SMASH to Planet Earth ... ??

While not finished by a long shot, we can now communicate between TCP/IP clients and the SMASH framework. The integration is not yet 100% complete, but one can now authenticate from any TCP client against the accounts table and create a chat client (CC: the player proxy). Any chat as of yet joins prefixed chat channels, this needs still a lot of work, like a channels DB, with authorizations to join, chat, listen, member list, password and so on, but at the very least you can now chat in 'general' and broadcast to any connected "player". This also works across nodes, so you can connect to different SOX servers that run on SMASH and even if the CC was created on a different node and still persists, as expected, the SOX thread correctly communicates with that CC, phew !!!

So, what's next ?? Now comes first of all a light test, after creating a scripted Delphi client, we will now do some tests over Apocalyx and create a VERY simple game world. After that there will be some very heavy work where we need to create a character selection / creation something and a channel table with all kinds of authorizations, cheers !!! This will be fun. And also upcoming then is a command parser, to enable the server to start validating stuff, because up to this point each client will decide positioning and capabilities, which is obviously not acceptable. During this step we will also have to implement a physique server, current thoughts are to put an Apocalyx client to do that, but to omit texture rendering and represent clients only as cubes (for line of sight), so we could verify very precisely physical conditions in the game without reinventing the wheel, but much lighter than a client side reproduction, let's see how that works out.


Stay tuned, a graphical test client is just around the corner.

Sunweaver