You may have wondered why there was hardly any update or post on my blog the last weeks.

Thing is I've been working on the OpenNetwork for some time again now. One thing that really bugged me was the UDP port that still was too buggy an unreliable. I however wanted to port the Client-Server-Communtication of ProjectFreedom from TCP to UDP so I had to improve the UDP-Port a lot to not get into troubles there.

The first thing I changed was the way the messages where send/queued inside the port. Unreliable and reliable messages are handled the same way now. Also the port is able to split up big messages (several dozend kbs!) into small chunks and send them. The pinging of the port is now based on the latency. If its bigger resends and timeouts have bigger time interavals.

Looks kinda nice he? What I still miss is encryption and checksums. I am not sure if I should use third-party libraries for that or implent my own stuff.

Second, I forked cAudio to OpenAudio, which is very similar to cAudio but fits better into the project. So basically its just namespace changes and renames of classes and types.

Third, serveral improvements here and there in Project Freedom. The server architecture is now much more stable because I separted connection and process handling. In future it'll also be possible to have several ConnectionServers to support more players (and crashes).

Whatever I don't want to talk too much about things I am working on. I'll tell more when good results are there.

In the last months of Project Freedoms design discussions it became more and more clear that this game has to put itself compatible with the needs of a Web2.0 user.

If you remember the page written in HTML/CSS I posted about a month ago. Think of it as a mockup. What happens at the moment is that PFs Server is gettting a new kind of ServerProcess that handles the http-port. 

What are we aiming at?

A lot of games feature a homepage and the ability to have dedicated forums for your clan and whatever. But only a few offer access to that ingame. As Projec tFreedom will be a community based game we decided to combine server and homepage by making the website a part of the game server.

You willl be able to write messages to your ingame buddies via forums and manage your guild even if youre not ingame and we hope it will find a wide acceptance in the community.

At the moment there are still some tests ongoing but it seems like the framework we are using works fine and will help us create dynamic pages even easier as with php.

Soon I will post first previews of the page. Though it will just a rework of the mokup ;)

I didn't say anything about what I coded for some time.

That is because I have been researching a lot lately and ended up having something really cool: A working server architecture.

What it basically does at the moment is dynamically start/maintain/restart/stop services. Also it can be controlled trough a Terminal-Process. It is cool to see a server process crash but the client just get a small notification no disconnection. The service then gets restarted and everything works again.

The most time, as everyone know who codes a bit, I am bugfixing. But of course not only PF but also OpenNetwork. 0.3 will finally bring encryption and the patcher system I need for my Project. It will already be a release candidate and 1.0 will most probably only be a bugfix release as everything works fine now.

I am still looking for somebody who wants to improve (or let's say implent) the UDP-Port. Just mail me or comment if you are interested. Of course the SVN is open to everyone and patches can be submited 24/7.

I've been working on the basics of projects freedoms server model the last days. The cool thing about it is that it, like Google Chrome for example, uses multiple processes and one crashing doesn't crash everything.

At the moment I have one ConnectionServer acting as a proxy between clients and other processes of the server. If the connectionserver finds out that a zone/chat/login servers went down it will restart it.

But then again you see the main problem of that design. What if the ConnectionServer crashes? Well , i tried to keep the risk as small as possible by moving everything out of the connections server except for routing the messages and identifiying users/processes.

I would like to draw i nice diagram but then again i think it is not that complex, or is it?

You know i miss it. I really miss top down old school RPGs and I miss the simple gameplay they had mainly because of that.

So why not have this kind of gameplay in my concept: Project Freedom?

I worked a lot with the Irrlicht Engine the last years and I already wrote serverl prototypes with it. I love 3D-Programming and think it makes things a lot easier (just think of lighting/shadowing or depth handling).
So I would like to turn this into a 2,5D-game. What means a top-down view on a 3d map. But actually youre just moving on the x and y axis. At no point another person will be directly above you.

What you get? A game that is a lot easier to play. A game where you dont have to turn your camera. A game that doesn't overhelm you with a lot of impressions at once.

I feel SIMPLICITY

Doesn't such a retro-style top down view remind you of old games like diablo or utlima online? Isn't that neat? I think it adds a nice attitude to the games design. Of course some may dislike it but I want something more unique.

Also use tile-based movement? Nah, i think tile-based 3d games are just wierd. Just think of bigger entities in the game that occupy more than one tile and are moveable? The collision and movement in general would be very unnatural and ugly. I don't think you need tiles to be retro. Mario didn't move tile based either ;)

What do you think of a next-gen-retro-game? Flame me!

A thing that always fascinated me about humanity is it's freedom of speech, religion and whatsoever and where it has brought us. I think giving everyone the ability to do whatever he wants makes this world so diverse but also so full of anger and misery. It allows us to do whatever we want and go whereever we want. We try to control it with ethics or some sort of military or police, but as we germans say "you don't have to do anything but die".

Having Freedom as the most powrful factor in our all lives why not put it's power into a game project...PROJECT FREEDOM!

Who has done it already? Just think about it. Sandbox games! GTA, Spore, Sims etc etc etc. They're all successful but they miss one big factor. One person being completely free is fine but what about having something like in reallife where dozends or hundreds of people are interacting? This pushes us into a multiplayer environment and at the point where i ended up after a lot of months in thoughts.

Of course something is missing. In real life we've ethics and nationalities that somehow put an order into this messy and big world. So i have to think of something that acts similiar. Maybe invent a religion inside the game? Well thats something i will discuss at some other point.

But what about groups of players? They must be able to own parts of the environment and to manipulate it. They should also be able to invent stuff like machines or weapons, craft and trade them to have some kind of economy.

On the other hand you have to be careful not to put too much restrictions on the player to keep the concept of a free environment.

So i end this small post with a question:
What should a player be allowed to do in a multiplayer environment ?