2008.08.20
First off, my apologies for letting this project lapse for so long. And apologies to anyone who has emailed me and not received a reply. The tremendous amount of spam to this mailbox should be under control now. It will take a while to filter through the backlog of messages, but I will try to reply to future inquiries in due time.
On to some real news, the project is (believe it or not) not dead! As of this month, I am working on Phosphor again, and there will be some real updates in the near future. Here are the goals for the next couple of months:
- Game physics will be using Ageia PhysX, so collisions, environment clipping should be much better, and we'll be able to have dynamic world objects (tumbling boulders, moving platforms, etc). The current Lingo-scripted physics slows down dramatically when there are many projectiles active, hopefully Ageia will solve this problem too.
- Also the network code is getting a total re-write. The current peer to peer-host arrangement isn't turning out to be a very good architecture for a web game (problems setting up a multiplayer game is probably the most common question asked), so I'll be a moving to a centralized server that everyone can access (without messing with port forwarding and firewalls). I am currently looking at SmartFox and ElectroServer as potential backend solutions. This means using Flash's text sockets instead of Shockwave's built-in network component (which supports binary data and UDP connections). Initial tests surprisingly show better performance with the Flash path, so this looks promising.
- Create several more levels. The first will be probably mockups to test the new physics.
- And before I forget, make a website.
Anyhow, that's all for now. Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions. And much thanks to everyone who plays this game regularly. You've managed to keep a very old Shockwave demo alive, so I hope to do my part, and finish it (or at least get it out of the perpetual "beta 1" state).
-nick
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