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Wow…

Stick it in HD, full screen. Nuff said.

Imagine having a web server that stores your objects and data just like a live app. Imagine being able to write in the same language on the server and on the client. Something this awesome has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here!

I’ve of course been playing with Persevere and absolutely loving it. Part of the big delay with ‘the Chaos remake’ has been the complexity of creating a robust way to get data from the clients to the server, and for the server to remember that data and be able to process it in the same way. Well now, thanks to this fantastic piece of kit, I can do all of that. Each server instance is a live JavaScript interpreter, with its own persistent object storage database – i.e. objects created are both accessible at any time, and saved.

What does this mean? Well, with the help of haXe (another brilliant tool) I can now write the code for the remake in one language, and ‘compile’ various parts of it to different platforms. I can write most of the game logic and other critical stuff and then have it work the same on the server as it does if it was just running on your own machine – and Persevere will make sure that it acts in that same ‘in-memory’ persistent way.

There are other projects on the go which I’m going to use as testbeds for Persevere – it’s not without possible issues, scalability being the big one at the moment, as one of my projects may end up being quite heavily used (one hopes anyway) and Java (the underlying tech behind Persevere) may not be up to that kind of task.

I can see Persevere being just the beginning of a whole paradigm shift for many parts of the internet into persistent object-based servers – it certainly doesn’t make sense with rich web apps to have to jump through all the current hoops and endure the inefficiences that go with the current ‘single shot’ model of web languages. Bring it on!

I know I’m not technically a ‘Darlingtonian’ but I do know the place well, and I’m really looking forward to getting involved with some movie making for this (it’s about time I cracked out the 5D mkII, especially now it has a proper manual mode for the video!) so expect something soon (people still waiting for the Chaos stuff can collectively groan at this point – sorry!)

Oh and you may have noticed I’ve started twittering on a bit more. I’ve grown quite fond of Twitter now – so basically, follow me if you want to keep more up-to-date with stuff I’m doing.

I suggest you check out this guy’s work:

daggerxl.wordpress.com

Oh, and while you’re at it, you may also want to take a look at:

www.dfworkshop.net

Absolutely mindblowing progress from these two on a game that utterly deserves bringing back from the dead!