Still alive

Still alive, upright, and taking on oxygen. Game development is on a bit of hiatus while I enjoy some World of Warcraft. Never fear, progress will begin again soon.

Time for sleep

There is a cargo pod in position on the top of the ship. It is not distributed yet. It does not track inventory yet. It pretty much just looks pretty.

I think I know what is wrong with the server crashes. The creator of the object is the only one allowed to destroy the object. Currently it is created and owned by starfieldAI, but is being destroyed by client.py.

I will have to do more work later, 'cuz it's bedtime.

Views

Couple minor changes tonite. Added the ability to change from the "over the engine" view to closer to a "on the bridge" view. Not on the bridge yet though, and not 100% happy with how it looks.

Also trying to get rid of the annoying server crashes. Still haven;t gotten it ironed out.

Think I may spend a late night tonite messing around with stuff. I want to get the mining ship tracking what it has taken in, and start showing the cargo pods in the game.

Troubles

Rough night. Tried to break the chat logic out into a separate module / class. It didn't work well. For some reason the client repository wasn't getting references to the chat manager or the asteroids. The only thing I was seeing in the doId2do list was the time manager.

I suspect that for some reason, it wasn't setting interest in zone 101, which is the starting system that includes the avatar, asteroids, and chat manager object. The avatar was being created in zone 101 though. As I understand it, creating an object in an interest zone automatically sets interest in that zone.

Anyway, ended up doing a revert against the SVN server, and got everything reset to where it was when I started and it all works again. Maybe I can create a separate module without making a chat manager class...

Chat

Chat is finished. I have the incoming messages displaying in a scrolling area in the lower left of the display, right above the text input line. As a bonus, I can send system messages to the window as well. Special thanks to 'ThatGuy956' from the panda3d forums for most of the display code. I made minor changes, but most of it was his.

The server stability issues *seem* to be resolving. I suspect that it is related to how I was destroying the distributed objects.

Still waiting for a 1.7.0 to come out, and I will put out a couple downloads for people to test out. I would like to see some more stress testing. I have had 4 connections at once so far, but obviously that isn't enough.

Anyway... I will put links to the videos to the left for all to enjoy!

Login Screen Video

Since videos are so much fun, Here is a preliminary shot of the login page.

Login screen

Late night. I have a preliminary login screen, but I still need to get "Broken Empire" on screen somehow. I know where, and have a good idea for the font. It is just a matter of making it. Animated flying asteroids. Satellite and mining ship on screen. Need to animate those somehow, maybe some blinkey lights, that sort of thing.

Once it is finished (probably tomorrow) I will post it as another youtube video.