It has presence

Today marks the first time in history that World of V is available to the public.
Last night I signed up for hosting on WebFaction, and today I loaded up the code and got it working. Normally, such a step would require a few blog posts about the steps I had to take to get everything up and running, but with webfaction I don't need to!

Everything works exactly the same, although I cutely disabled registration for new accounts. The nice thing is that I can now get a feel for the lag while moving and interacting with the site. I do need to put something in to discourage people from clicking and not waiting for the lag, since it is AJAX, you don't notice that things are going on behind the scenes.

So that's very cool.

I still have some work to do with abilities, security, interface, and clean-up, but it's a damn good start. At least I know it will actually work.

And so the countdown begins: 45 days until alpha-launch.

Being Productive

I have been very productive lately.
Here are the things I have accomplished:

• I worked on the interface a little. I don't know if it is the final interface I will go with, but it doesn't look to bad. You can see a screen shot on the right. I used some jquery rounded corners and CSS fun to change the color based on the map type. I still need to play with the other interface elements such as the mappable's info, the character info, messages, and abilities, but it's a start.
  
• As the screen shot may show, you can also view the mappable items that are not in your current map cell. This had always been planned (how else could you hunt down monsters?) but never implemented. I improved the way that the map cells are created and streamlined the retrieval of the mappables in the surrounding and current map cell. For now, equipment and items not in the current map cell still won't show. I think that's pretty cool.
  
• Abilities totally work. Not only do they work, but they can send back forms or something else to get more information from the player and they return a json object that indicates what interface items should be reloaded. For example, if you choose an ability that only changes the messages and the character info, you won't reload the map or the mappable info. This should save network and time.
  
• Did I mention Abilities totally work? They also are implemented differently. Now, if I want to make an Ability, I just create a class in the abilities module that extends Ability and implement a perform method. The method may return different results depending on what data was passed. For example, for messages, if no message data was passed, then it returns a form asking for the message to send, then a message will be passed and so the message gets sent to the other player.
  
• What else? The JavaScript has been cleaned up as well as the map loading. Map cells are now loaded individually, and the client-side tracks what mappable we are currently showing the info for.
  

Okay, maybe there are other advancements, but that's all I can think of for now. I'm hoping to keep the Jan.30th deadline for total deployment of Stoneage.



Did I mention that I know exactly how the story is going to be and the quest system? I don't think so.