TMWServ Development Report July 2007

Post by **Crush** » 30 Jul 2007, 21:29

Thanks to Guillaume "Silene" Melquiond, who is currently doing the TMWServ development almost single-handedly, we made some very big advances in the last months.

The inventory and item system made very good progress. Monster can now drop items when they die, items can be traded between player characters (although this does still need some tweaking) and the equipment look of players is communicated. Unfortunately there isn't a way for equipping and unequipping stuff and equipment doesn't affect the character attributes yet. Reasons for this being lack of conceptualisation of the game mechanics. Rotonen and me will start a big conceptualisation cleanup tomorrow to decide upon the details of the equipment game mechanics.

A lot of stuff that was hardcoded before like spawn- and teleport areas is now read from map files. Another step on the path of making administration without any programming knowledge possible.

A provisorical NPC engine has been implemented. NPCs can now appear on maps and you can have multiple choice dialogs with them. These dialogs haven't got any gameplay effects yet. This will have to wait until we got the scripting backend running.

Now we only need a complete inventory and equipment system, exp gain, trading with NPCs and fixes for some small quirks and we are close to a public test of tmwserv.

Dr Wahl · Post by **Dr Wahl** » 30 Jul 2007, 21:55

Great job! Sounds like a lot got done this month. Can't wait to see what is in store for next month

eXcite · Post by **eXcite** » 14 Aug 2007, 13:19

Sounds realy nice. One question. i hope the server supports sql databases not TXT Files

Post by **Crush** » 14 Aug 2007, 13:44

The server uses SQLite as database backend by default meaning that the sql server is integrated into the accountserver (the database itself is stored in an external file and not in memory, of course). There is some code for abstraction layers for external databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL in the server sourcecode but I never tried it. So I am not sure if these even work. Until now I hadn't much to do with the database system at all. Maybe someone else can tell us more about this.

The option to store the game data in flatfiles is neither supported nor planed (AFAIK) because of the known drawbacks of this method (long search and manipulation times with large sets of data, vulnerable to corruption through program errors, problems with multithreading)

eXcite · Post by **eXcite** » 14 Aug 2007, 14:15

I think the administration would be much easier with sql database in backend.

i know it because you can handel quests or items much better in sql than in Text Files.

But for now i hope the TMserver will release soon