Gearing up for another Release Candidate

I've been so busy my hands are sore!!

With the addition of such things as player owned housing, building, skill trainers, locked chests, and even a light emitting flaming longsword, I have been working hard on the MMOKIT to prepare for a new release candidate this Friday. In the meantime I have had a chance to read through Game Programmer's Guide to Torque and finish up the Advanced 3d Game Programming All-in-One series. Incredible learning resources, I wish I had read them months ago! Things like the inventory system would have been much easier.

Well after what seems like forever, we are finally nearing the point where MMOKIT 1.5 has all the core features in it that are needed for a RPG or MMO game. I am very much looking forward to working on an actual game soon, and to pulling out some portions of the kit to post up in some form as resources. I even had time last weekend to whip up a 40 page manual for the kit. The most frustrating part of working on a project meant for other developers is realizing that even with all the great code that is already there, it is going to be hard for people to use what I've written unless I show them how. So I took some time out to make some examples for mounting, the skill and quest system, and a bunch of FAQ answers. It felt much better to finally have something out for docs, even in its draft form.

I think one of the very next resources I will put up here is a full treatise on GUI customization. This has been addressed a lot in various form, but I still needed to go figure it out myself, especially things like properly constructing a bitmap array and some engine tweaks to get things to align the way I wanted them to.

As I become more involved with the TSE MMOKIT (Titas) I will need to learn more about shaders, some advanced server object optimization, and the nuances of video cards. Luckily I have people like Erik Madison to learn from :) I was a little upset when after all the work that was done to get MMOKIT ported over to TSE MS4 it kinda just hung there on mission load. Then I booted it up on my super duper PC with a new video card and dropped my jaw on the floor. I hadn't expected it to look that great. Nice job GG on getting TSE to this point!

The next few months for Torque look like they are going to be quite amazing also, and that just gets me more excited. Even while planning my own game in the back of my brain, I am thinking up all manner of addons to create for Torque and the stream of creativity is relentless. Remembering that the reason I got involved with the Dream RPG project in the first place was to learn how to do the things needed to make my own RPG. It's quite something to look back over these 8 months I've spent with TGE, Dreamer and Ashtara and the things I've learned. As I say jokingly sometimes, after the 9th month of working with Torque for me, something truly great will be born! Don't know what it is yet though, maybe the final release of MMOKIT 1.5 or TITAS v 1.0. That would be something!

To keep this short, I will post up a small picture of the store gui we are going with in the MMOKIT these days, and a quick shot of TITAS. WoW is a heavy influencer to my game development :)

Come on by to www.mydreamrpg.com and visit sometime!