Project Status Update 3

Welcome to the third in a long line of project updates. Since the last update, a lot of progress has been made, all of this is explained below. New comments are shown in green

At the bottom there will be some technical info for all those who are feeling adventurous.

As of June 28th
Quite a few background features are complete and up and running. Below are is an updates list of features from the previous updates.

• Main client window
• Contains a toolbar where the player can access the market, their factory, their settings, and their inventory. - and now a logout button, and information about their account
• Will contain a chat room, list of online users, and the players account details. - Now contains an online user list (fully working) and will contain a chat room
• For the duration of the BETA tests (and possibly after), a report bug button is available for players to report any problems they find in the game (top-right of the window)
• The client now recognises when a member of staff logs in, and allows them access to staff commands.
  
• "Today's News" headline bar (which updates every 10 minutes)
• Will reveal news about global events (such as wars, or famines etc) and also personal player events (such as when a user contributes a certain amount to the game and gains a rank). - Currently working 100%, the server can send a new headline whenever it wants, and all clients will update their news.
  
• Market section
• Buying and selling is now completely operational, all we need now are the resources to fill the market. At the moment we have over 100 resources for you to play with, however these cannot be added to the market until base costs, and some other details have been worked out for each.
  
• Client-to-server communication
• This is obviously a major part of the game, and is what will require the most work. Currently the server can recognise the following commands from the client:
• Login *
  
• Logout *
  
• Buy *
  
• Sell *
  
• Get product details * - still need to complete databases, but framework is there.
• Get factory details
• Send message *
  
• Register new user *
• Some staff commands *
• Change password *
  
• However the server cannot yet do anything with these commands as none of the server side databases have been created (players, products etc). - Server can now fully use the commands that are *ed
• The client can recognise responses from the server for the above commands, and can act on most.

Tech Talk
After having a lot of problems with the winsock control used to communicate between client and server, we have finally created a control that works for our needs. It allows the server to log the amount of users that has been connected, and send and receive files. - All works well testing the client when it's running on the same machine as the server, however connecting to the server over the Internet is not working right now - we are working on solving the problem. This problem has not yet been resolved, mainly because we have been too busy to get round to it. I know that sounds really bad, but to fix it both me and Ashley need to get together and work on it, recently there have been no opportunities for this.

The Future
Ashley is currently working on the resources, and creating databases to contain them. This is a very big job and he will be working on that for a while. I am currently coding the server and client, adding new features almost daily, and fixing various bugs I've already found in the code.

The third screenshot

(Click to enlarge)

This is the third released screenshot of the game client as it looks now. The picture shows the main client window, with the market open. The news bar can be seen at the bottom of the picture. - The user list and logout button can be seen as well. And yes we know the client hasn't changed much to look at, but a lot of code has been added in the background to prepare for the new features. As you can see from above, the client has changed a lot from last time. Notice all the new shiny buttons on the toolbar, they are all pretty self explanatory. Because most of the sections shown are not finished, I will hold off screenshots of them for now. For obvious reasons, the staff options button will not be available to all. Finally notice to 'report bug' button in the top-right, this can be used to report any problems you find while testing the game.

And Finally...
As usual any features and ideas discussed here can and probably will change before the game is released, nothing is set in stone yet.