Last night's progress
Well, I got the client and server on speaking terms, which is a plus. They’re pickling and compressing to communicate; I just need encryption now, which won’t be difficult and will have to wait until I have actual authentication systems in place (which is a little while out yet).
The client is already tracking the game world (well, a set of maps, anyway), so that’s fine; it needs to be using a child class that adds rendering information and methods to the maps, but that’s pretty trivial, and it means I can use most of what’s there on the server, which will track the basic map, since it doesn’t render anything.
I think I may be to the point of taking a break on the really technical stuff and getting some rendering going. Making the client do something useful, at first anyway, is going to revolve around activating objects and then adding a chat interface; doing that on the console would probably end up making more work for me than it’d be worth, so I think the next thing I do will be getting basic rendering up and running.
From there I can start work with rendering panels for menus, chat boxes, alerts, etc., which I’m hoping to use for anything that displays text to the user — if that works out, and I’m not sure why it wouldn’t, I’ll be able to use them to build the entire menu system very quickly, including the initial startup and login interfaces, which will be the starting point for authentication with the server.
Oops.
Well, turns out instead of simulating a queue with a manged list… I should have just been using a managed queue. Brilliant, huh? Yeah.
Going to apply this when I get home and hopefully I’ll end up with an execution queue that can accept and process arguments pretty much the way I’ve been attempting to for… oh, weeks now.
Frustrating. But hopefully it works and then I can move on to something new.
Welcome to Textpattern!
A side note, completely unrelated to this blog…
I’m running textpattern, which is a very barebones blog done in PHP. It has a few obnoxious design quirks, and most of it is done in a way I simply would not write a website, but I can’t help enjoying its simplicity and effectiveness.
This isn’t much of a plug (note the lack of links); more of a “hey, item of vague interest, perhaps.”
The last couple days have not been conducive to RPG development; I may get some time in this weekend, but if not, definitely by the beginning of next week. Inter-map movement will be high on the list… I don’t recall how far I got with pushing user input to the command stack, but if that’s not done it will be next (and if it is, next comes subclassing for various menu implementations).