So, a lot’s happened over the last month or so that I haven’t mentioned here, but I figured it’s time we did a proper update on what’s happened lately.
Firstly, and probably most importantly development-wise, I’ve gotten the M&F source code to actually run. And it’s not as hard as I was making it out to be with that multi-part guide. Now that I know how it’s done though, I’ll get around to make a right and proper guide soon. There’s still one last thing we need to have a playable (and thus truly usable) test server, the map data. I hope to have that handled in the next week.
Secondly, I’ve setup hosting for the server that will soon be hosting M&F, as well as it’s project tracker and, ideally (when I find one), translation tool. The server is intended to be as close to the current server’s configuration as possible. If everything goes well, we could be talking about a server move as soon as, well, this month, perhaps.
For the project tracker, we’ll probably be using an open-source project management tool called OpenProject. I’ve not gotten around to installing it yet, but I will say that it’s already pushing my understanding of how a web server actually works and serves web.Some of it is just things I’ve not needed to know so forgot, but some of it is things I never realized in my laziness with some website plans.
I looked around at a bunch of options when picking that project management tool, and of the many options I get the feeling this is the one that will be the most useful. Mostly because I can host it myself, not pay by the user (or at all), and it does a LOT of stuff. Double points for it because compared to some others that you can host yourself, the requirements list is relatively short and has some overlap with M&F itself. Down the line, if I get particularly industrious, or if we find someone good with setting up an API, it’s also well documented in how it works, and has native support for API keys instead of passwords. Since it’ll exist on the same server as M&F, this could eventually end up in the game having a bug reporting page that passes information straight to the project tool (assuming I don’t tell M&F how to just put it straight into it’s database directly).
As for the translation tool, I could easily just make this tasks in the project tool, but having something that is dedicated to finding inconsistencies and highlighting them in an interface that is not a git repository, ranks pretty well in my book. User friendliness increases the chance that users will actually use it.
Thirdly, we’ve gotten farther on the forum merge. I expect to have a lot more info on this tomorrow-ish, after I’ve dedicated some good time and effort to the new information I have. The merge could actually happen as early as next week. Knowing how the databases actually store information, I could take a day off and do this manually if I absolutely had to. It’d be several types of suck though.
I’m still working on this site as well, and pretty soon posts like this about all the things will be multi-posted to 2 or 3 blogs, so you can focus your view on this or that instead of fishing for what you care about on just this.
Lastly, I’ve been working with the BM development team when I have a moment in order to keep pushing my skills forward, and it occurred to me that the way M&F and BM handle variables and PHP is similar enough to allow us to work together and share the fruits of a joint combat system update. It’d be a level of update to such degree as to qualify as probably a total overhaul in either game, but dissimilar enough so that what works in one may not work in the other–both games track different things for groups of soldiers, for instance: BM tracks only the group, and all the soldiers in the group have the same stats, while M&F tracks individual soldiers in a group, and they all have individual stats.
Trust me when I say this, it’ll be super freaking neat, and we’ll probably roll it out, to M&F at least, incrementally! 😀