MV3D Development Blog

MV3D Version 0.40 will be officially released today. I’m building the Windows binaries and source release now. I’m happy with the release, but visually, it’s a bit of a step backwards. I don’t have any good screenshots to show, or a movie detailing the new features. There are new features though. They just aren’t visible, and if they are working properly, you should never need to worry about them.

The main theme of this release was completely refactoring the scalability and redundancy of MV3D at the core. This was a very big success. I now feel comfortable saying that MV3D is ready to scale. In a properly configured cluster, items will be both spread across the servers and have redundancy in the case of a failure. Items can be transferred from server to server based load balancing needs.

Looking at MV3D as a whole, there are still a few elements that need major work. The most obvious right now are tools, the client, and possibly data storage (sadly). It seems to me that tools to generate content are less useful if the data storage mechanism changes significantly (since either I’ll have to write a converter or you’ll have to lose all your stuff). On top of that, making the client look good and perform well is hard to do and mostly pointless without any content.

With that said, the logical order is to work on data storage first, then tools, and finally fix up the client. I’m hoping to not spend too much time on data storage. I have some ideas, and generally want to make whatever I come up with retain the same API. For tools, RED needs to be extended and generally made useful. There also needs to be a way to more or less export and import whole areas (or even whole realms) at a time. Any project bigger than a single person messing around will want to have this ability so that they can version control their world.

While fixing a recent bug, I came to realize that a tool for managing MV3D clusters is desperately needed. My repro steps for that bug involved checking in to SVN, updating two servers, restarting them, and then connecting to their SSH console. It would have been nice to be able to run 2 or more servers on my desktop for testing. So, this is another tool that should be forthcoming.

While I’m talking about that, the reason I had to repro the bug on the servers as opposed to in unit tests is because while there are unit test facilities for testing a full server against a real-ish client, there isn’t much in the way of full integration tests between multiple servers. Some of the problems I was tracking down ended up being issues that came up only when you started two servers, created some stuff, shut them down, restarted them, and tried to create more stuff. Integration test helpers for scenarios like this would be pretty awesome.

Another headache I ran into while rebuilding the demo servers was that since the starter world initialization code is written to work on a single server that provides all services, it doesn’t work well when you have a separate directory or account server. This made it so that I was basically typing the code on the console to create the world. No one should be expected to have to do that– a tool is needed that can bootstrap a set of servers to get them to the point where other tools like RED can be used to create a world.

There are plenty more things that need tools, but so I don’t bore people more than usual, I’ll move on to the client. The client seems slow. In reality, it gets 150-160 FPS, but it still feels sluggish for some reason. This is probably physics related, but it makes things look bad. The other big issue on the client is that since the server sends position corrections to the client’s avatar instead of the other way around, moving around can be a little clunky (even with the smoothing that’s done now if there’s a discrepancy). The UI on the client is very clunky and ugly. I’d really like to get that looking better. There’s tons of stuff really that needs help.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? It definitely is. If you’ve gotten this far, you must be interested in MV3D, so why not contribute? There are a ton of open tickets now that would be excellent for someone looking to get started.

That’s all for now! If you try out the new release, just be warned that it’s visually the same as the last release. I’m hoping that as tools come online, I’ll be able to add more content to the demo world, but that depends on what code changes I have to make on the server to support the tools.