The weekly hog news 17

These past weeks i’ve been working on solving lots of different kinds of technical issues.
I’ve now completed a basic registration of Ymir on steamworks and started learning how it all works, uploading my first test build on steam.

I’ve also , at last, merged all the old server code into the client, so everything is now combined into a single program.
I’m now busy repairing and updating all the networking functions and starting to actually get this new server runnning and communicating with the client again.
Its a long process as, since the prototype, not only did i decide to update to a quite different version of the engine i’m using but i also to got rid of as much of the 3rd party extensions i was using as possible.
I did this because even if these were adding tempting new content to the engine, in the end they’re a liability and a source of problems.
Its a bit like having a game with lots of big mods. Each mod sounds nice on paper, adding new features. But in the end you start adding these and when your game crashes you can’t do much about it. First its a problem as everytime the game has an update, you have to wait for all the modders to also update their mods , then reinstall these, and its time consuming. And usually by the time they’re done, there a new game patch.
Then there’s moders who eventually abandon their mods after they get bored, and as they did all that for free they dont own you anything after all. So when the game has a new patch, you’re left with incompatible or unfinished mods and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Well its a bit the same with the engine and its 3rd party extensions. So i’d rather be dependent on as few things as possible and i’m trying to eliminate all the extensions i was using in the alpha1 prototype. Which includes the networking library itself. So all that + the new engine version update is basically why i have to repair/inspect each mecanism of the program one by one.