dristin.com

While waiting to move out of residence (I just graduated with a B.Eng degree ), I figured I'd check up on a few indie MMORPG projects I had bookmarked.

I'm really surprised to see that Dristin is still being developed; I'm sure you'll remember me telling you that you'll never complete the project due to the languages and tools that were chosen for it.

However, from what I've seen from other indie MMORPGs, indie development journals tend to be very technical; instead of posting the features they intend to support, they post solely the design changes to the code with the assumption that readers will be able to conclude what features it enabled; basically, they tend to be more proud of their technical accomplishments than the features implemented for the game.

You guys don't describe the technicalities of the project, and I'm very curious. One of the benefits of making the journal very technical is that people with technical background can accurately determine what parts of the project have yet to be finished. I've tried finding hints on the forum, but there's virtually none, . I skimmed through every post by the admins here, and (omitting speculation) I was only able to find vague progress reports of the project, of which I'll summarize below:

Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:02 pm - Client and Server Coding
Our main priority atm is still client engine and server coding and that doesnt make for very interesting screen shots

Thu Aug 07, 2008 9:12 pm - Development Tools
We've been working on development tools (file editors, map editing program).

Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:57 pm - First Person to Login
Today Strongbah became the first person to log on Dristin. Sounds more exciting than it really is. We had a error with our new gui system that caused a test window to look like a gray blob. Strong got to see the test map which hugely exciting for him .

Mon Apr 21, 2008 7:30 am - First Login Outside Test Environment
We rewrote alot of the backend of the gui system and only have some basic control's to add. This week also saw the first person to log on the server outside the test environment.

Sun Oct 05, 2008 8:57 pm - Tool Coding
We've been building design tools for a bit and are in the middle of a rewrite of our map editor. We went back to the drawing board on our map editor and decided to build it from the client itself instead of a seperate windows application. The main reason for this, is it lets us get bugs out of the dristin game engine, as the editor and game will use the same code.

Tue Feb 10, 2009 10:48 pm - Finished Tools, Working on Networking Code
But we are done with our tools, working on graphics and client/server comunications which are basically the last step before we can start breaking stuff.

Sun Feb 15, 2009 8:20 pm - Networking Coding
Worked on some more sprites (which will usually be the case), And have spend alot of time on the network code. Working on the area of the map that will serve as the place you'll see when we start our beta (nothing soooo exciting), but its mostly waiting on additional artwork.

Tue Feb 24, 2009 8:34 pm - Chat System Testing
We are doing some pre-public testing with the chat system tonight.

Mon Mar 02, 2009 2:11 am - Chat System Ready for Testing
Chat system has been reworked and its basically ready for the upcoming testing. We could put it up right now, but we have a few more things we want some people to 'break' in addition to the chat system, so we'll be adding that in this week.

These progress reports don't really entail what you guys have left to do. In fact, it doesn't even accurately describe what you've even accomplished. For instance, does "Networking Code" mean that you've finished all the different types of packets that are used in the game, or just that you've figured out how to send and receive data?

The ability to send and receive text messages can be done in about 15 lines of code in a high level language such as Java , C#, VB.NET, C++/CLI, etc. And a tile editor can be done in about 200 lines (XNA included, for DirectX support). I know that you guys arn't using a high-level language, but I'm just trying to show that the screenshot of the editor (although impressive) doesn't really show the work that you guys have put into the project.

Cheers
-- Peter Blain

Hi Pete, The purpose of the 'progress reports' is simply to give a brief bit of information on what we are working on or worked on recently. Not really meant to have any technical merit. It will remain that way mainly because I feel the majority of people may not understand, and probably don’t care about the details.

If you have questions on more in depth stuff, you can add me on msn rbanke (at) hotmail (dot) com, and we can talk there. I didn’t really see any specific questions in your post, aside from network code, and to answer that, we do not have our protocol fully complete, but are able to do most everything we would want at the moment (send map data, object information, chat stuff, authentication, player actions/movements, etc). The design of our net code allows us to easily add new functionality, but doesn’t necessitate anything further until we move forward.

-Rich

Relic wrote:Hi Pete, The purpose of the 'progress reports' is simply to give a brief bit of information on what we are working on or worked on recently. Not really meant to have any technical merit. It will remain that way mainly because I feel the majority of people may not understand, and probably don’t care about the details.

It's important to make available a brief bit of information on what you're working on, and what you've worked on previously; I hate having to read through archives to figure out what the current status of the project is.

However, your progress reports (without supplementary technical details) are so vague that they are not indicative of your actual progress. Even I tend to read them with some confusion, as it sounds to me a lot like:

• Working on {A}
  Almost finished {A}, Working on {B}
  Testing {B}
  Redesigning {A} for {B}

That's not to say that your weekly reports should be several pages long, and include appendices with code sample; the amount of technical details doesn't have to be vast; it could perhaps just list what you're struggling with in the project. For instance, here's in exert from my own project:

(Sorry about using Chinese date syntax, for those who don't have East-Asian text rendering support. You'll see the dates with question marks or boxes.)

