Dawn of the Geeks

The Dawn of the Geeks Forum is now up and running. The registration rules are lax. There is no account verification email. As long as you remember the username and password you can log in even if the email address you supplied is bogus. There is no moderation.

I want to see what the state of the forum will be in 6 months. It’d be interesting to see what kind of content finds its way into the forum.

The new C# Bunnies server is now running in place of the old PHP version. Also out is the new version 2.1.5 client which adds in multiplayer support. If you have a Bunnies account and log in with it you will be able to see and chat with other players in the same map as you. Enemies are controlled by the client so if there are any bunnies or soldiers running around you’ll need to take care of them.

One of the next features to add is custom player sprites. But first I think I’m going to focus on making some actual levels and updating the manual.

One of the biggest memory hogs for Bunnies is all the textures that sprites use. So I switched things up a bit. The first thing I changed is that texture handlers now only load their textures if they are actually used. The second change is that objects now reference a texture handler.

The first change means that even though the game supports and knows about X sets of textures, it won’t actually load those sets until an object that references the set has a request for a texture. So the first time a texture handler is actually used the sprites all load. After that it just returns the requested texture.

The second change means that you can use an SS texture set with a Guard object.

The reason for this change is to support custom sprites for players. A default sprite set will be created for players for now. In the future the Bunnies website will support uploading and creating new sprite collections for your account. The Bunnies client will then be updated to be able to make use of these custom sprite collections.

I’ve decided to approve all 2400+ comments and turn off moderation. Let’s see what happens.

The Free Speech Zone is back.

The Free Speech Zone is essentially a dumping ground for whatever you want. You can use HTML links in your posts. All other HTML is stripped. Just enter in a title and your message and you’re off. No accounts, no moderation. As the amount of content grows I’ll rework the interface for browsing existing posts.

You can also comment on existing posts. If you enter in a title that has the same title as an existing post then your comment is added to the existing entry.

Enjoy!