Enter The New Multiverse3D
So I decided to throw out the hundred thousand lines of code in the old MV3D and start over. Sounds silly, I know, but taking the old code and fixing it would be much more of an effort. For this version, I have a pretty strict plan of how I want to go about programming. For each feature, there should be four phases: plan, document, impliment, and test. They should happen in that order. I feel that if I stick to that method, I’ll have some pretty good code and will hopefully reduce the amount of refactoring or redesigning I will have to do. I will say that so far, I’ve been doing poorly on the ‘document’ side of things. I’ll have to remedy that. On the flip side, what I have so far is well planned out, written, and tested code. My other ideas on how to make this effort be more successful are to use 3rd party libraries wherever possible, use Python as much as I can, and to concentrate on getting the hard/unfun parts (which basically comprise the foundation of the game) done before moving on to anything.
Did I mention that the new version of MV3D will be open source?
Now I’ve been working on the new MV3D for a few weeks now. It’s at about 5,000 lines and the part I’ve written is all Python. It currently uses Twisted and PyODE (a Python interface to ODE). There are about 70 unit tests written as well (which are included in the 5,000 lines and are almost 3,000 lines). I’m not writing the Client part of things at all right now. I want to get a very stable server with most of the functionality it needs finished before working on the client. The unit tests have been used to make sure everything is doing what I think it is doing. Here are just some of the cool things the 2000 lines of server code can do:
I could go on, but in short, the functionality I can get out of ~2,000 lines of Python is pretty amazing. There are some things left to do before I can start working on the client:
A short term goal of this project is to get a server up and operational that will stay online 24 hours a day. The current server is very solid and doesn’t crash or error out (as would be more likely in python). The unit tests abuse it pretty well, too. Once there is a server up all the time and the Windows client is stable and usable, I’ll start asking around for alpha testers. It’ll be a boring job– especially at first. Because there won’t be much to do. But if you like QA and finding software bugs, maybe it’ll be fun. 
One of the other things I’m going to try is to go it alone. As I mentioned in my previous post, adding team members kept me from working on the game while training them and they generally didn’t contribute much. Unless I find an insanely good programmer or artist who can devote 15-20 hours a week to this, I’ll continute to work on things on my own for the forseeable future.