Development hasn't died out
ETC for RC3: July 14, 2011.
I did have a long talk with Thyth and he has been making quite some progress towards the next patch. He has been working on it (around his normal life, which some people think he doesn't have :P) and seen in the recent update to the Development Roadmap.
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As a good anticheat system is a fairly complex thing to implement, I'll be working on improving it over the next patch versions incrementally. The ability to manage clans is one of the more visible missing features since the Vivendi system shutdown, so a greater emphasis is being placed on that right now. I work on whatever I find least boring at the time.
Currently, the tmail backend and data interface systems are functional, but not quite finished. There's a database space saving change I want to make to the message storage table, and I want to convert all of the color and various other formatting tags available in T2 text UIs into some sort of more universal BBCode type deal. There will be an online web-based method of managing tmail and browsers without needing to go in game, so converting to BBCode type representation for formatting is essential.
The data interface to Tribes 2 itself is complete, and I'm doing a little bit of final UI integration work (reconciling differences between my system and the original Dynamix based implementation). At the moment, everything works except searching for players (by name to get GUID), and sending messages (since it requires a GUID list, not a name list).
Attached is a couple day old screen shot of the mail UI connected to the new systems. I've since added sent item folders, and fixed a few UI issues.
Unfortunately, the system board in my main development laptop started exhibiting serious hardware problems this afternoon as I was working on this project. I've borrowed a system board from a similar laptop until a proper replacement arrives, but I won't be fully operational again until then. The July 14th date, as such, is just an estimate.
Also... if anyone is feeling helpful, I could really use someone soon to do UI integration work between the new TribesNext data interfaces and the existing Dynamix UIs in the browser. Contact me on IRC if you are proficient in TorqueScript and willing to spend a few days coercing old UI code into behaving.
I don't know a whole lot of scrip for for Torq but, I would love to help in any way I can!
Thank you again! ;D
Wanted to also say thank you for your efforts on keeping this game going and the improvments you are making are going to be very valuable.
Keep it up.
Ravin
Good progress has been made on the backend systems for the browser. They aren't fully debugged, but most of the features are working.
Browser backend and data interfaces have been debugged. I'll need to do some more testing once the UIs are complete, but everything looks like it's working. The next stage for me is building web based browser and mail UIs. I've built JSON data interfaces to the mail and browser systems specifically to enable this (and allow anyone to build third party clients should they choose to do so).
Making good quality UIs is a time consuming task.
In anticheat related news: I've written a new experimental component for the server-side anticheat system. This component is designed to detect client abuse/modification of the $timescale variable (along with other methods of introducing momentary lag). It's very reliable in detecting intentional lagspikes (e.g. taking a screenshot) and modifications to timescale (even if the modification is of very short duration).
I don't know how it will fare in a real server situation, where network latency can lead to unintentional lagspikes. The obvious advantage to having server-only components of anticheat is they can't effectively be hacked around, assuming they are viable in the first place.