I spent time planning out the feature set I want for our first binary release and came out with the following list that can be seen on the forum.

There is not going to be a set deadline to finish this stuff as the programming is still primarily a one man operation. I can see these features are going to take up a considerable amount of time (months). Hopefully by the end of it all there will be something that is fun to play rather then the tech demo we currently have.

I’m still working on issues with the client / server split which has made sqlite crash for some unknown reason. It has been a real blocker in allowing me to progress with the features I want to implement.

This week was bug smashing week.

I finally figured out the build issues on arch linux and the new version of ubuntu. The cause was a mistake on my part in the cmake script.

Apart from that I have been getting closer to fixing the issues with the new networking implementation. I finally figured out the problems I was having when transfering strings over the network. Hopefully I should have it all working and commited to launchpad soon.

Some other things that happened this week was that I now have a new logo for the game which I updated in various places. You can thank Qubodup and Tranberry for that. Here it is.

Hardwar Logo

Overall a pretty productive week however still not much banter on the forums which I encourage everyone to use.

Sometimes it may look like the project is dead because I never talk much about what I do on the project. I decided to start documenting weekly about what I have done as a way to combat this.

This week there were a few issues with the forum that needed resolving and I spent time trying to rewrite all the documentation we lost on the old forum.

I started a discussion on the forums about creating the game’s main menu screen. This is something that doesn’t need much programming involvement and can be extremely creative, so if you like doing 2D art I suggest joining in the discussion or submitting some artwork to the forum.

The most important issue that I have been working on is backups. I’m making extra sure that we have backups of all our content this time including database as well as uploads from both our blog and forum.

Apart from the website I have also been fixing the debian packages for the new version of ubuntu, 9.10. I use this packages as dependencies when building the game. This time it wasn’t as easy as just copying the packages over as canonical have upgraded some of the libraries. There is now the latest version of cegui and ois so it means I no longer have to package these up myself (yay). Unfortunately Ogre is still old and has vital things disabled. mygui hasn’t been packaged up either which is still a problem.

Due to all this stuff I have not been able to squeeze any coding time in on the game. Hopefully next week will have some more progress on that front. I’m still where I was last week, fixing bugs in the networking code which is time consuming.