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In a surprising turn of events we decided to start streaming data from the Enki server into our chunk renderer. The result is above which, I realize looks an awful lot like the earlier mesh data, but I can assure you it’s not.

Pretty soon we’re going to be working on data persistence. Last week I stood up a new NodeJS service to warehouse all our data and keep all the members of the team working in the same space. I’m not entirely sure if this is how Unity saw their tools being used, but I have to say I’m loving it.

There’s been some discussion about whether or not to keep the entire world persistent, as a single player game, with remote save game storage. The more that we work with these network services; the more value I can see in doing things this way. Our world is “procedurally generated” but in a way that’s not really at all like the way Minecraft or Banished are.

We generate a single “bible” map out of a few different permutations and math that I barely understand. Once that’s done we can all work in the same space making changes that get merged together in the single datasource on the server and redistributed.

I keep thinking about the idea that this could be incredibly fun for users. What if we could do global events that change the entire plot of the game mid-stream. “Didn’t finish the main quest yesterday? Tough it’s gone forever. Here have a demon lord!” Crazy, crazy stuff.

There’s also the possibilities for multiplayer that I think are most obvious. We could very easily build match-making into Enki and have massive tactical battles in turn-based arenas without a whole lot of extra coding. I’m sure the discussion will keep going, we’re kind of evenly split on the whole idea of requiring at least periodic connections to the home server and we don’t have any way to manage the cost of the hosting itself.

In any case, the above is an example of the newest version of the editor (now running as a desktop application instead of a web player as previous versions were because of cross-domain scripting policies.) Ultimately I think we’d like to get back to the web player possibility because that would open the door for the Facebook market.

All in all a ridiculously productive week. If you haven’t checked out the mutiny blog or rob’s blog you definitely should.