Week 4

Salute!

Week 4 has been pretty busy for me - actually so busy I thought I'm already at the end of week 5,  so at first I named this blog post accordingly :).

I'll try to keep this report pretty brief, so to spare some time for more coding.

Our progress on the 4th week:

^{CoA Creator Result}

 Game Client

1. I spent a few days on the CoA Creator. The structure is finalized, so I've started to think about and implement what we discussed with Steve last week - how should we manage the CoA data on the client and on the server (to also provide the ability to edit your CoA as you make progress in-game), and what descriptors and parts shall we treat as built-in and what as moddable segments for the future. Sándor submitted more CoA art in the meantime and also made some improvements on the material layer of the shields, which we also tested and tweaked for a while.
2. I also spent some time on some graphic optimizations and sprite atlas related bugfixes (ie. some sprites were too close to each other in the sprite atlas - so when we were using them on a CoA, some of their edges were "corrupted" by some other sprites. I think one example of this could be seen on our twitter too).
3. Binary serialization and compression have also been added to the client features (it spares a lot on device storage and bandwidth for local data caches and websocket communication).

^{Another CoA result}

 Platform & Game Server

1. Steve is still not back full-time, which has a sad (but at least temporary) effect on  our schedule for the Player Module. This week he was primarily working on data validation, DTO transformations, the authorization methods and scopes - ie. how to be authorized, under what circumstances and for how long your authorization can be considered valid, and in what special cases it should be re-validated even if it's still valid (think of some actions that cannot be undone; or situations when an OS or other apps typically ask for an admin password or a fingerprint to continue). 

^{Really, we have tons of CoA variations now! Releasing the Creator seems imminent.}

 Website

1. Never say never! I've spent a lot of time improving our Forums, so topics can now be tagged (I've tagged the old topics too... sorry for the chaos it may have caused!), and the whole forum structure is now much less complex. You can also easily check for a complete list of topics having the same tag for a price of a click, so you can list the topics of your interests more easily. Of course you can tag your own topics too. Actually, it's better to check it out yourself!
2. I've also refined navigation & the blocks layout, so new elements have been added (like recent blog entries to the right of a blog entry and to the left of the Community pages), older ones were tweaked (like our old-new timeline), etc. We've also added a Discord widget, which you can use to easily join the Feudums discord server, courtesy of our community member scont. Discord provides another alternative for community discussions, and you can also occasionally find us there. It doesn't even require a client app. :)
3. We owe a big thank you to scont for all his valuable feedback on these things. If he hadn't offered his opinion, you'd have a CoA creator by this time ...ehm, I mean, our site would be way less user friendly and certain elements would be much less discoverable, so for almost every improvement on the site this week, the praise is for him. Really, we would definitely love to see more community input about anything.  We do listen!

^{Okay, the hype is maybe for the fact that we love these tags. But more organized forums will also make your life easier!}

 In the next episode

• On the Game Client, I can continue either with the GUI of the CoA creator scene, or with Player Module related scenes (like implementing the login/register/etc scenes for the new Player Module), depends on whether Sándor or Steve will have made more progress. I can also start working on some BBAPs (Big Beautiful Animated Paintings) scenes we always wanted to implement at certain parts of the game - like the throne room of the players. So many choices!
• On the Server, Steve still needs to implement some activation methods, re-authentication, add a name availability API and fine-tune admin notifications. Then he can finalize the API and make it available for the client, and implement some admin views for them too.
• Site: Hopefully we won't need to do anything with it (from a developer's viewpoint). But I don't believe in fairy tales. Not anymore.

That's it for the week, and here is a closing question: if we were to release a custom build of the CoA creator when it is more or less stable, would you actually give it a try? Please answer in a comment below, or on the forum!

Thank you for following us - and see you in no more than a week!