WorldForge Developers Journal

Recently I have been trying to push ahead with designing new features which require data formats and conventions to be specified for the Atlas protocol used to communicate between clients and servers. Progress has been a little slow because I have been forcing myself to write a full spec for the changes and additions to the protocol before I start writing code, and I am never quite happy I have the design right. It always seems to be a little too inflexible, or not general purpose enough. The result is that weeks go by and nothing really happens.

So I thought it would be interesting to try a new approach. Rather than try and design everything perfectly from scratch, why not hack the necessary features into the protocol in the simplest way possible, and get it working quickly. When design flaws inevitably emerge, modify the design to deal with those flaws, and don’t worry about the fact that all current client releases might be broken. Instead focus on getting the clients updated, and release a new version as soon as is practical. The hope is that this will lead to new features getting into the code much faster, with the same opportunities for getting the design right in the long term.

Given the rate of progress in overall features recently, I think there is a strong case to be made for trying something different, and I would like to venture that this is the way we should go. I have already experimented with this approach by hacking in an Atlas representation for expressing what Mercator terrain layers are being used, and in what order by a world. Simon has managed to implement something roughly compatible with the format I hacked up, without any documented spec within a couple of days, and it seems to work in the common cases. I have now re-thought the data format I submitted, and plan to break it within the next few days. If this experiment works, then with any luck the necessary client changes to keep up with the new hack will be available shortly after.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.