Heat of the Race Prototype
The prototype will be developed based of the version 1.0 of the game engine, so to give the other developers a view of what the game will be like. After that the game engine code base will be updated to include the new features. Version 1.1 will be developed after the Heat of the Race Prototype is finished. Heat of the Race should take a month or so to complete and I think that the version 1.1 code should take one or two months to complete also.
Once the version 1.1 game engine code base is finished, Mecha Asylum will be updated and the version 1.0 will go unsupported. Hopefully, I only have one or two games developed with it, so I don’t have to do much work changing because backwards compatiablity won’t be supported either.
JavaScript
One of the secondary focuses of version 1.1 is JavaScript and including more of it to make the UI more usable and visually better. I’m going to limit a lot of support for IE, since it is standards impaired for now and it will be quite a while before it is run by the masses. Hell, I still have people running IE 5.0 and 5.5 and that is just crazy. I’m going to support IE 6, but any version less will have to do without. I’m not that skilled in JavaScript to manage all of the other IE versions. I also want to check out and start developing based on the new JavaScript standards that Firefox and Mozilla supports (in part). It would be interesting to give Firefox (which I love) some interesting things to look at and try to do the same for IE.
Some of what is planned is JavaScript Validation, and UI: Tips and inline Error messages. It does kind of suck major ass having to display messages and erasing all of the form because they made a simple mistake. Errors should be displayed by using JavaScript and PHP to make them stand out better, or more specifically, I should say CSS. All things will be looked at and on ways to make was made better. The new stuff needs to conform to better standards, so that other developers besides me can use the code and extend the code quick and simplity.
Design
The reason why I’m putting off designing the features set and how it will work is, because I haven’t written the post-mortem for the first version (let alone the fact that the first version isn’t even finished yet). I am getting ahead of myself, but only because I’m thinking ahead for when I do design version 1.1. With all the work going into version 1.0 and all the work and research that will go into version 1.1, I can only say that I’ll be working full time and as much as possible before I have a real job and can’t spend all of my time on this project.
Designing a project is a time consuming and sometimes more fun than actually doing the project. Some of the details stem at the base of the registering and options for recovering an account. Some go into the user profile and defining what is used and what isn’t needed for different parts of the game. I would like to create the registering for defining which of the parts are required and which aren’t. I would rather this not be a mysql table, because it would get really big and require many different tables for multiple things. That wouldn’t be fast and would suck ass.