I've started to build a simple conversation engine into Janthus, something I've never actually done before. I'm doing it from scratch, just to get the experience with thinking about the problem; but eventually I see this component of the game being replaced by something driven from Lua scripts,…

Added the first quest-type point to the game: descend into the Rat Cave (entrance at 122,62 inside the small cave in the starter castle), and clear out all the rats (50 of them). If you survive (and you should, the rats are easy) -- the Rat King will appear in the cave to challenge you. Kill hi…

Creating an MMO (see http://www.janthus.com) is monstrously difficult, as I've come to realize. After literally spending hundreds of hours on the core game engine as a sole developer, I've just now started to make inroads into the horrible problem of lag, and fighting it to the point where people …

So the communication protocol in Janthus (http://www.janthus.com) is basically a custom solution, transmitting a simple text protocol over TCP. I wonder if I basically re-invented the wheel on this one. I've mused about using XMPP (Openfire, see http://www.igniterealtime.org), most of it written by…

Following my initial discovery that looks are indeed important, I've since striven to incrementally improve the look and feel of the world. For instance, I've severely curtailed the use of ascii tiles for both the movable sprites, and the world tiles:



I've noticed that visitors have started to enjoy…

Its been an interesting 3 days of alpha testing the game. What I've discovered is that the amount of time people spend in the game literally exploded from 15 seconds a visit to 10-15 minutes a visit when I made slight tweaks to the graphics engine (to be less ascii-like). Also it appears that most …

Finally after 5 years of procrastination, I built out my mmorpg engine, Janthus (http://www.janthus.com) to the point where it can actually be played by more than 3 people (I think). Not really sure that 3 people make it a massively multiplayer online game, but at the very least, it doesn't seem to…