Development Update - Sept. 05, 2014

Mycal

Staff member
It's been awhile since my last update, but as my previous post mentioned, I've been having some personal issues that needed taking care of. For the most part, they have been taken care of now. However, due to some changes in my full time job, I'm on a very tight deadline at work so I have very little free time these days and when I do have free time, it's usually spent de-stressing. I'm going to be pretty swamped at work for pretty much the rest of the year so expect very small updates if any in the future.

On topic, I have a very hard problem leaving things lay when working on Ody. Often, I'll develop something move on to another component and then later hate what I originally did and try to refactor. I'm trying to train myself to ignore this nagging feeling and make a note to come back later. Well, recently I have been rethinking so many aspects that I've now got several pages in OneNote filled.

So here's my plan. I'm going to press on and only work on what needs to be done for a server built in v12 to be fully playable. As soon as things get in this state, I'll release the first Alpha. As soon as we are feature complete, meaning we are fully comparable in features to v12, we move into Beta. We'll stay in Beta for however long is necessary until the release is stable and then move into official release. I'll try my best not to feature creep so as to reduce the time it takes to get to this state. The official release will be v13 since there are major breaking changes from v12.

From there, v14 will begin immediately. I will immediately increment the version because this will mark the beginning of truly refactoring all of Ody. I've already changed a few things such as scripting, but for the most part, the core engine has stayed the same. Maps, monsters, npcs (shops), players, classes are still as limited as they were in v12. The game logic is being converted 1:1 after all. There will likely be multiple alphas and betas of v14 as I slowly work through each component, maps being the first to be tackled. I plan to completely overhaul maps using the Tiled map format. This greatly increases flexibility with maps in general. Immediately following maps will be an overhaul on how monsters and npcs work (more on this later). Long story short, by the time v14 is done, Ody may be a very different game. However, as always, my ultimate goal is to give a complete upgrade path from v12->v14, so you'll never be stuck having to start over or feeling like you wasted so much time creating your world.

This brings me to a final point that I've been a little afraid to touch on. While my original goal has been to restore the Ody server registry to it's former glory, the more I work on it the more I feel it was abandoned for a reason. Ody and it's concepts are dated. So much of the code has been completely rewritten and so different that it may not even be considered Odyssey anymore. Sure it currently shares the game logic and concepts, but this will change as time moves on so that it becomes it's own thing. This combined with it's past are kind of a tricky subject in terms of copyright. Before I release, I'm going to find and speak with a lawyer, but it may be time to consider a name change. I am a little afraid of what may happen after release, so it may be better to get my bases covered early.
 
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