Mythruna

Ok, so it's not what you think.  I have not purchased Fallout 4.  It is not consuming any of my free time.

It's my reward... when I finish something else.

I've arranged to take the entire week of Thanksgiving off this year.  Ostensibly, this is to get networking into Mythruna finally once and for all.  I almost hate to write these words down because fate always conspires against me to make me eat those words.  So assuming no new health issues come up, no major breakage of personal property, no new family injuries or emergencies, that's the plan.  But in the last two years, every time I make hard plans like that, something comes along to derail it all.  Here's hoping that doesn't happen this time.

In the mean time, I have to knock a bunch of things off of my virtual to-do list in preparation and so far I'm making good progress there.  Some are even things I have to do out in the 'big blue room' before winter hits full time.

I really want to be playing Fallout 4.  My son also really wants to be playing Fallout 4.  It has taken all of my self control not to take this week off of work with 'radiation sickness' to play it.  Unfortunately, that's the reason why it would be entirely counter-productive to have it.

So it is my reward.  If the stars align and I'm able to get networking into Mythruna this month then December will be Fallout 4 month.  The additional benefit is now my son is nagging me, too.

Even if you don't finish the networking, you deserve every break you can get. This may be my own ignorance of your situation speaking, but what I see of you is a person most people wish they were, if only without your trying exxtraordinary circumstances.

So, will this mean that E-Space will be fully functional soon enough?

E-space is what it is.  It's networked and ships can fly around.  I don't remember what I was holding off putting out a version for but I kind of just have to push forward.

Within 2 hours of FO4's release they had the rift working with it. I spent 2.5 days downloading the freaking game. Played a little last night. About to have a wasted weekend.

You, sir, suck in the worst possible way.  And I mean that in the best way possible. ;)

Heh heh. I've got a little bit of FO4 hype, but not nearly enough to drop more than 15$ on it. Maybe I'll partake next year. :P

If only they would accept bottle caps...

Random: as an experiment, I'm trying to use trello instead of my paper to do lists.  The board is supposedly public.  Don't know if this is the right link or not:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

Notes:
1) it's an experiment so potentially don't read too much into it at this point.
2) for a while, the to-do list will likely grow faster than the 'done' list... at least once I get started for real during Thanksgiving week.  So it's probably not as straight forward as it looks.

especially considering this one:
(http://i.imgur.com/5aLtWkh.png)

Could turn out come Friday night that I've forgotten a bunch of stuff since I last put it down so many months ago.

Actually, someone mailed bethesda a few thousand caps and got a free copy of the game for it. Probably a one-time thing, but that was neat.

oh and http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/031/176/083.gif

Yeah, I couldn't remember if it was a copy of the game or a pipboy or I'd have mentioned it. :)

More progress... still tracking it here:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

The neat thing about this page is it auto-updates as I change things.  For those who like to watch paint dry, you can just leave it open. :)

"Ham-fisted position updates (using ES components only)"

(http://orig10.deviantart.net/03b3/f/2012/068/c/2/fists_of_ham_by_rowleen-d4s86gw.png)

Heheh.

Work-on-Mythruna-staycation... so far so good.
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

Well, at least the "Done" list is growing even if the 'To-do' list isn't shrinking yet. :)

It's been a rough day and a half or so.  Took some time off on Thanksgiving which was nice but then finished up feeling the pressure of my ending vacation.

Today was a good but painful day of test, fix, rebuild, repeat.  The plan was to temporarily stub out all of the 'services' that the client expects that will normally need to be provided by remote services.  Like terrain loading, grabbing objects, etc..  The preceding couple of days was building the infrastructure necessary to do that.  The plugin system needed a slight overhaul because I'd never fully implemented a design for how to deal with plugins that needed to add different services depending on what mode the game was running (multiplayer server, multiplayer client, or single player).  I'd hacked in one approach a year ago or so that I completely yanked out for a better one once the design was improved.  Funny how once you start something and put it down for a few months at a time that the train of thought can get derailed.  Anyway, things are now more straight forward.

