Status Update

Wow. 2020. Yeah, so this has been a crazy past 5 months for our team. As you can imagine lots of changes, major developments in life, as has been the case with many across the world. By way of covid update, no one from our team has passed away, although we've had members contract and endure through it. I could go on but my guess is you're all fairly tired of hearing about COVID-19 by now!

So what's new for us? We've had a few months off and our itch for development has sprung back to life. The past week or so we've spent much time on two major avenues, one we've decided to modernize our hosting solutions and switched our playfield, login and chat engines to run within containers. This gives us a little more flexibility in terms of hosting and operations. We've also spent a bit of time revamping our data footprint on the serverside. One things we've noticed is that during the research phase of our project data formats were often unknown. This led us to be a little less tidy than we'd generally like with our data management, relying on JSON and other binary formats for alot of the data that powers items, nanos, heightmaps, and much more. This led us to have quite a bloated repository, and subsequently a bloated deployment pipeline and devops experience. So we've flipped out data footprint on it's side and moved much of our content into good ol' relational databases. This allows us to iterate on content and features faster and prepares us more fully to build a toolset for creating items, nanos, npc templates and modify things like spawn points.

Bleh... boooring

Yeah. The above was a bit of a boring task but it had to be done. But on the other hand one of our intrepid devs aka '@Unknown' has been working on a new initiative for a custom client that supports both the live and PRK server protocols. This will help us in developing a dev client for our own content creation and management purposes. But it also has interesting impact on the broader AO experience. It's completely exploratory and experimental! But it is interesting. Hopefully we will have some more juicy updates on that front soon.

Anyway, its good to be back, the show must go on!

Sincerely,

Portaler

Developer | Co-Founder