Guess Who's Back -- Back again?

After some time reflecting on the question, I'd finally answered it for myself...under what name will Chess Avatara be released?

It will be released under Rapture In Venice.

I've decided to retire Bite Size Studios now. While I still like the moniker, it represents a small-size game profile. Since the cell phone market proved itself to be week for an ISV, and Avatara is nothing near a cell-phone game, I'm going to go back to my old favorite.

As for a release date, it's still miles away. January 2006 would be a great, and a Best Case scenario, but it will be at least 6 months and I can't guarantee it would be limited to that either.

As for progress, it's going pretty nicely lately. I was actually able to run the client under both of our machines here at home, the PC being the big accomplishment as it's the one NOT hosting the server.

As for public testing, that hit a snag. My Web server (for Bite Size Studios) has a firewall which prevents the Avatara port from being accessed outside of the server. So, I'll need to find a server that will allow me to do this important testing.

But for now, I'm OK. Miles to go before a public server is required...so let's actually *get* to that point before worrying about it. :-)

I did a lot of code refactoring yesterday while Michele was playing In Nomine with Kevin, Aaron, and the Rammie. I added Log4J support (a logging facility), abstracted some base functionality to share amongst server and client (especially protocol stuff), and pulled many constants out of individual classes and into a global constants class.

Eventually, I will pull these values out of the constants class and into a properties file. But, one step at a time.

My next tasks will include login support (no authentication quite yet), and having multiple sprites appear alongside a player. Then, the sprite management code will go in and I'll have the prototype I've been driving for for a while. :-)

Very exciting. I hope to get most of the work done this week, but I only have 3 days to work on it. Wednesday night is a Young Dems meeting.

As for this weekend, including Friday, Kevin, Annie, Michele and I are heading to a Bed and Breakfast to read the new Harry Potter book. Book 6!!! Very cool! So, should be a fun weekend. :-)

OK. Back to work for me.