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Rayblon
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« Reply #75 on: November 17, 2016, 05:12:18 PM »

Soo... I assume you've got some pretty big plans for Mythruna this thanksgiving, Paul.

Er... if previous years are any indication.
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pspeed
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« Reply #76 on: November 19, 2016, 01:22:32 AM »

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.
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« Reply #77 on: November 21, 2016, 01:31:38 AM »

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.

Anyone who is a patience-masochist can feel free to watch the Trello page from before:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

I've been updating it a bit... I don't even know what's relevant anymore as I try to dig things out of mothballs and get it all working again.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #78 on: November 21, 2016, 09:44:03 AM »

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.

Anyone who is a patience-masochist can feel free to watch the Trello page from before:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

I've been updating it a bit... I don't even know what's relevant anymore as I try to dig things out of mothballs and get it all working again.

I noticed this as being one of the bugs you entered: "Client goes ape-doodoo if the player does not have a valid position. to Bugs (in no particular order)". When(or perhaps more appropriately, where) would that be a problem? I figured that that should kind of be expected, and if the position is invalid then the player is probably already in an irreconcilable place.
« Last Edit: November 21, 2016, 11:59:45 AM by Rayblon » Logged

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« Reply #79 on: November 21, 2016, 03:58:04 PM »

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.

Anyone who is a patience-masochist can feel free to watch the Trello page from before:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

I've been updating it a bit... I don't even know what's relevant anymore as I try to dig things out of mothballs and get it all working again.

I noticed this as being one of the bugs you entered: "Client goes ape-doodoo if the player does not have a valid position. to Bugs (in no particular order)". When(or perhaps more appropriately, where) would that be a problem? I figured that that should kind of be expected, and if the position is invalid then the player is probably already in an irreconcilable place.

Well, there's failing and there's "Not finishing the loading screen" or "crashing in a half dozen seemingly unrelated ways".

What I'd expect: "game loads but you are positioned in the ground at some weird location"

The first time I ran the game, it never got past the loading screen and just waited forever.  30-45 minutes of tracking later and found that issue.  Then I got crashes in the drop shadow filter.  Fixed that.  Then I got random crashes from deep in the heart of JME telling me I was modifying things from the wrong thread.  (I was not but confirming that took me 3+ hours.)  For some reason, camera position ends up as NaN, NaN, NaN instead of 0, 0, 0... and the rotation is also NaN (<- which explains the position actually).  NaN = a special floating point value of "Not A Number".

In coding, whenever you find a case where one simple error causes a whole cascade of really nasty things, it's worth pulling that thread because there are likely 100 bugs buried in there waiting to jump on you at some other inopportune time.  Somewhere here is a case where the player rotation gets messed up.  There is nothing that would SET player rotation to NaN so until I look, I cannot guarantee that something else wouldn't trigger this case also.
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« Reply #80 on: November 22, 2016, 05:46:40 AM »

Also, for twitter users... if you don't already follow me then you may want to add:
@MythrunaGame  https://twitter.com/MythrunaGame
and
@Simsilica  https://twitter.com/Simsilica

Both should be seeing more activity this week as if I'm going to want to say some random transient thing out loud then that's where I will do it.

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Rayblon
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« Reply #81 on: November 28, 2016, 05:14:26 PM »

https://trello.com/c/APLhqkeQ/25-finish-cleaning-office-seriously


... c:
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Rayblon
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« Reply #82 on: December 03, 2016, 12:06:18 PM »

So how'd the thanksgiving development go?
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« Reply #83 on: December 03, 2016, 04:52:22 PM »

So how'd the thanksgiving development go?

It went ok.  It was kind of an emotional roller coaster on some level.

On Tuesday/Wednesday I finally got to the point where I was integrating the SimEthereal networking library.  It was incredibly painful and I had to rewrite lots of stuff to convert it over to use some of my other open source projects (a win mostly).  I worked like 10 hours straight and I wanted to chuck the whole thing and start over from like 2 hours in.  It was a very disheartening day.  Fortunately, I felt like it was one of those cases where even if I decided in the end this wasn't going to be the final solution, getting it done would at least teach me what I needed to know to fix it.

And so I got that working.  I can log in and move around.  Physics is handled by the server and my client is a 100% slave to it.  Connecting to my local machine doesn't even feel too laggy.  Ultimately, to make this solution the final solution is going to require a lot of changes and it will be very painful... but having something working already is gold.

I did a lot of soul searching during that 10 hours and the next day as I fixed bugs that cropped up.  The reason I wanted to chuck it all and start over is because it's only when trying to thread such a complicated thing into an existing complicated thing that we can see that we did everything up side down.  In my hurry to clean things up and work on fun new rendering, etc. 3 years ago or whatever, I chose to refactor the whole engine.  What I should have done was wait until I had a networking solution and then build a networked game from the ground up.  Adding rendering and menus, etc. to a working network base is way easier than doing what I did.

I mean, to be fair, that never would have worked out.  I've learned a lot about creating networked games and other tech in this last three years (4 years? ugh).  And that was more or less the realization I came to after I had the basics working and was just fixing stuff.  If I refactor again, I have to be careful what I know and what I don't know yet and how that will alter what I do.  For example, AI is a huge missing piece and that might affect the architecture.  (Though never as bad as networking would... just not possible.)

I also realized that whatever I do, it will need to be done in a way that I can make incremental progress even if I don't have solid week blocks of time to work on it.

Fortunately, I'm kind of in a nice place right now.  Even to finish networking support to get the missing parts in, I can now do in smaller chunks.  For example, right now multiple players can login but can't see each other... though we can see the block changes we make.  My current task is to get avatars visible.  (Which has a really nice encouraging moment too *)  I also need to go back and fix all of the terrain feedback loops... for example, changing a block does not update the larger terrain info summary files that are used for the far terrain.  So even though I will probably never be able to show buildings and such in the far terrain, if someone flattens a mountain or makes a new lake, that kind of thing should show up.