So that last day and a half or so the process has been:
-run the server
-run the client
-connect to the server
-join with a character
-get an error
-fix the error (sometimes with some not insignificant amount of coding)
-rebuild everything
-repeat

The most unfun part of a hard week.  But now I've finally connected to the server and walked around.  I can't actually see what I'm walking on because I'm not getting real terrain.  Also my position on the client only updates once a second (ham-fisted after all) but I can see that the camera moves up and down and so on as I traverse terrain that I can't actually see.

(http://i.imgur.com/hRtfkoX.png)

That's a picture of the multiplayer client connected to my local server.  The view is of far terrain which I've hard-coded as all water at 0 elevation.  The white area is where it cuts off for being too near the player.  The actual land is invisible because that data is hard-coded to return empty.

So now I can get to the business of actually implementing the services.  Turns out there are only three that need immediate attention before I can at least see what I'm walking on.  I'll have to implement at least one more to be able to open my inventory and select my build wand.  That will be needed for adding back support for terrain change notification so the client knows to update.  Once I have all of the basic stuff working then I will get to networking the physics engine with Sim-ethereal (the networking library I used Espace to test).

Hopefully the boring parts are done and the real work can begin.

Starting to page over some real data by building out some general resource transfer infrastructure.

The low res terrain and tree impostors is the first by-product... so starting to actually SEE STUFF!

(http://i.imgur.com/awSRmmN.png)

Heh heh. I see that one tree sitting in the water. Will the faux terrain ever be setup to have accurate-ish approximations of things like buildings, or no?

I bet from a distance you wouldn't notice

In Minecraft factions servers, we do something called "pouring", which  is a method that can be used to create walls over 250 blocks tall with little to no effort. It's used to defend against the latest cannon tech through occasionally hundreds of iterations on servers that nerf obsidian. It's not common, but it would be... a very large and recurrent graphical oversight when it does.

Unknown.  I'm purposely staying away from any graphical enhancements right now as they are too easy to use to avoid the less fun stuff that is harder to do. :)

Well, you didn't wipe out the to-do list... but the done list is quite extensive, all things considered.

Yeah, I got a lot done.  And so far I can still poke at it as some of the bigger hurdles are done.  As long as I keep up some minimal momentum that I keep the bits of string straight in my head and won't have to untangle it again later.

I'll try to make another big push over Christmas break but I'm trying to still push things along.  You can see some stuff even got moved over to the 'done' column this past night.

This kinda makes me regret not trying to keep the whole post-a-day thing going, since momentum seems to have the same effect here. I have failed you. :(

Just going to leave this right here for anyone following along:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

(http://i.imgur.com/gLJXTUi.png)

Progress...

Lol, still haven't finished cleaning your office? :P

Before Thanksgiving, I made a big enough dent that I don't have to watch where I step through the main area but not clean enough that I'd not be embarrassed to post a picture.  I was able to vacuum part of it but there are a still stacks of stuff (moved to the vacuumed areas) that still require sorting.  I have new book shelves in the bedroom that are meant to take a lot of my old books so that I can move the current ones I actually use and tidy that whole mess up.  Some of that was started.

But then Thanksgiving came and it was clean enough to get work done without feeling like stuff was going to fall on me... so I put it on the back burner.  It's important enough that I want to leave it in the 'current' pile because I should technically be chipping away at it here and there every time I get up.

...but alas.

P.S.: new movement in the trello page.

I really like being able to check your trello to see progress. I am continuing my education between hearthstone, 7 days to die, and war thunder binges and will be starting to learn C++ soon.

Cool... then I'm glad I just upgraded to Trello Gold. :)

What's the Trello link? I never saved it.

Most recently repeated only four posts up... now again here. :)
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

That's cool but where's the Trello link? I must have missed it.
I think I'm going blind