Friday, November 25, 2005

Not quite dead

Given the title of the last entry, you'd think I'd abandoned this project. I haven't, but other things have unfortunately taken up a lot of the time that could, would or otherwise should be going to it.

What caused me to post again was not some new revelation or advance in the project, but the fact that I have returned to learning the Ice system mentioned before. Again, this is for a different project, work-related, but as I read about the features, I can't help but think back to MMORF (and the Wish project for which Ice was used). So much of the functionality in Ice is fitting for a MMO, for a multi-server world -- for what I'm trying to do.

By reading the Ice documentation, am I cheating? By seeing the APIs that Ice has available, am I getting an edge on the design of my own system, which would be the core of MMORF?

Luckily, no. I'm proud to say (and you'll have to take my word for it, I suppose) that the features and methodology in Ice are what I had already figured out for myself; that is, the way that objects are handled between servers, and how they are transparently handled by the clients (whether they exist locally or remotely is immaterial).

Perhaps another reason why MMORF has been silent is because I have stopped playing Ultima Online, so I don't have a constant inundation of "I would do that this way" and "I know how to do that" going through my head...

Back to reading, but I'll have time for MMORF soon, I hope.