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Well well well, I guess I haven’t posted here in… ohhh, ages? I owe you all an apology to be perfectly honest, as I’ve neglected to work on Archaos (or indeed any personal projects) in the time since my last update.

Life has panned out for me – work became extremely busy in the last few months, and my ever expanding role has ever expanded – and indeed shifted towards a more theoretical and management-style thang. I’ve been working directly with clients and producing a lot of exciting stuff for a lot of exciting projects which, if I get off my lazy arse and update this blog more often, you will no doubt hear about!

Another significant development is that I’m no longer a lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript – I’m a very much not lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript. I have indeed found a (dare I say it) lady geek – though to her credit, not even close to the caliber of my pure unadulterated nerdiness – whom I spend as much time with as my work and her sanity allows. I won’t allow myself to become soppy and embarrass her (and myself) but… well, I absolutely love you, and you make me a very, very happy boy. Oh bugger, I don’t think I succeeded there. Never mind!

This has meant of course (yes, you all knew it!) that my personal projects have taken a back burner in all of this. Well, I say a back burner, but I actually mean ‘have been placed in tupperware tubs and frozen’. I must say now that my passion for Archaos in particular has not waned one bit – however after such a hiatus, I’d like to start a lot of it again rather than try and work my way back into the existing code base. A problem with learning as you create is that everything you did a month previous is a bit crap – so stuff I started last year is gonna be pretty goddamn terrible now.

I will return to Archaos. I absolutely promise I will, and I have been reading Gooey Blob and other Chaos related stuff. The end of the year always proves to be a better time to get on with personal projects, and I hope to have something playable in December.

To those of you who still read this, still follow me on my similarly neglected Twitter account, I salute you – and I’ll be around more often!

P.S. Check this out. WOW!

I’ve been exceptionally busy with work, and only had the energy left to play Global Agenda on an evening – I’ve not made any progress with Archaos since the last update but once I’ve gotten this swathe of hard labour out of the way, I’ll be finishing the server, building a basic client and inviting people to begin beta testing. Sorry to those few of you who are still checking the site every day (I love you all!), I will have goodies for you soon – promise!

As another little aside, I’ve hacked in some configuration for Chaos Enhanced. Use the form below to launch a game with your desired settings – though please note that this is an abandoned demo with missing features and bugs!

Forgive the awful form and jQuery... it was quick!

The Archaos server now validates, processes and outputs a full turn of human interactions. This is a pretty major milestone in the development process, and I’m very happy with the results so far:

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "move",
  "interaction" : "sequence",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p0",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 1,
            "y" : 7
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p1",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 13,
            "y" : 5
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p3",
        "path" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 4
        },
        "flying" : true
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234
    }
  ]
}

I’d like to mention the huge amount of support, encouragement and fantastic resources provided by certain people of late. @andy_herbert has been a fantastic vocal advocate and provider of much inspiration and technical knowhow (he’s an utterly brilliant multi-talented programmer in his own right) and I owe an awful lot to his ‘cheery’ tone on Twitter! 😉

Secondly, I’d like to shout out a big hello to the Slashdot horde, who accosted the site a few days back. I got a hell of a lot of visits from these guys and I’m sure it’s helped spread the word about Archaos (even if that wasn’t actually my intention) and more importantly the Chaos scene in general!

Finally, a big thanks to @Zolyx for mentioning the project on his blog along with the other fantastic Chaos projects out there – muchos appreciated!