Sunday, July 22, 2012

Go!

Hey guys,
Been a while since I posted, let alone about anything having to do with Dune 2.  I hope you all have been doing well.  I've been very busy at work for the most part, which has also included learning more about object-oriented code and practices.

I've been looking around for a "primary" language/environment to use that both better conforms to industry standards than what I was using (BlitzMax) and also "feels" right for me.  Right now I've got my sights set on the Google Go language.  As many of you know, I've wanted to rewrite the D2TGP project for quite a while now, and with Go's in-built support for clean networking and what (so far) seems like fun code to write, I'm going to make it a priority to dig further here and see if I can't reboot this project.  Plus, it's not Microsoft, and it will compile on Windows/Mac/Linux, so that maintains my intention to have multiple versions available.

That being said, don't get too excited yet!  I'll be using this as my opportunity to learn Go and to exercise my knowledge, much more than to get D2TGP back on a development cycle.  However, this undertaking will allow me to get more involvement with others, so maybe progress will be good.  If I can maintain control of the project I'll see about making it open source also, though we'll need to get around the IP issues.

I've already (secretly) made a dedicated server version of D2TGP in the old code, so I think I'd start there.  This server version isn't fully fleshed out since it would take a lot more to rewrite how games are connected, started and finished, but it does run its own hard-coded CPU games well.

So hey, maybe something will come of this, maybe not.  Many of you know that I've started and stopped other projects before, but I'm feeling more determined and I'd really like to make a Go of this.  :)  Talk to you guys again in a while and we'll see where it goes.  Wish me luck.

--Drackbolt