Hi all, I've been working diligently the past few weeks now getting Bitphoria reading for its first public beta release. The goal of this release is to firstly expose the world to Bitphoria (and get it some exposure) whilst enabling people to begin familiarizing themselves with the scripting system. I'm curious to see what people come up with once they get the hang out it. It's simpler than almost all programming languages and makes it a very straightforward process for creating custom games that run in Bitphoria's engine.
I've just spent the past week fine-tuning the networking code itself to a point that I feel is acceptable for a public release. It can handle pings of a few hundred milliseconds pretty smoothly, and feels pretty responsive compared to most games running with that kind of latency. We'll see what kind of responses I get about it after the release, at which point I'll have a better idea as to what I should do to make it better.
I am currently focusing on getting a master server setup going so that players can easily start and join each others' games. This requires some work with the UI system that is responsible for presenting a server browser to players, which downloads the list of active server addresses from the master server itself and then goes ahead and performs individual 'getinfo' requests on each of them, and listing their info in Bitphoria's UI for players to click on for a preview of the world that is generated and a list of the players and their scores that are currently in the game, along with displaying the game server's ping and name, the name of the current game/mod it is running, etc...
Thus far I see no reason not to run the master server from my house, for the time being, and if/when too many players come into being I will then move the master server to a dedicated hosting solution.
My goal with this first release is to have the public's help finding bugs and providing me with feedback to help me direct Bitphoria's development. It's about 90% finished, as a game, and feedback is what it's going to take to get it to full 100% completion, at which point I will then likely offer Bitphoria for sale with paid-accounts for players.