GPG6's section on multiplayer is pretty crap to be honest. There was only one gem that I could really use, and that was on generating GUIDs for game objects, which made me realise that it could well be a problem if TEH MMORPG!!1 becomes as large as I'd like. Basically, 32-bit IDs can get exhausted in a matter of weeks, and 64-bit IDs can cause problems too if they're not managed properly. Another nice thing that article mentioned was assigning some bits to mean certain things, like the object type and so on. That way I only need to log the object IDs, and not a bunch of other stuff along with them. Maybe it's only relevant to objects shared between servers, but meh.
Yesterday we didn't get int othe office till almost 11:00, since we have one set of keys, and the person who had them was off on holiday. So we had to send someone to run and get them. And he came back with the old keys 20 minutes later. So we went for coffee while he was sent off to get the correct pair...
I've started on the game design doc for TEH MMORPG!!1, which is a pin to write, because word keeps replacing "TEH" with "The", and if I disable that autocorrect, I'll no doubt keep accidently typing it in documents unrelated to TEH MMORPG!!1. Oh well...
I'm also not very good at writing structured documents like that, the sections tend to blur together a fair bit. I also want to make the document technical enough to cover everything that it needs to, but still be readable by my friends, who are computer litterate, but don't understand a lot of the terms I'll use. Still I suppose they can always ignore the engine details.
I also have a habit of getting a lot of "feature creep" in my projects. Hopefully a GDD will help prevent that, or at least structure it so other people can suggest features early on.
I'm in the process of finding another memory leak at work. And changing the resource manager header causes the entire shitting project to get rebuilt. Which takes about 10 minutes on this PC. So I hope I've got it right, since if I need to change it again, I'll have wasted another 10 minutes. Still, it gives me time to post on GDNet and type more stuff into my design doc.
My aim for this lunch break is to mod phpbb to record the registering IP and user-agent for people on my forum, since I want to know if the spammers I mentioned in my last entry are bots or actual people. Bots are easy to fool, people are slightly harder. And that's what IP banning is for [smile].
Hopefully that'll take 10 minutes or so, then I can continue with my GDD. I'll do some brainstorming on the way home, and try to think of random NPCs, items, etc etc. My friends are useless when I ask them to think of things they want in a MMORPG, they come up with totally tangental things or things that are just not practical. "Can you have a webcam put your own face on your character?" for instance. Well, I suppose that one's slightly possible.
Ooh, compile has finished. Back to work...
EDIT: SHITTING CODEWARRIOR! DIEDIEDIEDIE DIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!
What the hell is the point in a breakpoint if CodeWarrior ignores it completely? GAHHHHHH
There's another Ph.D. student in my department whose surname is "Teh", which has caused much swearing with our admin staff and more than one misspelling on a name tag [grin]