Comments on: When is progress progress?

By: jason

jason — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:44:15 +0000

I am going to look at BlazeDS a bit more. You’ve piqued my curiosity. But Lila Dreams will remain with SmartFox because that’s what Kongregate wants me to use. I would consider Blaze for other projects, though.

As for horizontal scaling, I’ll be using Terracotta. It’s the reason I will never write any MMO server in anything other than Java.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:58:47 +0000

Ya, I looked at SmartFox and wasn’t too impressed. It didn’t really add much, and didn’t appear to be too scaleable. BlazeDS doesn’t really do anything other than interface you to your Java components (quite seamlessly). With some of the new Servlet 3.0 stuff, you can even do essentially synchronous connections for 10s of thousands of users on one box. You can do clustering too when you get above that. It’s nice.

Setting up the server side was an utter bitch, but now that it’s done it works well, and I’ve got as much scaleability as I’ll ever need.

By: jason

jason — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:12:12 +0000

The other Jason (there’s another one?), I haven’t tried BlazeDS. The new Lila Dreams engine uses SmartFox, but I’ve abstracted the server stuff away so I can pretty easily plug in anything. SmartFox is only ever directly used at very low level, so I pretty much forget about that and just write to my own API.

Schell, I’ll be using Box2d for my non-MMO/singleplayer games. At first I’m just using it for collision detection, but later I might use the dynamics, too. Depends on the needs of each game. A racing game would be awesome using it. Crash up derby with guns a la Car Wars?

I don’t plan to use any physics library in Lila Dreams because I don’t think Lila Dreams needs physics like that. I’ll implement something simple from scratch, probably. Things like jumping in a platformer need fine-grained control (to be able to tune it to perfection), so I wouldn’t put that through a simulator anyway.

I should add that another factor is I’m not sure how much complexity and trouble doing a networked version of Box2d would be, so I want to avoid that whole can of worms.

By: Schell

Schell — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:55:02 +0000

# Plans for more shiny game engine geek stuff? Hell yeah.

I’d be interested in what path you take with ragards to physics. Building your own or using an existing library? Box2D? APE? I like the geek stuff.

By: TwistedTextiles

TwistedTextiles — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:41:55 +0000

We’re with you all the way! I’ll start working on something for you to toss into the volcano when you get to the top … (ya know, to appease the angry, fickle, gaming gods?)

By: Ted

Ted — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:39:27 +0000

I (and, I’m sure, others) are still routing for ya!

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:13:21 +0000

Good for you. I know where you’re coming from, I’m working on a flex multiplayer game at the moment as well. The server bit was the hardest, but I’ve finally got that under control with a nice Java backend and BlazeDS, after a few aborted attempts.

Feel free to make some tech posts, I know me and a few others will be interested.