Anyway, there are a lot of things that I can work on now in small chunks.  Also, because I did do a bunch of things right in the last refactoring, if I start with a blank network base at some point in the future, pulling stuff over is fairly trivial without a total rewrite.

One thing that stuck me is that if I wanted to make an app that used a Mythruna world but displayed it in a different way (say as an isometric view or something), I'd be starting from ground zero.  With the old engine, I could easily use the terrain stuff just as a library but the setup required to do this is pretty impossible in the new engine.  Open sourcing stuff has been pretty beneficial for me overall.  I get bug reports in Lemur and SimEthereal, etc. and those projects are now constantly improving and generate constant motivation to keep moving forward.  I will probably take that approach with a variety of Mythruna's subsystems.  Even if I don't open source the whole engine, open sourcing the terrain library, the object scripting system, the dialog system, etc. will greatly improve all of those things, let a community of folks potentially help improve them by using them in their own games, and give modders a nice fully open base upon which to build their own Mythruna add-ons.  The only down side is literally also a huge up side: it will take me a bit longer to develop them because I have to make them cleaner and document them a bit more.

But really, when I'm having to take the occasional really long breaks... I need all of that for myself, too.

So by the end of the Thanksgiving week, I have a new more optimistic approach to everything.  I have an engine that I can continue to work on.  I have a dozen ideas for ways to improve the work flow and make it more efficient... and none of them will require large blocks of time.  I haven't written up a larger blog post yet because a) not many people read these anymore, and b) the push kind of isn't over yet.

I still have to get some things working before I can give myself my "Can play Fallout 4" reward.  Plus, I find myself on the moment at a temporary forced vacation because of some contract-related stuff at my day job... which is a nice little island of respite in a sea of totally-bat-poop-crazy-busy... before my 12 day long winter break. Smiley  By new years, I hope to have even more optimistic things to say about the future of the engine.

(*) the nice surprise was that I'd wired a whole bunch of MOB/avatar stuff together already to even include a nice little tester app.  It's really nice code and I was able to add a giant-rat pretty easily as another mob type.  Discovering this and some of the other nearly-fully-working things I'd already done was a nice surprise after the 10 hour slog I'd done the days before.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #84 on: December 03, 2016, 06:50:31 PM »

It's always so awesome to hear about how you're progressing. I think that overcoming the need for large blocks of time is probably half the battle so the fact that you've found a solution to that is great news. I bet we'll get that long awaited update in six months time now.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #85 on: December 09, 2016, 09:50:54 AM »

I can't help but feel like I contributed to this slump in activity by finishing a bunch of the stuff that needed doing and using up all of peoples' steam in the first couple years... I know it's not really logical, but it feels like that alot of the time.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #86 on: December 11, 2016, 08:38:54 PM »

Just 3 more days of work... if I can keep on it, that is...
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Rayblon
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« Reply #87 on: December 13, 2016, 07:48:53 AM »

It seems I'm starting to get back into the groove of trying to add to Mythruna again. Just as well, because I'll be having alot of free time on my hands soon.

Speaking of adding to Mythruna... Paul, you remarked that you reworked some things so you'd be able to make additions in small sessions instead of using huge chunks of time. Have you found yourself eating those words, otherwise, what do you think you managed to get done that would have been otherwise relegated to one of your breaks?

... And on the topic of free time... do you know what your plans for Christmas are? On the homefront and coding front, if it is not to much of an intrusion.
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« Reply #88 on: December 13, 2016, 08:02:30 AM »

I said I wanted to do that.  There is work to do to get to that point.

I'm still trying to push the existing engine along while I do some design work on how I want to break things up.

The bottom line is that there are a half dozen things that are on my list that might be impossible.  These are the features that I was never sure would actually work or not and it becomes clearer by the day that delaying a decision is only leaving open ended issues in the engine and/or parts that will have to be rewritten.  So I either need to think of ways I can prototype/implement/prove those features or I need to let them go.

My short term goals going forward are to break the engine up into separate pieces and to do so with an eye on implementing those undecided engine features.  I've been off work for nearly a week and a half... and will be taking real vacation starting Wednesday of next week (through the to the new year).  I don't know what I will be able to get done in that time.  (It is a family holiday after all) but either way it will be telling on how the future will go.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #89 on: December 13, 2016, 09:47:36 AM »

I said I wanted to do that.  There is work to do to get to that point.

Oh. Sorry, my memory has all but left me with finals being as hectic as they have been.

I'm still trying to push the existing engine along while I do some design work on how I want to break things up.

The bottom line is that there are a half dozen things that are on my list that might be impossible.  These are the features that I was never sure would actually work or not and it becomes clearer by the day that delaying a decision is only leaving open ended issues in the engine and/or parts that will have to be rewritten.  So I either need to think of ways I can prototype/implement/prove those features or I need to let them go.

If you don't mind my asking, what are these potentially impossible things?

My short term goals going forward are to break the engine up into separate pieces and to do so with an eye on implementing those undecided engine features.  I've been off work for nearly a week and a half... and will be taking real vacation starting Wednesday of next week (through the to the new year).  I don't know what I will be able to get done in that time.  (It is a family holiday after all) but either way it will be telling on how the future will go.

Ah. Well, you know this already, but there's never any need to put Mythruna ahead of enjoying time with family. Speaking of family, how's your wife been faring? I assume her condition has been improving at this point. Of course, it's not my place to pry, either, so you've no obligation to answer that if you don't want to.
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