Plan for Josh Ritter

For the technically inclined, here's a look at Minions of Mirth's binary schtuff:


Pretty funky aye?

I got the dedicated World Manager/World Server/Zone Server system all packed up and mobile. MoM will definitely ship with Massively Single and Multiplayer game modes.

An entire world can be server "statically" with dedicated zone servers (spanning multiple machines). It can also serve zones dynamically, as players move around in the world, teleport, join a world, etc. You can also mix the two so that some zones are always up (a busy city for instance) and some are served dynamically (a remote dungeon people hardly go to). The process priority of Zone Servers is set based on the number of players. If a zone server crashes, the world can automatically relaunch the zone. (I have had a World Server with 7 connected zones running for over a week)...

The whole point of this flexibility is so that a few friends can all be romping around in the world together (with 3/4 zones being served, most if not all dynamically)... or, people can setup 3d "MUDs" for hundreds of players with a dedicated box or two depending on load...

I've also split out the entire database configuration system for mod makers. New monsters, quests, items, NPCs, skills, spells, even zones can be created! You can, of course, make new zones with the Torque Mission editor and connect them to existing ones and/or make special teleportation spells/NPC's to get to them :)

You can even recompile the RPG database on live worlds and the data reattaches itself... from our "Editing Manual" documentation:

Quote:

Building and testing your changes

There are two methods to compiling your changes and testing them:

Live Updating

While playing the game, from the Tome command line, execute "/imm recompile". After a few seconds, the changes you made to the RPG rules will be recompiled and reattached to your running game! If something seems too easy or hard, tweak it and try it again. Spelling mistakes in dialog? No problem! It's great! Please refer to additional /imm (immortal) commands in the player's documentation in the repository. These commands can be a great assistance in creating and testing MoM's content!

Static Rebuild

If you want to generate a brand new, fresh, and clean database from scratch, the Genesis program is for you! From the command line, change the current working directory to your ./mom folder and execute "Genesis.exe". You should do this from the command line so that any errors are reported in the console. Otherwise, you can simply double click the executable. Once the build process is complete, the new database will be in the "./mom/minions.of.mirth/data/worlds/baseline" folder. Once you have your sparkling new database file created, you can start a new single player world, and the game will use your new data, automatically!

Now back to my 32nd birthday :)

-Josh Ritter
Technical Director
Prairie Games