So much for using ElectroServer to power the back-end for Portal Walker, or any game for that matter. Turns out that Electrotank, the company that created ElectroServer, was purchased by some lame casino game company that doesn’t appear to be interested in supporting ElectroServer or supplying new licenses for it. It’s a damn shame because it was by far my favorite server technology to work with.
With that behind me, I’m currently looking into using SmartFoxServer 2X, which has always been ElectroServer’s chief competitor. Pretty much the only reason I’ve never used SFS2X is because I was already familiar with ES5, fortunately it looks like SFS2X has some goodies and advantages that are making it a little less painful to make the switch. For one, the company that sells SFS2X is still in business, that’s a good start. They’ve also added some features specific to MMO-style games that look like they’ll be very helpful in creating the Portal Walker server. However, I’m still stuck where I was with ES5, as there is also no native Haxe client API for SFS2X, but the silver lining is that the AS3 client API for SFS2X is about half the size of the ElectroServer AS3 client API, which would hopefully translate into taking half the amount of work to port it to Haxe.
While I’ve been waiting to hear back from the internet about what I should do regarding the server situation, I started looking into procedural world generation for a 2D tilemap-based world and am getting ready to start working on the world generator for Portal Walker. Randomly generated worlds will be an important part of Portal Walker, but I want to note that the game world will not be entirely procedurally generated, so don’t expect something like Minecraft or Terraria. The only real news is that it looks like I’m going to have to write my own map generator from scratch. It looks like it will be fun, but I literally started to have a migraine while looking over info about Base64 encoding and zlib compression in preparation for how I plan on storing map data. Programming is very much so a headache sometimes.