Thursday, May 20, 2010

Project on hold for a while

I am currently fighting on too many fronts to be able to keep up with this side project, which doesn't mean it's dead, I definitely want to see some progress here, but at present this is impossible.

This fact not withstanding, whenever I play a MMO I think how I could this or that in SMASH, like f.e. I find myself intrigued with Star Trek Online's design. Cryptic implemented STO in such a way that there is only one realm for the whole game but every location is an instance to avoid sending hundreds if player data to each client, you get sent to a certain instance and that's about 20 players or so, nothing more, chat however is sent to all instances. I like this design and I have wondered how this relates to SMASH. My conclusion is that this could be implemented by means of what server you are connected to, so chat messages could get relayed like they do now, but player data f.e. could be limited to be sent only to the users on that same server, voila, we got instancing. It would only be required to allow instance switching, by means of logging a user out of one server and on the desired instance server, I am not yet 100% sure if I am not overlooking anything, but I guess SMASH can easily handle instancing this way.

To handle instances like private raid dungeons this is a bit more complex, as it would require copying zone data into a new zone, but we are still far from this approach anyway, so not much to worry about, yet.

Not many updates for now, but at least a sign of life. My goal is to have a working SAD demo by the end of 2010 with a simple zone, I cannot promise more given all the stuff I need to handle at the moment and my apologies for that.

Cheers,

Sunweaver

4 comments:

The Lorax said...

While the project is sleeping, any chance of opening the source for other erlangers to play? --mitch

therealtruth said...

sounds promising, please open the code(even is at ugly? alpha code ;)

Unknown said...

Actually with 20 players, the game might not be considered as a massive multiplayer online game anymore.
To me it only sounds like an ugly hack because their system can not do horizontal scaling.

getify said...

I have an inquiry for the owner (Dave Smith -- aka "Sunweaver"?) of the domain "sma.sh", but am unable to find contact information. Can you please contact me with any of the methods listed on my site?