« News
Dec
11
Monday Newspost
(Remember these? How I used to post what we were going to do in the coming week? Well, anyway, here's what's going on at Guild Software):
Work is progressing on the back-end rewrite. As I mentioned previously, Deliverator (the Lisp subsystem that handles some of the high level, large-scale AI behaviours: hive, piracy, galaxy-wide trading, and so on) has been having some stability problems. More specifically, the various Lisp implementations we've been using are having problems. So we're in the midst of a re-write to pull a lot of functionality out of lisp and push it off into a more scalable (and hopefully more stable) erlang-based system. That's moving along well, and our goal is to have it finished this month.. but it's a non-trivial project. So, not much can be promised beyond "doing the best we can". Unfortunately, until that system is stabilized, it holds up a lot of new Deliverator-dependent content. Full hive rollout, the new economy, new nation war stuff, and so on. Most of the advanced content we want to add, which depends on AI, is based around Deliverator.
In-line with that, I'm also personally doing some server juggling work, to try and stabilize the existing Deliverator system for "right now".. until the Erlang replacement is completed. I'm also working on some new-ship type content, missions, and design for fixing the faction system, which will be passed on to Ray when he's done with the new fog.
The fogging stuff (see previous newspost if you aren't aware) is coming along well. Ray's had to do some reworking of how our shaders work, which was long overdue anyway, and he's currently finishing that up. Testing is going to be pretty important on this addition, to make sure it functions across all platforms and different videocards, drivers, and so on. With some luck, the code will all be done this week, and we'll move into testing. No promises about whether fog will appear this week, as it requires some further artistic work (me again) and I'm burning time on other projects (Deliverator not crashing).
So, that's where we are. I can't promise what we may or may not release on Friday. It depends on how far we get, and how much time is available between other projects (like fixing broken Deliverator). Not the most exciting of annoucements, but still a bit of news. We're hard at work, and once we get some of this stupid broken-stuff fixed, we'll be moving along with the new content (the economy, full hive rollout, itani-serco wars, and other stuff we expected to be doing.. *now*).
As always, thanks for your patience and support, please keep the suggestions and input coming. We're still moving forward, although there hasn't been as much to show for it, lately.
Work is progressing on the back-end rewrite. As I mentioned previously, Deliverator (the Lisp subsystem that handles some of the high level, large-scale AI behaviours: hive, piracy, galaxy-wide trading, and so on) has been having some stability problems. More specifically, the various Lisp implementations we've been using are having problems. So we're in the midst of a re-write to pull a lot of functionality out of lisp and push it off into a more scalable (and hopefully more stable) erlang-based system. That's moving along well, and our goal is to have it finished this month.. but it's a non-trivial project. So, not much can be promised beyond "doing the best we can". Unfortunately, until that system is stabilized, it holds up a lot of new Deliverator-dependent content. Full hive rollout, the new economy, new nation war stuff, and so on. Most of the advanced content we want to add, which depends on AI, is based around Deliverator.
In-line with that, I'm also personally doing some server juggling work, to try and stabilize the existing Deliverator system for "right now".. until the Erlang replacement is completed. I'm also working on some new-ship type content, missions, and design for fixing the faction system, which will be passed on to Ray when he's done with the new fog.
The fogging stuff (see previous newspost if you aren't aware) is coming along well. Ray's had to do some reworking of how our shaders work, which was long overdue anyway, and he's currently finishing that up. Testing is going to be pretty important on this addition, to make sure it functions across all platforms and different videocards, drivers, and so on. With some luck, the code will all be done this week, and we'll move into testing. No promises about whether fog will appear this week, as it requires some further artistic work (me again) and I'm burning time on other projects (Deliverator not crashing).
So, that's where we are. I can't promise what we may or may not release on Friday. It depends on how far we get, and how much time is available between other projects (like fixing broken Deliverator). Not the most exciting of annoucements, but still a bit of news. We're hard at work, and once we get some of this stupid broken-stuff fixed, we'll be moving along with the new content (the economy, full hive rollout, itani-serco wars, and other stuff we expected to be doing.. *now*).
As always, thanks for your patience and support, please keep the suggestions and input coming. We're still moving forward, although there hasn't been as much to show for it, lately.