Looks like video gallery links are still broken..

https://www.gamedev.net/gallery/image/10413-boardin_day1mp4/

I did work on this a bit last night as well, so I guess it's day 1.5.. ish.. haha!

Still working on the crappy frame-rate, I'm not su…

Soooo... Additional project time!

It's a personal Christmas challenge.  Plus I really need to make something that I can release before another year goes by.

A basic re-use and re-imagining of my current main project assets.  With some inspiration from @Cyber…

So I spent several months there just writing code like an insane monkey with a caffeine addiction...  I'm spending the week cleaning house and making sure all my ducks are in a row to continue implementing the new story objectives that I wrote up.  There's a LOT of code in this pile that doesn't…

Soooo.... I've been working out some of the ideas I've had in mind for the game I've been building all this silly infrastructure for.. haha. 

I know, I'm the most backwards thing you've probably ever heard of.

Anyhow, I've always been a huge fan of games with some real-time strategy elem…

One of the great advantages to having a distributed modular system comes in its flexibility and its configurability/re-configurability.  The modular approach I'm taking with my system will allow me to service and tune specific aspects of the architecture individually during live operations. 

…

Well here it is, and finally in a format even I understand.

And then, keeping the above in mind, here's how the NPCs will work.

So, sometimes I get wrapped up in the moment and think 42 steps ahead of where I am, and in that 42 steps I usually take a sideways leap somewhere and not realize that I've put myself on a different train altogether. 

I got caught up in the idea that I had an architectural problem on my hand…

So, I've been approaching this as though I would be able to devise a way to omit an authoritative physics simulation from my server architecture, while still having physics running on the clients.

I'm really not sure that's actually possible for this game anymore.  Too much "fast" action... …

I started working on generating the systems that will instantiate the NPCs, got it booted up, you can check my latest video upload in the gallery for that.   But once I had that at a comfortable point to resume later, I decided I needed to close a planet sized gap in my server architecture.

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I think I've finally put my finger on the button(s)(quite a few apparently) that may explain my project.  It's helping me to clarify my vision anyhow, so just play along okay?

I'm not building a game simulation....  I've been trying to use that term because it's what everybody else uses, and…

Okay, the servers are now all running on Linux.  I had initially intended to wait until all development was mostly completed to make the transition but now I'm glad I've done it.  And, the more I use Visual Studio Code, the more I appreciate its simplicity and how well it's adopted the Linux env…

I have succeeded in creating a cross-platform, custom combination MQTT Client/Broker or "MQTT Router" that can Route messages to other MQTT Brokers/Routers.  They dynamically build connections to each other and test route latency.  They currently do NOT do any best route calculations.  But that …

Well, I've made some significant progress on my MQTT Router.  I've successfully brought 3 nodes online, 1 Primary and 2 Peers, and they are communicating Hellos and building connections between each other.

Here you see the Primary Router's output(Linux):

• Checks command line argument…

So, the MQTT exercises continue.  Now that I've established the basic topology.  Let's throw together a simple protocol to make it all work!! 

We'll call it MQTT-rp:

Okay, what's the purpose here?  We need a protocol to allow a combined MQTT server & client to become a Message Ro…

The past few days I've been working on figuring out how the "peer-to-peer" bits of my game network are going to work.  For now I'm testing with MQTT, because it's light and fast and reliable, but you could pretty much replace MQTT with ZeroMQ or just some raw TCP/UDP sockets code or anything els…

I've been having some trouble explaining myself lately.   So I thought I might draw some more pictures instead.  Please tell me, does this paint a clearer picture of my rambling madness?  In the picture below you will find my effort to explain how the system I'm building is structured, conceptua…

I posted this in the forum earlier from my phone and then realized it wasn't really a forum type post...  So, here it is in the permanent record of my project blog where it belongs.

So, I've been struggling with my perception of time.  Haha, at least with how it pertains to the game system I…

Here's a look at the first server executing from the Linux environment.  I chose to move the Action Server over first because it's still pretty small code-wise and didn't have any file system code that would need touched.  Was going for an easy win.  It worked.

Read more in Septopus

Well, since adopting the KV database into my server architecture I've begun to rethink many of my earlier assumptions, one of them being that I would continue developing my servers on Windows until I was past alpha stage...  Since I've already brought a Linux solution into the core of the archit…

Spent most of the evening sorting out my thoughts as to how the data will flow between my servers and clients.  Here's the final result.

I'm moving forward with Redis as my KV db, it should be easy enough to switch to so…

Okay, I'm not going to go into as much depth with this evaluation simply because I don't feel like I need to.

I'll provide the simple benchmark script(same as last one,just modified to use NCache instead) at the end.

NCache installed easy enough, but I had to update my powershell to use …

This is the first of at least two posts regarding my evaluation of the addition of an In-Memory(RAM) Key-Value Database system to my server architecture.  If you're unfamiliar, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key-value_database, for some broad spectrum info. 

I'm beginning with Redis…

It's been a little bit since I put up a general game status update.  So here's where I'm at.

On the Game Server front:

This past week I wrote up another server and then duplicated the code to create the remaining server "stubs".  So, the entire system is now composed of 6 Game Servers an…

Here's the completed basic animation set for my RepairBot.  (left to right) Turning right, turning left, moving forward turn left, moving forward turn right, jump, moving forward, idle.  And full sized android for size comparison.  

Read more in Septopus

Got my basic set of animations done for the ArmBot.  Moving forward/back, idle, turning right/left, and picking up object.  When the coding is all done, I'll go back and add in transitional animations to make state changes smoother.  I'm apparently testing the limits of the .gif file format as w…

A little smaller than an Android class robot, but twice as many grabby bits.  Really good at getting into small places and fixing broken things, or breaking fixed things..  Whichever it is you have need for.

…

Meet the Mark1 ArmBot... yeah, I'm working on the name too.  This one will specialize in, well, carrying things and making obnoxious faces with its two digital displays.  These ones probably won't be available as playable characters.  I'm sticking to humanoid PCs since I don't want to duplicate …

Say hello to the new Mark1 Android, this one's dressed up for some general labor and/or construction duties.  There might be a few versions in the game (mk1,2,3,etc.) but those will only be simple cosmetic changes from a modeling perspective.  Still working on the textures/etc..

Read more in Septopus

So, I ripped out all the UMA2 code from my game client.  Slapped in some Space Robot Kyle.  Say Hi!

And apparently, I guess some of the mesh magic going on behind the scenes of the 10000+ lines of code that is …

I decided I was tired of my current story idea, I didn't spend much time on it anyhow, too full of holes and just well, actual crap.  In addition to that, I have realized that all the 3D modeling work that it would have taken to get anywhere near the richness of experience I wanted would take ye…