Meanwhile, Somewhere in the Void...

Decided it was time to post an update about work on World of Antra. Went into alpha in late November, with formal weekly builds and test sessions running on an array of machines I had set up at my office.

In January I took the next step and leased half a cabinet at a nearby service provider. Not that we were in any way in need of that much bandwidth, but it takes me a while to pick up new things and I like lots of lead time so I can practice. Setting up the router, sourcing and assembling the machines, and other purely supporting activities proved to be a bit of a stretch for me, and trying to do that while fighting bugs, making art and programming after announcing a date would probably be fatal.



(Yes, I've rerun the cables neatly since the pictures were taken!)

Alpha continues, and again, I'm glad that got started so early, because a few bugs which were very difficult to trace turned up and due to their intermittent nature wouldn't have been exposed without the alpha crew pounding on the builds for weeks.



I finally managed to integrate Bitgap Games' Sahara correctly, and that proved to be a real marvel--beginning the art phase after the last basic game system was completed I took another stab at it having not gotten it quite "right" on a few previous attempts--and the resulting texture effects proved to be so stunning that slogging through all the models proved to be very rewarding instead of painful. My "programmer art" skills are pretty minimal and Sahara provided beautiful icing for an otherwise pretty hopeless cake!

Still got quite a ways to go! I'd like to begin closed, larger beta by summer, although in light of all previous deadlines slipping that's pretty ambitious, but at least the backend is set up to support it.