Wow, we have been away from our public lately. We’re sorry about that. All of us are working hard on getting Emerald Kingdom ready for Alpha and Beta. Not to mention, we have been busy preparing for the 3g Expo at Columbia College. We will be showing off a special version of WireWorks, as well as talking to young women in high school who are interested in games and game design. One of the things folks may not realize is that Double Cluepon has two women registered as owners!

Emerald Kingdom progresses. Samael has been a coding madman; StoryTeller now has the base sprite functions it needs, and Sandalphon, our Animation Director has been doing run/walk animations. Uriel, the Art Director has been cranking out Player Character parts, clothes, hair, eyes…she is also working her magic with monsters, Gremmies, buildings and tiles. StoryTeller is nearly to the fork point. When I say point: I mean the point at which we fork it off so that StoryTeller goes one way, and Emerald Kingdom (the client) goes the other.

All of which is great, but without a way to talk to a server and a database…would be pointless. When Raguel and I started looking at servers for Emerald Kingdom, we lamented that there were no free, or at the very least, solutions which were cheap enough for an underground game company like ours. The most widely known solution was expensive: $5000.00 USD just to get started.

We elected to write our own. To that end, Raguel has now finished the first version of our centerpiece for a true AS3/Flash socket server. We call it: SWFConduit.

Here is the official release statement:

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Announcing SwfConduit! An event-driven, bidirectional Flash socket server written in Python using Twisted and PyAMF.

SwfConduit allows you to asynchronously communicate between the server and clients by passing event objects over a bidirectional AMF3 socket. SwfConduit uses full objects, so no messing around with serialization on either client or server, it all happens automatically!
SwfConduit will be powering Emerald Kingdom, an MMORPG written in AS3, and StoryTeller, the Emerald Kingdom world builder. This is a preview release. It works, but there is little polish and only the bare minimum of features are implemented.
SwfConduit Requirements:
  1. Python 2.6
  2. Twisted
  3. PyAMF 0.6 (available from http://pyamf.org)
Client Requirements:
  • AMF3 (AMF0 does not support full object serialization)
  • Flash clients require AS3 (AS1/2 do not support raw binary sockets)
Planned features for a 1.0 release:
  • Content Encryption
  • Rich set of default events
  • Server and Session objects to cover common tasks
  • More documentation on how to write clients
Planned features for future releases:
  • Server Clusters
  • Inter-server communications
  • Connection negotiation (choose the least busy server to connect to)
  • Swapping active sessions between servers in a cluster (each server can handle a geographic area in a game, spreading load while maintaining communications between friends)
  • UDP support
  • Speed at the expense of reliability

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And there you have it. SWFConduit is the centerpiece for Emerald Kingdom’s server, it’s support for modules means that the modules make the server. So, Raguel will be writing the modules for Emerald Kingdom to work with SWFConduit. The beauty of this is, SWFConduit is a bit like Zombo.com. You can do anything, anything at all with it. Write a module for a simple high score tracker database in SQL, or write a multiplayer server for a Flash game. THE ONLY LIMIT IS YOUR MIND.

It’s free, and licensed under the GPLv3. Which means, if you use it, or modify it….it gets better as we go along.  You can get SWFConduit from github. Be sure to let us know if you use it!