It’s only been a month since the last update, so things must be improving!

Game design is great. Normally you start with some grand idea, and as time goes on more and more features are added to it. Eventually you end up with some fantastic vision of how it’s going to play and all the cool things people will be able to do.

Then you have to make it, and things start going down hill.

Clients and Servers

The “Online” part of Shining Online was always very much a case of “I’ll do it later”. There were other things to do, like designing cool enemies or making bats hit Ken in the crotch.

Seeing as the whole game is being rewritten (again), this time it’s starting from the online perspective. There’s a tonne of stuff involved with this, and most of it involves telling the client what the server knows. Bats are way more fun, but they won’t get players online.

Like most things, the current design is open to change. For those that are interested in these things, here’s a rough idea of how things are supposed to work.

The client connects through the gateway server, which takes care of “global” accounts (i.e. ones create on the Shining Online website).  World servers are where the action takes place. When they’re started, they register with the gateway server so that players can select them.

I doubt the player count will ever be big enough to require multiple servers, but in the future I’d like to release the server code and tools so others can run their own worlds.

Once the player is connected to the world server of their choice, they can start having fun. The world server handles all the game simulations, and passes information to various databases and sub-servers (for zones and battles). It’s simple and probably won’t scale all that well, but it actually works at the moment so it’s staying ;)

Pictures are fun

Development is going well, and so far clients can login and connect to servers. Now all that needs doing is the entire game ;)

For those that prefer explosions to texty stuff, here’s the “World Server” in action:

Actually, that’s even less interesting. There’ll be a better picture next update, I promise ;)

See you all next week!