WhiteRush

Hello to anybody brave enough to be reading. This is Jon and this is my first blog post about White Rush and what I am getting up to.

Currently I'm responsible for the networking and server stuff. We have decided to write the networking layer ourselves, which should be fun as I have absolutely no experience with any of the technologies or programming paradigms involved. Hopefully I'll be able to get by with a keen sense of intuition and the ability to pick new things up quickly.

The current state of affairs is as follows: An initial networking layer implementation is complete bar bug fixing. The server accepts and manages new connections from multiple clients. There are generic server-side and client-side classes that can be instantiated to connect-to and send and receive messages. Callback(s) are provided for receiving of messages. The current implementation, while simple, is pretty robust. A few generic classes and utility methods are provided to make it quick and easy to construct serializable messages.

As for the White Rush-specific server stuff - we've got basic text-messaging functionality (text messages can be sent to the server and then relayed to other connected clients), as well as the ability to update your own location and receive the locations of all others around you. There is no validation on the location data being sent from the clients, but it will come with time.

As a first pass, what we have is pretty robust and reliable. We still have to see whether choosing to implement everything in Java is a wise choice.

Finally, as the title suggests, coding will be slowed for me (in input speed, though not necessarily progress) because I've fractured the joint in my little finger and also potentially my ring finger in my right hand! A hilarious jape backfired on me and is no longer quite as hilarious as it once seemed. That'll learn me!

'til next time!