My project is not dead (neither am I)

It has really been a LONG while since I have even gotten to look at my blog here for GTADS. I have been working on a lot of things both business and personal and I haven't really gotten back to work on GTADS. GTADS 1.14 was supposed to be released with 2+ player support, Phalanx (the GTADS plugin) was supposed t o be getting underway and countless other plans. Right now I am in the process of securing a couple of windows machines for development while looking at where 1.14 was left off. The other developers have also been busy and this project has all but died. I will be picking up my own slack and looking to release a 1.14 release when I can. I will also be keeping an update of more things on this site finally.

I am sorry to all those who anticipated more out of the project sooner.

GTADS Lead Developer,
Steven Day

P.S. The server on Rez.fastping.net is back up but the web services aren't so you won't be able to see any servers up yet. I will be working on fixing that within the weekend.

GTADS Phalanx

For the sake of simplicity, we decided to move the GTADS Phalanx project (formerly known has Global Conquest) to its own blog site. You can read all about the developments of the plug-in at http://gtadsphalanx.blogspot.com/.

Updates and Global Conquest for BR 1.15

I want to start this entry with developments for 1.14. Well GTADS development had been going at a decent pace with the Server code being improved and some SQL additions to make new server user installs quick and easy. Progress has been slower on the Client end since developer availability has been limited and my recent Windows XP crash :-\. Nevertheless virtual machines should provide enough testing to get something out.

Now for the bigger news posed for the future. I will be developing a game which will use the integration of GTADS and Age of Empires to create a hybrid of a strategy based game such as Civilization with the real time battle of Age of Empires. The name of this game so far will be Global Conquest and right now it is in the planning stage. The implementation approach we are going to take is going to require a few rewrites of the current code to allow the implementation of plug-ins on both the client and server side.

We will keep you posted on developments.

Long Absence and Development

February was a very busy month for me and I wasn't able to really take a look at the GTADS code and do much development on it. Its already March and it will nearly be a year since the 1.0 release of GTADS came out. I want to hope that we can get 1.14 out sooner than that and with limited machines for testing it makes it tough. GTADS has received a number of changes however including multiple chatroom support that allow any user to be in multiple rooms at the same time. In addition to that, we have new security settings in place that give the server the ability to enforce strong passwords. More bug fixes and memory problems were solved as well as our massive project to get many languages supported in our next release. I appreciate everyone's patience as we continue to develop and move on at our pace. I also ask that if anyone would like to support the project further, we will be accepting more language translations (We still need Russian) and donations are important.

Greek translations and translations on the fly

Previously on GTADS if you wanted to change to another language set you would have to close the app or a window and reopen it for the language settings to propagate throughout the text. Well with the ClassRegistry project we have been working on changes to applications on the fly will be able to occur with the click of a button. Right now thanks to Ridergr from Age4Greeks our newly functioning translation system now has full Greek support. With the live system as well jumping from Greek to Norwegian is as easier as selecting which language.

Here are some screenshots of 1.14 running in Greek:

Translators needed

We are coming to the stage of wrapping up everything for the new GTADS release 1.14 but we need some translations done. I set up a file that has all the English labels found in the app and all one has to do is translate what is found. I ideally want to have the following languages done for the release:

Spanish
French
German
Norwegian
Russian

Greek translations are being worked on so far. The template file can be found here and it may be subject to change from time to time but nothing major until 1.14 is released.

Rez has had a body transplant

Thats right, tonight between 12am and 1am rez underwent a machine change, which consisted of me moving the hard drive from a 450mhz machine to a 1ghz machine. The machine was my old media machine and until I find a permanent machine for it, rez will remain there. I made the switch because of the very unstable hardware the 450mhz was running on. Anytime the processor was utilized heavily the machine would go into a coma with successful reboots becoming more and more random. Anyone interested in the specs of the machine:

CPU: VIA C3 Nehemiah+RNG (999.52-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = "CentaurHauls" Id = 0x693 Stepping = 3
Features=0x380b03d
real memory = 234815488 (223 MB)
avail memory = 220123136 (209 MB)

It is running on a VIA Mini-ITX board with everything integrated onto it. Runs very silent too :-).