McElrath, Jervin Music, Arteria-Gaming, Timothy Aste, Todd Pickens, My Dream Games, Garage Games and the numerous other people and companies who help by creating the resources on this website and on TDN. All of you made enormous contributions to this game, both directly and indirectly. Thanks!!!!

Wish us luck on hitting a home run on this one.... I think we need a bit of luck right about now :P