I finance this thing with money from doing contract work on mobile games, and I've had two back to back nightmare projects to work on. The first was a nightmare for various reasons, including my health and a lack of real planning on the part of the client. The second was just a very short time frame - six weeks from start to finish. I'm hoping to get back on track here, now that those projects are done.

Don't harbor any illusion that this project will be up and running any time soon. I don't. One man MMO's take a long time to make - they take a long time to make even when there is more than one person on the project. I figure that if I get a basic version up and running in less than two years, it'll be a success.

As the title says, this month has been horrid where progress on IS has been concerned, and the lack of blog posts is just an indicator. I was sick for nearly two weeks, had to do taxes, and have a deadline for the work that pays. Not a good recipe for work on a part time project.

I did spend a little time thinking on the skill/level/xp area of the game, and have pretty much concluded that I'm going to try a mostly classless, skill based system. I really want the game to be more of a sandbox, do what you want when you want if you have the money and the skill, type game, rather than a "I've got to get 50000 more xp to get to the next level so I can use such and such equipment" type game.

In a nutshell, there will be several (or more) classes of skills. When ever you use a skill in a particular class, you will gain skill points that can be spent on acquiring other skills in that skill class. You will also receive some percentage of generic skill points that can be spent on skills of any class, which will allow the player to get a foothold in a skill class that they might not yet have any skills.

Each skill will have some number of levels that it can be raised (number to be determined, but likely 3 or 5), and some skills will require that you have other skills before you can learn them. You will also likely have to find a training disc or a trainer in order to learn the skills, and pay for their services with credits.

You will likely be able to select from several starting factions and professions that will provide you with a basic set of skills, depending of course, on the selections you make. Being able to train any skill will allow movement away from the initial starting point.

In order to keep players from becoming totally homogenized, I may have to put skill caps on the categories so you can't learn every skill in every category, or perhaps, just a general, overall, skill cap.

Something to chew on, at least, until I get time to make more actual code progress.

How does one guy make an MMO? Automating everything he possibly can.

So today, I added a Subversion repository for use in updating the server with new builds. This let me cut the server update process down to two steps.

1) Commit the changes to Subversion.

2) Log on to the server and run a batch file that stops the services, updates the directory from subversion, and restarts the services.

It's only that two step process because I have the Visual Studio project building into the same directory structure that is the final directory structure, including all the resources, dependencies and whatnot.

And for those of you who just went "huh?", Subversion is a piece of software known as Version Control Software. It keeps a record of all the changes that are made to a project over the course of time, and allows multiple developers to work on the same documents without destroying each others work (simplified description).

One benefit for me is that it's one command to send updates to the server, and one command to get those updates from the server, instead of the other option of using FTP which requires a lot of human interaction. The problem with human interaction is that humans make mistakes.

The other benefit for me is, if I make a bad build with a bad bug in it, it's easy to roll back to the previous version until I can get that bug worked out.

So it seems that my update scheme has a little flaw. I'm using RakNet from http://rakkarsoft.com, and the version I'm using is still in beta. I don't know how long it will be in beta, either, but it exposed this small issue. If, when Rakkarsoft builds a new version of RakNet, the protocol gets modified, older updater clients may not be able to connect to the new server. I just had this happen.

One solution is to add an http check for a new version of the updater, since we all know the http protocol isn't going anywhere, but that's a bunch of network code I don't really want to write. RakNet doesn't support it.

The other solution is, when this happens, to pop up a web page and have players download a new version of the updater. The initial download is not large, and these days, it's probably considered absolutely tiny. 579Kb, at this point in time.

I'll probably go with the http download. I don't want players to have to do anything at all once they click the icon to play, other than play, of course.

Making progress, making progress. I have the account creation portion completed, which really means, yes, you can create an account and get it activated, if I were to provide you with the URL. Sort of pointless to do that yet as you couldn't do anything in the game. As soon as there is any kind of interactive thing to do, I will put up the account creation page to accept your damage.

I had to write a Terms of Service, too, (boring). I'm sure it's not complete and there are a ton of loopholes, but hey - the whole thing is under development.

Anyway, the system works very similar to any forum signup, at the moment, since I'm not charging anything. Assuredly, once that time comes, it'll change all over again, but for now, you just type in your particulars, check the box that says you agree to the TOS, and hit submit. If you entered a valid email address that belongs to you, you'll get an email that will have a link you need to click to activate your account.

The reason for this is that the email will be used to send updates about the service, especially if there is a problem with your account. Your account user name will also, eventually, be used for the user forums, and I don't want spammers creating game accounts just to spam the forum.

It's exciting to be completing pieces though, regardless of how boring they really are. I can't wait to get to the fun parts, but all of these initial steps are necessary. Tough to play a game you can't log in to.