XServer - Update

This project may seem dead. I’ve come back to it again and again and found it difficult to continue on it as it is quite time consuming. While the initial version works, I can not seem to continue with it as the design is not complete and it is easy to loose track on what does what. Also, it does not make it easier when I realized that the problem is more complex than I initially thought, so a redesign should be done.

Therefore, I found myself pondering about distributed systems, because that is what this basically is. It should include Reliable Multicasting, Group Management and maybe Message Ordering. I also thought that RPC is what the current implementation have done, so it should be better if I used a standard that anyone could pick up as it is well defined: JSON-RPC.

Due to the complexity mentioned above, I figured that I should redesign XServer to have a chained packaging in order to make the implementation easier to understand and extend in the future. While this in itself might sound pretty hard, I have last year implemented such a system in Java, so it is just a matter of porting parts of it to TorqueScript. Whenever I get time, it should be less problematic and most definitely easier to add extra functionality and even extend the usage toward Blockland functionality itself.

The problem is: Who would benefit from such a system? Who will make use of it in a game that people are fine with the current limitation we currently have? Will this be useful for hosting more servers? How is this applied to the limitation of three servers per IP? I cannot answer these questions, but if I find it fun developing it, I sure will find it worth it.