Building a brave new world

What is 'The Pressure Coder?
This blog is my attempt to 'pressure' myself into being more productive.

The Pressure Coder is a ramble about SteamPunk, and game development. This is actually a coherent combination as I am currently developing a Fantasy/SteamPunk themed game. The working title is currently 'Skies of Psyberia', but that may change for a host of reasons... I'll get to those later.

Let me set the stage for you, first, this is intended to be a multi-player online persistent world Role playing game. I could have just said MMORPG, and pretty much anyone would have gotten that, but, I'm an independent developer and I'm not going to delude myself with visions of World of Warcraft scale success. I also omitted the word 'Massively' from the descriptive string, because I've been toying with the idea of creating personal level servers that small, close-knit communities can grow within. These servers would have fairly small population caps, and once filled, the system locks which keep NPCs in charge of the world would release, allowing the players to rule (or not) depending on their whims and ambition. Again, it's just an idea, and I'll get to it in more detail later.

This is a developers blog. As the title of the blog 'The Pressure Coder' alludes to, I am attempting to pressure myself into more regular and productive coding by putting my progress (or lack there of) online fore the world to see.

When I first began this project, before it even had a name I was using PennMush to create a text based persistent virtual world. At that point in my life I was a windows computer tech, working in the bowels of a large corporation, plumbing the networks and distributing new desktop computers. For a time reference, Doom II was the most popular game of the day, and MMORPGS were all text based, mostly accessed via telnet clients, and running on university mainframes. At this point in my life I was NOT an accomplished programmer, I had played with basic on my Apple II, compiled other peoples programs (sometimes with changes) and been very confused about how other people thought to produce such complex gibberish. Not only did they produce it, but it actually worked!

All of this changed as I began building my world within my very own PennMush server. I was using PennMush, because you could compile it from a simple set of instructions, and 'build' the game from the inside with a fairly small set of commands (@dig to create a room, @link to connect it to another room). None of that crazy programming should have been needed. I was wrong! Structure and descriptions could be done with no code, but for the world to become alive, things needed to happen, Non Player Characters had to be created, a money system, plus a way to regulate it was needed, etc... I needed to write code. Rather than giving up, I turned to the PennMush user community, I was sure that someone would have already done what I needed and I could copy their examples and tweak them to work for me. I found some pieces, but there were many gaps still. One day I was creating a building that needed an elevator. The elevator was just a room, but the exits (aka @links) needed to change based on a players command, and that required code... required me to code it... I took the plunge. That day is when I finally GOT programming, the art of breaking down a task into simple pieces and giving the computer simple rules about what to do with them. A new world opened for me that day, not to long after that I picked back up the Visual Basic I had done nothing with and learned, changes careers to software engineering and I have never gone back.

A little about the technical side. I have moved from one technology to the next, restarting my projects with each new technology, progressed thru versions of DirectX and language revisions. Here is where 'Skies of Psyberia' stands today.
* Visual Basic .Net 2008
* TrueVision3D 3D Middleware
* SQLite Database
* LUA Scripting language
TrueVision3D allows me to concentrate on the actual game development rather than the minutia of wrapping all of directX calls myself. But, like any good wrapper, still allows direct access to the base DX libraries and objects if I need them.
SQLite is a small lite SQL query parser and database engine rolled into a single dll. I'll probably replace it with a more robust server side solution later, but it makes for a very clean developers database.
LUA is the latest addition to the mix, and it allows me to customize the behavior of objects without creating special case modifications to the main code base. Because it is interpreted, I can also experiment and change behavior without re-compiling the main game code.

I'm sure by now, any potential reader is bored, so I'll sign off with a commitment to providing more uninteresting drivel in regular daily installments.

PageFault