#1:  First Succesful Login and Chat Author: EthanC,
You have posted in this forum: Wed Mar 18, 2009 5:42 pm
I don't have time to use pretty words and come up with an eloquently assembled speech.
Here's what is up.
In the last month we've had a bunch of updates. Mostly good.
On the plus side, after wrestling with the 800-pound gorilla known as "mmo networking capability", we cheated, pulled a hidden knife from our trousers and stabbed the gorilla in the throat, killing it.
It wasn't a clean fight I'll admit, but we're in it to win and you know you'd have done the same.
Thanks to the excellent work of many people Divergence saw it's first successful login less than two weeks ago. then a few moments after that, it's second successful login and then it's 3rd, fourth, 5th, and so on.
To congratulate Jon, our lead programmer and commemorate the occasion, I pulled an assault rifle from my inventory, pointed it at his head and attempted to blow his face off, as is customary in American business. As it turned out however, Jons client didn't display the gun and instead all he saw was me pointing an "invisible gun" at him, making me look quite foolish in front of my subordinate.
This is still very good news though, because it means the majority of hard work associated with mmo networking is done, and only small things theoretically remain such as who sees what. We have to take some time and tie everything to the server that currently only exists locally such as npcs, equipped items, and those kinds of thing.
During the same relative period we also had a major breakthrough implementing and testing our chat system, which once again needs a lot of addition, but it is now safe to say that Divergence has had it's first conversation between players as well.
And now for the most challenging hurdle, humans.
They suck.
More accurately, they're incredibly difficult to implement when you figure in that humans and lokri have a hundred times the customizability as other races in Divergence.
On a more technical note, the abilities granted to us that provide the super sweet facial and body customization require exacting precision in vertex ordering, weights, skinning, and normals. The problem is that it appears to be nearly impossible to retain 100% of those specifications going from our raw models into the engine. It is possible that we may simply have to complete the rest of the game while we essentially wait on the engine to provide us with 1 or 2 updates to address these issues.
Currently it is possible to make a human of either gender, or breed and to do pretty much anything the other races can. This issue is entirely graphical in nature, and we don't want anyone to see the humans for a few more weeks until we've come closer to a fix.
In the meantime, the rest of the game will continue to be developed.
Thanks for your patience and support as always.
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