Finally after 5 years of procrastination, I built out my mmorpg engine, Janthus (http://www.janthus.com) to the point where it can actually be played by more than 3 people (I think). Not really sure that 3 people make it a massively multiplayer online game, but at the very least, it doesn't seem to tank when my brothers and I log in and duke it out in party mode against the hordes of bad dudes roaming the world.

There were many false starts, most notably the one I opensourced (and abandoned due to the arrival of my son), http://sourceforge.n...ojects/janthus. That engine had some fundamental flaws in its inherent design, particularly the overly multithreaded architecture, and premature support for sharding, all of which contributed massively to bloat and unnecessary complexity.

The new design is consciously single threaded, with a single execution loop iterating through very short lived events, effectively timeslicing the CPU over the various tasks that power the world. This has worked out to be much more performant ... of course, I have yet to see any kind of traffic on the engine, so only time will tell if this approach beats out the earlier design (though I am pretty sure it will).

Now that I have a reasonably well fleshed out proof of concept -- fully playable -- I'm at an interesting crossroads: where to invest my incredibly scare free time? I could go many directions:

• build out a story line
• improve the graphics (but still keep the retro look)
• focus on player dynamics (more party support, guilds, etc.)
• world building
• more npcs and AI

If the engine can stay stable with say, 50 or more simultaneous users (please log in and play!), I could safely spend the next year or so on any one or two of the above. I won't bother if the engine can't support that many players, however; it just means I have to spend more time on the core engine, which I hope I don't have to do, having already spent months rewriting the original.

I'll try to keep this journal going, as a testament to my ultimate goal of creating a playable online community!