Mycal
Staff member
It's been a little while. I've been really busy at work and when I get home I've been jumping straight into Borderlands 2. However, the past week I've spent a lot of time working on Odyssey so here's an update of what I've been working on.
I've been mainly working on backend stuff. Since this is a very large change from VB6 and forms to C#/XNA and a single game screen, I've been working a lot on the UI aspect of things. I think I'll keep Odyssey's current interface for now, but after the initial release this is likely to change due to some planned features.
I've also spent a little time on the single login/registration backend. I've mentioned this before, but Odyssey will no longer store user accounts per server. Your user account is now centralized. This is to protect you as users and allow for easier management on my end. However, this is all new stuff and since I don't want to write a server just to listen for this, I decided to use the webserver and JSON packets. All communication between game client and webserver will be encrypted as well as client to server interactions. This is one-to-one encryption so all clients will have a unique keypair which should increase security even more. I'll have to play with this a little to see if this causes any network lag, but I think it should be OK.
There's a lot of things I've cut from the initial release and the list is ever increasing since they are just fluff features that can be pushed for the next release. This one could affect some servers, but hopefully not too much. For initial release, only the normal Tiles.rsc file will be supported. Odyssey's tilesets are huge and I do not want to load them all in memory at once. I'm still tinkering with ideas on how to best handle multiple tilesets and have a good idea to solve it, but I would rather wait for the next release to do this. In fact, I may also cut out the large sprites temporarily. I don't think many people used these since they were so buggy anyway, but to save a little time and effort, I may just cut them for this release. Due to the way XNA stores/loads textures, you will also be unable to swap out the images manually. This will remain in order to give a consistent experience no matter what server you join.
However, I will eventually bring back multiple tilesets in a much easier way than what ody originally gave. I will also give a way for servers to give players custom tilesets. These will be sent on first connection and will be cached locally by player's clients. This includes, tiles, objects, effects, and sprites.
Lastly, because I don't want to waste time for it on this release, I will be cutting out the auto updater and registry. There will be a built in private connector that is a lot less buggy than the built in one on the game client, but this will be it for the time being. After the initial release, the next version will include both of these features. This should be the last version you will need to manually download.
Sorry if there's any disappointment, but I'm trying to rush development along so I'm not wasting time on features that can come later.
I've been mainly working on backend stuff. Since this is a very large change from VB6 and forms to C#/XNA and a single game screen, I've been working a lot on the UI aspect of things. I think I'll keep Odyssey's current interface for now, but after the initial release this is likely to change due to some planned features.
I've also spent a little time on the single login/registration backend. I've mentioned this before, but Odyssey will no longer store user accounts per server. Your user account is now centralized. This is to protect you as users and allow for easier management on my end. However, this is all new stuff and since I don't want to write a server just to listen for this, I decided to use the webserver and JSON packets. All communication between game client and webserver will be encrypted as well as client to server interactions. This is one-to-one encryption so all clients will have a unique keypair which should increase security even more. I'll have to play with this a little to see if this causes any network lag, but I think it should be OK.
There's a lot of things I've cut from the initial release and the list is ever increasing since they are just fluff features that can be pushed for the next release. This one could affect some servers, but hopefully not too much. For initial release, only the normal Tiles.rsc file will be supported. Odyssey's tilesets are huge and I do not want to load them all in memory at once. I'm still tinkering with ideas on how to best handle multiple tilesets and have a good idea to solve it, but I would rather wait for the next release to do this. In fact, I may also cut out the large sprites temporarily. I don't think many people used these since they were so buggy anyway, but to save a little time and effort, I may just cut them for this release. Due to the way XNA stores/loads textures, you will also be unable to swap out the images manually. This will remain in order to give a consistent experience no matter what server you join.
However, I will eventually bring back multiple tilesets in a much easier way than what ody originally gave. I will also give a way for servers to give players custom tilesets. These will be sent on first connection and will be cached locally by player's clients. This includes, tiles, objects, effects, and sprites.
Lastly, because I don't want to waste time for it on this release, I will be cutting out the auto updater and registry. There will be a built in private connector that is a lot less buggy than the built in one on the game client, but this will be it for the time being. After the initial release, the next version will include both of these features. This should be the last version you will need to manually download.
Sorry if there's any disappointment, but I'm trying to rush development along so I'm not wasting time on features that can come later.