Creatures Caves

Okay, Time went by to fast yesterday, had to go to bed before I was able to wrap things up in a nice update Post.

So here it comes.

Based on the discoveries made, in my last update post, i developed a System that allows general purpose "DirectMessageAgent"s to be sent directly between players.

To send such an Agent to another player you just need to create an Agent that looks lie this:

new: simp 1 1 35753 "blnk" 1 0 0
sets name "aw_recipient" "bob"
setv name "some_integer" 1337
setv name "another_integer" 42
setv name "a_float" 3.14
sets name "a_string "some message"

The client running alongside the Game engine, pulls this Agent of the Engine, sends it to the server, and the recipient user "bob" can then retrieve the Agent, and it will be injected into his game looking like this:

new: simp 1 1 35754 "blnk" 1 0 0
sets name "aw_sender" "alice"
sets name "aw_date" "<timestamp_the_agent_was_sent>"
setv name "some_integer" 1337
setv name "another_integer" 42
setv name "a_float" 3.14
sets name "a_string "some message"

This Agent then can be used by an in game enumerator to do... basically whatever you want.

The Named variable "aw_recipient" and the "family, genus, species 1, 1, 35753"
is the only thing that is needed for an DirectMessageAgent to work. all other "NAME" variables are custom, and can be set by the sender as he pleases,

On the receiving end the "aw_recipient" variable will be replaced by the "aw_sender" variable and an additional variable "aw_date" which contains the time stamp of when the Agent was sent, is added, and the species is set to 35754. All custom variables are kept intact.

I released a very early Alpha version code named "alpha alpaca" containing this functionality as well as authentication, registration and basic housekeeping functionality, to the people interested in the Caos Coding Cave discord.

Mea and Aiko helped me test the Client, and Game modifications on another Windows 7 and a Windows 8 Box, but as this early version was limited to just sending Test Agents back and forth, the alpha alpaca release was rather boring at this point in time.

Aiko then grabbed the alpha alpaca by its fluffy mane tamed it and teached it a cool new trick! Based on the DirectMessageAgents, she implemented a working prototype of the ingame mail message system, this made things much more exciting as it shows that the DirectMessageAgents can easily be used for this and that keeping them as customizable as possible was a good design decision, as no Server side modifications where needed for implementing the mail System!

Aiko and I re iterated over the modifications she made, sent messages back and forth, fixed a few bugs, and now I am confident to say that we got basic mail messages working, there are still untested scenarios, like sending gibberish, containing weird Symbols and stuff, but those would not crash the server, possibly the client though.

The thing I am currently working on is to implement a similarly general purpose approach for sending and receiving creatures, based on PRAY files, exported, and re imported into the game on sending/receiving end.

After sending creatures across the wire, there is just a few more thing to implement to make it for a early access beta/alpha whatever release.
Oh and of course everyone favorite... documentation. XD

Everything we are currently working on can be found here: https://github.com/AlbianWarp

feel free to play around with it, If you find something weird, open up an issue, or talk to me directly via Discord, I am around on all the Creatures Discords known to me ^^.