I am planning on attending MIX09 this year, already registered actually. I missed it last year but wanted to be present this time around for the new Silverlight announcements and to meet some of the Silverlight team. Anyway, if you are going I will be there :)
1/27/2009
I uploaded the Perenthia Armorial Version 1.0 to the Perenthia Alpha site tonight. The Perenthia Armorial is a way to provide external access to Perenthia information. The first version includes the Player Bar feature, where you pass a player name to the service and renders back HTML with player details.
The call to http://alpha.perenthia.com/Armorial/Armorial.ashx?n=Aldarian renders the following:
1/18/2009
I did a Character Creation, Movement and Chat test last night with the Perenthia Alpha players. The tests went well, I chatted with a few players, found some bugs and was very encouraged by the whole thing. The next test should start next weekend and will include some combat/spell tests. After that we will do some questing tests, travel tests (boats and stuff) and then I will open up more of the world for the alpha players to help resolve other issues not covered by the main feature tests.
I am enjoying Silverlight as the client UI, it provides a Windows like interface with ability to be run in a browser.
1/16/2009
While developing Perenthia I tried several different communication formats from sending JSON serialized objects back and forth to sending byte arrays containing mostly integers indicating what should be loaded and displayed, what commands to execute etc. What I eventually settled on was a bit of a hybrid. I've created a simple set of "tags" that can be sent to and from the server. The tags are nothing more than pipe delimited strings contained within curly braces and there are a limited number of tags that provide simplicity yet flexibility with the data that is transmitted. The tags are represented in C# by tag objects allow me to create them, query them, etc.
A simple command tag for the SAY command might look like this: {CMD|SAY|"Hello World!"}
I wrote a custom tag writer class that parses the tag objects into strings to be sent to the client and likewise a tag reader that reads the strings sent from the client and parses them into tag objects.
The client can only send commands to the server but the server sends commands, messages and objects to the client. The commands are all the same, the CMD text then the one word name of the command and then a list of arguments, messages are system, chat and tell messages but objects have a bit more information. For instance, an object tag encompasses several different types starting with a base ACTOR, a PLACE, a PLAYER and a PROP or property. The ACTOR, PLACE and PLAYER tags all define the ID, Name and Descriptions of the objects, with some additional data per type but the PROP tag defines the object id of its owner and a name/value pair. An example of a PLAYER tag with properties for x, y and z coordinates might be:
{OBJ|PLAYER|3756|"Aldarian"|"My character description..."}
{OBJ|PROP|3756|"X"|45}
{OBJ|PROP|3756|"Y"|26}
{OBJ|PROP|3756|"Z"|0}
The client can find and parse the player tag and then find the properties associated with that player instance. The way the server works now it will send the full player tag once logged in and a character is selected and then from then on out it just sends property updates.
Using this type of tag structure allows quite a bit of flexibility for the client. I could choose to write a very simple client that only displays MSG tags, much like a MUD, I could write a simple 2D interface client and display and move sprites about the map using the properties from the server, etc. Once Perenthia is up and running I will probably post some information on the tags and how to talk with the server should someone feel the need to write their own client. :)
1/5/2009