I have been up to great good over the last week or so, and tremendously so over the past 3 days. I have replaced the theme here a bit, but that’s bound to change again in the coming weeks. Lets get into the meat and potatoes of the changes within the game.
In my down time I have been playing with TCPLink, a class that allows TCP networking calls to be made from my game, to virtually anything else I choose. I have put together a POC that is able to POST, just as an HTML form does, to my webserver and retrieve information at my will. In the coming week ill add the persistence layer and start a job to reset it every few days (so I can screw things up properly and still be able to revert to the original game state).
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As things stand I think that this is the first step in making something really amazing. There are a few games that I have played (Minecraft, and some MMOs) which would really benefit from a certain level of persistence across all servers. I am now able to provide a certain amount of it for BetterTech, and so begins the whole process. In other words, when you join a BetterTech Server it will have to have registered with my own, and you will be able to take your character where you choose. One tricky bitch of a segment was the content of the actual POST request. Hopefully i can help lighten someone elses load.
One element that is still in the works is this kiosk...
It features its own render texture which should, in theory, allow users to interact with each kiosk separately. I have to figure out the interaction layer still though. One option is to only grab the numpad keys, allowing pager code type interaction to be implemented, and emulating a true ATM pretty closely. The second, more powerful, option is to grab all input, including projecting the mouse location into the kiosk. I think this would be more free, but it is also much more involved and would definitely move this out of the realm of proof of concept.
I am also getting considerable response from people interested in testing and helping the project out! Thank you all for your emails. I’ve already answered a couple. I will likely be looking for 5 or so testers to help out confirming and hardening the codebase. Especially with the addition of a webserver to the list it is important that things are developed in a secure fashion. If you are also interested in helping out with the testing team I would love to hear from you. Please shoot me an email at bob@gneu.org. I am always around =)