# (2008年6月24日) Ok, this shouldn't be that hard for me to grasp! Things like MaxHealth and MaxEnergy don't need to be properties that invoke iUserFunctions because these properties don't have sync with the client/server network. The reason why they don't have to sync is that the iUserFunctions that swap equipment in and out, also update the MaxHealth and MaxEnergy. Having said that though, properties alleviate the need to invoke the "super" operator, which is notorious for making my variables hard to remember. =/
# (2008年6月24日) Ideally, changing equipment around should be done with either the IUserFunctions or ISystemFunctions. If it's done like this -- than the server and client can share code.
# (2008年6月24日) I need to bring in the static common class cShapes again. Since the last thing is a horde of redundant shape creation code in each of my attack mode classes. I think the file is still kicking around in one of the "/Unsorted" directories.
# (2008年6月24日) Actually, wait a minute... what am I thinking. Items should not have a sTryFire() function, since items are not suppose to have that level of flexbility. The cAbstractItemType should contain a cAbstractFX and a list of relative points from its destination that it damages.

The exert contains technical detail that, because I haven't worked on the project in over year, I don't even understand. It's been soo long, I'd have to relearn my design. However, just by reading this, I get a sense of relief that the programmer (1) certainly sounds like he knows what he's doing, (2) is working hard on the project, and (3) is not getting stuck. I think your viewers on this forum would greatly appreciate this form of development diary.

Keeper of death wrote:and since there hasent been any real news update i just wanted to know how its going?
tell me everything thats happening!!!

Not really stuff I'm concerned with explaining and/or allowing people to be privy of. This is not a public project as you would see on sourceforge or something like that. If anything the updates are simply to let people know that we were making some sort of progress. As it stands, I'm not looking to have people follow what we are doing, if they want to hang around and see what we come up with thats cool, if not thats also fine. For those that keep up with the site, showing a screenshot of something or a description of an idea, etc might be interesting to them, but I dont care to give a changelog of work for anyone other than myself and Doug. The worklog you provided on fleurin was cool, but not what i am looking to do.

/poorlyformatedtext

It's not a matter of it being vauge. Half of us could give a damn abt codes and stuff like that (not that its unimportant) Just most of us understand if we constantly want to see ever last detail = no surprise=longer to make the game= ppl wil get bored. So um yeah

Relic wrote:Not really stuff I'm concerned with explaining and/or allowing people to be privy of. This is not a public project as you would see on sourceforge or something like that. If anything the updates are simply to let people know that we were making some sort of progress. As it stands, I'm not looking to have people follow what we are doing, if they want to hang around and see what we come up with thats cool, if not thats also fine. For those that keep up with the site, showing a screenshot of something or a description of an idea, etc might be interesting to them, but I dont care to give a changelog of work for anyone other than myself and Doug. The worklog you provided on fleurin was cool, but not what i am looking to do.

Projects on SourceForge are required to be open sourced, it has nothing to do with their publicity.

I haven't seen anyone on this forum accuse you of exaggerating your progress, or allege that your group is overly ambitious, but from what I can tell, your audience seems to be a bunch of hovering zombies.

During my work on Frostwinds, I had developers from small start up companies and university graduates offer to help with code. And my summaries of the progress were received with a lot of objection. My audience was very impatient, and numerous people alleged that I was just an attention hog, and that the project would never succeed. I'm guessing that my project attracted a larger audience of enthusiastic gamers on account that, in addition to detailed progress reports, my forum software was hand-written by me, as opposed to just some superior (but cliché) phpBB package.

There's another indie project I'm keeping in contact with, its similar to your project, a small team (about 3 people) working on developing their own MMORPG in C++; the only difference is that they have already completed an MMORPG in Visual Basic 6. The developer and I use to commonly meet on an IRC channel years ago, in which I was able to confer to him that he's making the project unnecessarily difficult by choosing C++.

However, the "progress reports" that he's keeping are vast. The two programmers of the project both keep Twitter accounts for their work on the project:

http://twitter.com/ITS_Invisible
http://twitter.com/ITS_GreyKnight

They publish development blogs to IGN describing what sort of challenges they are facing with the project:

http://blogs.ign.com/ifthensoftware/

They have an overview page that describes a bit about what they have left to code:

http://www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/progress/

And lastly, of course they have screenshots:



Combined, I can say with absolutely certainty that the developers are making progress, and that I'm not wasting my time checking up on them, or making suggestions about particular aspects of their game (such as how unique items are distributed, or whether the size of a monster should be indicative of how strong the monster is).

At the moment, I can see that Dristin isn't dead, but I don't think it's getting anywhere.

I can only say it so plainly. I could give a shit if anyone thinks we are making progress. I dont care if anyone keeps up with what we are doing. I dont care to post some self important twitter bullshit or blog about my life or work.

In the end, this is 2 people doing something that interests them, if my methods arent good enough for anyone else, that doesnt matter to me. I have to say, you sure havn't lost that condescending tone.