Week 20

Hello!

Milestone Reached!
Get to the Choppa Platform!

This is the first post that I'm writing under our new Platform. I mean, I can still log in! Wo-hoo!

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There are some tiny things that need to be fixed, but this signals the reaching of our second milestone. We're celebrating it by putting our next two milestones on the timeline: Game Map and Game Servers. You can read a bit more about them on our front page by hovering over their timeline entries (hint: use the pagers on the left and right if you see them there).

Coat of Arms Editor isn't totally neglected either; we'll publish an update in the next few weeks with a working communication module for the Platform (along with some bugfixes) - so you'll be able to save your Coat of Arms as your Noble House standard! -, but I had to put it aside for a bit to implement a few things to the Game Map so Sándor can work on the graphic assets uninterrupted.

Our other news: this is the 20th week since the restart, so it isn't like we're beating any publishing records, but with the amount of people and resources present, I'm more than happy with the pace (and more importantly, the overall quality) and I expect that time spent between our milestones can be decreased as we continue marching towards the field of playable features.

Also, after really trying to forget the many issues of our site for the past month or so, we've finally sacrificed some development time on it's altar: Steve spent several days fixing various modules... and missing parts... and image issues to make it more stable and to hide fix some of it's most disturbing problems. He also implemented a few new site admin views to provide us some features we were lacking. These updates are going live continously this day. We've also upscaled the hosting service a bit, and migrated our downloadables to a dedicated endpoint, so the site should be more responsive now. Hope you'll enjoy it, because fixing them wasn't a pleasure.

Weekly Status

Game Client

  1. I've spent my time on the Game Map, finishing the zoom / render strategy logic (ie. how the tiles and the game map should handle different zoom levels, how they can save time and resources by updating their rendering strategies for current camera distance, etc.).
  2. I'm almost done creating a dev version for Sándor where he can check his assets in their natural environment. :)
  3. Sándor has finished tweaking the seasonal sets. We'll still need to tweak them a bit once all of those are in-game, but he is done with all the leg-works.

Week 20 - Random Generated Map, Overview Distance
A random map from overview distance

 Platform & Game Server 

  1. Gábor pretty much finished Collectibles (and as part of it, the Coat of Arms admin views, including tagging. Filter and Vanguard reserved heraldic parts, here we come! ). Steve should double-check things then after the necessary bugfixes, it can probably go live too.
  2. Gábor was also making extensive testing on the available logics (making tons of automated tests).
  3. Steve was updating the server architecture specifications and API documentation.

Week 20 - Random Generated Map, Strategic Distance
The same random map from a bit closer - strategic distance mode. Yes, sea tiles are that ugly without the coastlines rendered.

 Website

  1. Steve spent most of his time on the website. He added, changed, fixed (if I'm correct) a total of 43 bugs and features (hopefully, he was fixing bugs, not adding or changing them, but who can tell for sure..?), updated the core modules and after we've made some tests on the dev version, started pushing everything to the live. With some luck, everything should be done by the time you've finished reading this line.

 Next Step  

We are already working on our next milestones

  • On client side, Sándor and I will start working on Game Map animations as it's a fairly complex area that was solely missed from Phase 1 and we need to find out how we're going to approach this task.
  • If or when we have some "free time" (or getting sick of our regular task), we're going to update the Coat of Arms Editor with integration to the Platform.
  • Steve and Gábor will work on the Game World Management, server infrastructure & stability.
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