I have finally finished the majority of the Visual Designer and and now I have started work on the Real-Time Testing feature of the Tool Kit. It's coming along pretty quick, and I'm expecting to have it ready sometime Mid-June. The designer is still undergoing some testing, but for the most part it's been very stable, and is in a useable state. Objects can be created, doors can be linked and the objects can be added to the rooms, all via a simple drag and drop system. The engine (not the tool kit) supports custom commands and the tool kits real-time testing will allow developers to rapidly prototype games and perform some heavy testing.

As of right now I am writing the player creation code needed for the tool kits testing feature, and then I will be implementing a inventory manager, NPC interaction and a battle system. I don't know if I will have time to implement all of those aspects before Beta 1 is released, but they will be implemented prior to Beta 2. I want to make sure and allow myself enough time to write some good documentation on how to use both the engine and the tool kit.

So with all of that being said, I have also spent the last couple of weeks debating on if I will charge for the engine and tool kit or release them as freeware. At this time the decision is to release the Mud Creator Game Engine for free, and sell both Indie and commercial license for the Mud Creator Tool Kit. The final price has not been decided on yet, but I do know it will not be any more than what a new game would cost if you where to buy it. The source code for both the Mud Creator Engine and the Mud Creator Tool Kit will be available for licensing, it will be an additional cost over that of the Tool Kit, and is not meant for Indie developers as the cost might be fairly expensive. For the most part the Mud Creator Engine is being designed to allow you to extend onto it with without needing the source code.

Currently I have three beta releases planned. Beta 1 will include the Mud Creator Engine and the Mud Creator Tool Kit, without networking support. During this release only single player games will be supported. Beta 2 will include both a Server and a Client for your Mud, along with an internal server/client built into the Tool Kit. The final Beta 3 release will focus on the team management aspects of the Mud Creator Tool Kit, such as allowing all of the team members to connect to the Tool Kits server and create/modify objects within the project in real-time. On top of that there will be a internal Team Chat System built into the Tool Kit so that team members can communicate with each other during the development of the project.

The Mud Creator will require all of your clients to have your projects compiled client installed in order to connect to your server, but they will not have any of the project files, as those will be stored on the server. At this point I am focusing only on the Microsoft Windows side of things, as the Mud Creator was developed using Microsoft's Visual C# 2008 and .NET 3.5, and so at this time it is only able to run on a Windows platform. However, I plan to port the engine over to Linux using Mono, but that will take some time due to Mono not having all of the classes that the .NET framework has. With that being said, all of your clients will also be required to have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed in order to play your game, but that is not that big of a problem and I might write something that will download the framework for the clients if they do not have it installed.

So until the next blog,

Johnathon
Airhead Gaming