A little perspective

This image shows how everything is linked together and what has been developed so far. Everything shown here is added in the solution, either fully working or not working.

Re-work

Now that I have the Room Designer, Zone Builder and Realm Explorer all linked together and working with one-another, I have started working on adding Room Linking within the Zone Builder. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of various ways to implement this feature, and I still haven’t decided on a solid method of doing it yet. I really like the drag and drop method of it, but I’m not sure how to build on to that idea. It’s not a new concept for me, as my previous Mud Designer IDE that I replaced with Mud Designer used a drag and drop approach, and it’s really simple to implement, however it would require me opening up the Zone to accessing the Realms. It would need to in order to allow Rooms to be linked to Rooms/Zones within other Realms and I don’t want that. I’m trying to keep each editor segregated from their parents. Realms can access Zones but not Rooms as that is a child of the Zone. Zones can access Rooms but not Realms, as Realms manage and control the Zones.

So how should I approach the Room linking? I’m still not sure, I’ve started with trashing 80% of the Zone UI, as it wasn’t going to cut it. Not that there was a whole lot to the UI in the first place, but it had to go. I’m thinking of adding a ‘Realm Exit’ property to doors, or something along those lines, at which point the Realm can select the Zone and view all of it’s Realm Exits. Users can select a Realm Exit and link it to a Realm Entrance within another realm. I think this is the best approach to take, but implementing it is going to take some serious thought. It sounds fairly simple, but I need to make sure that the implementation of it is well planned. I don’t want to do a whole lot of re-work on this, and I want to make sure that the classes are built correctly. It’s very time consuming to do re-work within the editors when I remove or change an engine class. I spent close to 2 hours re-working the editors after I decided to remove the Engine class earlier this week. I’m trying to avoid that this time around with some better planning.

I was hoping to release a tech preview of the toolkit in a binary form this weekend, but that’s not going to happen sadly. Hopefully next weekend something will be ready, but until then people will just need to download the source and compile it in order to take a look at it.

Congratulations Garage Games. I am pleased.

Last week I wrote about the state of Indie Game Development and my disappointment in Garage Games due to them charging $1,000 for their new engine while Unreal and Unity released theirs for free.

While I still stand by my statement that Garage Games should be setting the Indie pricing and content standard instead of following corporate pricing modals (such as being out done by UDK), they have done a good job in changing the Torque 3D licensing fees. You can now purchase a binary version of the engine with all of the same features the $1000 Pro version contains (without the source code) for $250. If people purchase it during the month of December they can get it for a cool $100.

Nice job Garage Games, this is going to help indie developers get their hands on a high quality engine with a low budget. Hats off to you.

Merged Projects

I spent tonight merging projects together with the Mud Designer. Previously all of the editors where contained within a different project, segregating each editor from another, but this created issues when trying to debug the project and test features, as the Zone Builder would place its files within its debug folder, then the Realm Explorer couldn’t see them due to being in a different project directory.

This has been fixed by moving all editors and the engine itself, into a single project. I was actually surprised to see the project file size be reduced from 3.9mb to 575k, not that it really matters now-a-days, but that was something i hadn’t expected.

Some of the items within the project is broken due to the change, as this was a pretty heavy overhaul. All of the namespaces have been restructured and editors that where previously calling files to load (like the Realm Explorer executing the Zone Builder.exe) are now working in a hacky manor until i get something better setup, which shouldn’t be to long. Hopefully by the end of the week I will have the Realm, Zone an Room editors all synced up and ready for a preview Release on Codeplex.

Nearing my first release

I worked quiet a bit on the Mud Designer over the weekend and managed to get the Realm Explorer, Zone Builder and Room Designer Built up. The Realm and Zone editors will be fleshed out some more and finalized over the course of the week, get everything working together and publish a preview release of the engine and it's toolkit hopefully this coming weekend.


- Posted from my iPhone

Free-To-Play games vs. Subscription

Jeff Strain gave his opinion on Free-To-Play games earlier this week, and while I was reading it, I could feel myself becoming a little perturbed. His argument is, '”Developers working on free-to-play projects are too preoccupied with in-game revenue opportunities and don’t have time to focus on making games fun.”

Well, I can agree to a certain point with him on that. There are a few games out there that I’ve played where the company is more concerned with making money off the store transactions than making new free content for the players, but there are also a lot of games out there that employ the modal and still look out for their user base. The game is free to play and thus needs to generate revenue in some form, so that is to be expected and should be acceptable to a degree, provided new content and still provided to users on a free level as well. Something that Jade Dynasty has done, or Perfect World. Both have released several expansion packs for free to their users with a large set of changes and new content.

So Strains statement is an invalid statement, especially when you look at World of Warcraft, a game that focuses on it’s free 'patches being aimed at helping the lower level players, because they complain about things and Blizzard doesn’t want to loose their business. How about their expansion packs? Those aren’t free, and it’s another way of pulling subscribers that have canceled their accounts, back into playing paying for their subscription again.

Both sides of the MMO world is the same, they are both trying to feed their pocket book, and have a right too, provided it doesn’t take their focus away from the users and giving them a good experience. Something that Perfect World games have always done.

I’m have no problem paying a subscription fee for playing a game, I limit myself $20 a month in microtransaction fees, so my rant isn’t because I don’t want to pay the monthly fee. I paid for warcraft for 5 months before i canceled it.

One last thing I’d like to point out is that microtransactions usually employ character customization options such as new outfits or hairstyles that aren’t available in the standard game, and I like this approach as it provides users with a way to be different from others playing the game. Everyone can find something they like and wear it and be different.

RIP Visual Designer

I had to delete both the Visual Designer and the Visual Components projects from the MUD Designer Solution tonight. I was tired of trying to manage two different sets of editors for the same project, and had to make a decision. Which would be the easiest to build, and let me get something to the community fastest? The current setup, as the Visual Designer was going to rather elaborate and take awhile to work on, although it would be less code in the end, and probably easier to maintain, it was going to take to long to implement all of the dynamic components of the engine.

The current setup is quickly getting someplace, as tonight I managed to get the Realm Explorer built, Zone Builder started and Room Designer stable. The Realm Explorer allows users to launch the Zone Builder to build rooms that they can place within Realms. The Zone Builder lets users launch the Room Designer and create Rooms for the Zones to hold.

At the moment, both the Zone Builder and Room Designer is accessible via the Mud Designer Main Window, but once I get the Realm and Zone Builder in a stable state, I will remove the Zone Builder and Room Designer from the Mud Designer window. Users will access them in a hierarchical fashion, starting by launching the Realm Explorer.