Volity update

Just posted v0.4 of Frivolity (gory details and download at SourceForge), shaking out all the little bugs for hours, until both the server and the client installed and ran cleanly on my Mac. (My current development environment is the volity.net machine itself, up at Arcus, which I access over ssh.) Now I have a lot of documentation and other Volititous exposition to catch up on, as noted in an earlier post. While being the bottleneck always sucks, it's sort of perversely neat to know that you're bottlenecking your own project. Not that I plan on making a habit of it or anything.

Summary of the state of Volity, after summer 2004:

* The volity.net bookkeeper, the network's logical center, is permanently running on volity.net, and as of this month has started actively surving some purpose, helping client programs discover and download the UI files they need, on the fly.

* Two test/example game servers (rock-paper-scissors and crazy eights) are permanently and stably running on volity.net as well. This allows anyone with a fresh Frivolity installation to test it against a live server, which is pretty nice.

* Frivolity (the Perl server & game programming framework) is pretty stable (in performance if not API), and I've brought its documentation (both in man pages and the Web-based develepers' guide) to a level that makes me feel personally satisfied.

* Javolin (the Java client) isn't quite releasable yet, but you can play games with it.

At the start of this year I was hoping to have a releasable server and graphical client available by Origins. Not so much, clearly, but we've made a hell of a lot of progress anyway, and I think we're actually pretty close to meeting that goal... we'll just a few months late. In otherwords, quite the professional operation, as far as entertainment software goes, hey wot?

There's also no chance I'll have "The Volity Book" done by year's end, needless to say. But, it doesn't make me sad; all my energy for this project has been going into development. I'm about to enter another major documentation phase, though, so we'll see where that takes us.

All very nice.