Mud Engine progress

Thought I’d take a moment to post an update regarding the Mud Designer.

There has been a lot of work done on the engine over the last two weeks. It now has a working server, simplified implementation of linking rooms, command engine re-write, script engine re-write, game management re-write and character re-write.

The designer itself has been removed from the project as every component of the engine has changed & the designer contained more bugs than I cared to count. It was built wrong; writing the designer without a engine proved to be a mistake. As the engine progresses, work on the designer will resume, with a whole new designer.
The project now has a story board contributor, a network developer, UI designer, conept developer, lead engine programmer and component developer. With the help of these guys we’re sure to knock the socks off this thing over the next few months.

Apple iOS 4.0 Exchange Issues

I’ve noticed ever since I updated to iOS 4.0 on my iPhone 3GS that sending mail from an external app (either 3rd party apps or the Apple based Notes app) does not actually get sent. The message sits in the Mail app’s Outbox. I have to open Mail, select my outbox, open the email and select Send in order for it to actually get sent.
This isn’t an issue however if I create a new mail within the Mail app and send it from there. Only apps that support sending mail has this issue. This wasn’t an issue prior to upgrading to iOS 4.0 however, and everyone I know running iOS 3.1.3 or older does not have this issue.

At first I thought it was just my phone, since my GPS is broken on it as well (That’s another topic for discussion), but then I changed my default mail account from my Google Exchange account to my Yahoo SMTP account and the problem went away.

I suppose before I get to far into this I should say that I have two Google accounts setup on my phone, and this is why:

1. SMTP account for syncing notes. Push is not supported via Google’s SMTP servers, so I only use this for syncing notes since Google’s Exchange servers don’t sync notes.
2. Exchange account for syncing my Contacts, Calendar and mail via Push.

With that having been said, I tested my SMTP Google account by turning on Mail syncing (only supports Fetch however), so I fetched my new mail, then opened up the Apple Notes app and tried to email a note from it to myself. It worked! So the issue doesn’t seem to be my Google email account, but rather something with the Google Exchange server, or the way Apple handles sending mail via exchange. Like I said, everyone I know running iOS 3.1.3 and older can still send mail via the Google Exchange, why can’t my iOS 4.0?

I called AppleCare and spent 45 minutes on the phone with them before they said they’d call me back. I guess they’re having their senior team look into the issue. Apple really screwed things up with iOS 4, exchange issues (this is not the first) amongst other problems with the OS people have had. Then there’s the iPhone 4 debacles.

Come on Apple, you can do better than this. Don’t turn into a Microsoft.

Update:

I spoke with one of their Senior iOS Advisors and he was not able to figure out what the issue was and gathered all the information to turn over to the iOS Engineers so that they can take a look at it and figure out if this is an iOS Exchange hole or an issue on Google’s end.

Update 2:

The iOS Advisor emailed me and let me know that he created an account setup with Google’s Exchange and had the same problem. Mail would sit in the outbox when sent from external apps, and he would have to open the mail inside the outbox and select send in order for it to actually get sent. He went ahead and forward all the information to the Apple Engineers and now it’s just a waiting game to see if Apple says it’s their issue or Google’s.

Mud Scripting

Last night I spent some time porting a modified version of my Blit Script engine into the Mud Designer engine. It will replace the previous implementation of the script engine which wasn’t fully completed and not supported by the designer.
The new script implementation already contains dynamic method invoking, dynamic property access/modification along with on-the-fly compiling. There are several examples available including one for dynamic compiling. Note that the examples include XNA only source code in them, Mud Designer specific code will be placed on the designers home page soon.

Mud Designer Team

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had several people inquire about joining the Project. I’ve gained two networking developers and one software documentation editor, effectively filling all of the open positions that I had within the team. I’ve had several discussions with the teams Content Designer regarding the direction of the project and what objects needs to be implemented in order for the engine to be usable in a production game and we’ve come up with several cool ideas that I want to get implemented into the engine. With the newly formed team, I think we’ll be able to get things up and running smoothly pretty quickly.

There are several things that have happened with the project over the last week or so, one of them being the engine and designer having been separated into two different projects. When that happened the designer’s compatibility with the engine some-what broke. Objects could still be created and edited within the designer, but they where no longer being saved. I then decided that the current implementation of Game Object Collections was not sufficient for what I was trying to accomplish with this project and that it needed to be re-wrote to an extent. This will complete the compatibility break between the engine and the designer, as the designer will no longer be able to link objects together. The current Pre-Alpha 0.3 will continue to work, however if you download the source and attempt to run the designer it will not work and errors out.

Network development has also started with the project, hopefully the engine will be able to start and stop a MUD server along with connect and disconnect as a client pretty soon. I’m also hoping to get the Engine into a usable (for testing purposes) state for hard-coded MUD’s over the next couple of weeks.

Finally I wanted to mention that work on the Designer has stopped for the time being. It will resume once the engine is working and is further along in development than what it currently is. It’s difficult to build a visual designer for an engine that does not function correctly or have half the features implemented that the designer needs to have in order for it to work correctly.
The designer is still an important part of this project, and work on it will resume as soon as the team has a solid version of the engine up and running.