Hi folks,

Just a quick note where things are in Volity-land:

The Volity core team - myself and Andrew - does not plan on making any further updates to the Volity technology (beyond emergency maintenance). This includes both the volity.net website you're currently looking at, and the protocol information described at volity.org.

We put our all into the Volity Network in the middle part of this decade, and tried to find ways of making a living from it, but none of them panned out. We have since moved on to other things. They are pretty awesome, but they are not this. We are proud of what we built here, which is why we keep it propped up. But it's no longer our primary interest.

The Volity protocol and core software - including the Perl and Python parlor libraries, the Gamut client application, and the bookkeeper - remain open-source, and available at volity.org. That will never change. We will also continue to support new Volity games, if people wanna write 'em and put 'em on the network.

Then there's the story of the web-based Volity client, the intended replacement for Gamut. (I'd been calling it "WebGamut", in fact.) I worked on it through 2007, and by early 2008 I had it right up to the precipice of being viable beta software, but just couldn't get it over that last hump.

So, I intend to release what exists not as a working prototype but as open-source software. Seeing the current small surge of interest in Volity encourages me to make this happen; I don't have the wherewithal to finish the project, but if someone else does, then I would love to see them make it happen. It needs some cleanup and documentation before I can tar it up and make the code available to the world. I will work on wrapping this up as time permits, and post updates here.

If you have any questions about any of this, you can always write us at info@volity.com, or you can contact me personally at jmac@volity.com.

P.S. Our startup, Volity Games, is alive and well and living at http://volity.com. Feel free to visit and take a look at what we're working on lately.

Sorry, Werewolf fans; I failed to get the bookkeeper kicked up after tonight's scheduled game was supposed to start. My sincere apologies for the disappointment.

Starting games manually and joining games through the website or Gamut's Game Finder window still works perfectly well; it's just the embedded scheduling tools that are causing these problems. I hope to have them fixed soon.

For reasons I haven't determined yet, the Volity Bookkeeper - the central watchdog server for all game activity on the network - falls over exactly ten seconds after a scheduled game is created.

It's nice that it's so predictable, because that means it will be less difficult to fix. But until I do fix it, I've taken the scheduling system offline.

I'll make sure that the bookkeeper survives through the Werewolf game scheduled to happen on March 30. I'll post again when things are happier.

We're moving the main volity.net server from one hosting company to another today, Feb. 3. Everything should be fairly seamless, except for the necessary transitional burp when everyone connected to the volity.net Jabber server (including all current game-players) will get kicked off.

If you note anything else out of the ordinary, file a bug or otherwise give us a holler. Thanks!

We clearly missed the Jan 1 deadline I mentioned in November, but are making progress anyway. The demo is looking quite sound, technologically; it's now a simple matter of information organization and documentation, so that everything will actually make sense to eager Volity hackers upon release.

For now I'll stop naming dates. It'll be done when it's done, and that'll be soon!

Gamut's Game Finder window appears to be broken; when you click on any game's name you get nothing. I'm not sure why this is happening, yet.

For the time being, if you have Gamut installed you can play and join games by going through the games' links here on volity.net; it will launch Gamut and add you to the right tables.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to fix things soon.

Update: It was a problem that only appeared on Mac OS X 10.4 using Apple's latest Java version. We worked around it.

It's been months since any of the core team last made a blog post, and things look a mite more quiet then they actually are. Most notably, we seem to have missed our Sept. 30 deadline for a web client alpha release. While it's a thin replacement for an actual demo, allow me to write a brief update on things here.

Mid-August saw my first successful tests of the web client, playing Tic Tac Toe against a bot. After about a month more of tuning a tweaking, multiplayer support seemed to work, and we were on the verge of a releasable demo.

And then I lost my job, which provided an unfortunately sizable distraction. We tried to get a release out in early October anyway, but it was clear (after a rather unimpressive live demo we put on for some local friends) that it still needs more work, so back to the drawing board we went.

And there things remain, for now. I'm pushing back the alpha release date to Jan 1. Yes, this is originally when we said we'd have the beta done. But, being off by one letter isn't so bad.

A belated congratulations to Andrew Looney and the Looney Labs gang for Treehouse taking home the Origins Award for best board game of the year earlier this month.

If you haven't checked out this game for yourself yet, why not try our free online edition?

So as Jmac said previously, I have indeed made SVG Tic-Tac-Toe work with the web based testbench. It's only proven to work in Firefox (with a little tweaking it should work in Safari 3.0). Anyway, it's neat to see even if it isn't likely to be the focus of future development.

The SVG file being used there will also work in Gamut and Testbench as well, without further modification.

Progress with the web client is coming along nicely since my last blog post on the topic. Unlike the current volity.net website, we're developing this as open-source software, and you can track its development by following the "web-client" directory of our public Subversion repository (which you can browse online or check out locally.)

As mentioned in the forums earlier, I've created an HTML port of Testbench, and put online a couple of demos showing it running different kinds of game UIs. Here is Tic-Tac-Toe running as pure DHTML, and here's the Flash version. Andy Turner has also gotten an embedded-SVG version going, and I'll leave it up to him to announce that. In all cases, the example UIs may be found in Subversion.

Meanwhile, I've got a prototype of the server-side user-managing daemon written (also in Subversion), and am on the verge of using it to make some basic Jabber services available through the web, such as a roster view. From there it's actually not a tremendous leap towards having it manage games as well, thanks to the solid state of the Volity protocol. Once we have anything to show off, I intend to continue working in the sunshine, setting up a test copy of volity.net with all the new stuff mixed in, and inviting testers to come play with it while I work.

Allow me to ambitiously call a shot here: there will be a fully playable demonstration of a web-based Volity game (yes, it'll be Tic-Tac-Toe) by September 15. And I still stand by our goal to have a full-blown client in beta by January 1. Between those two dates, I'm going to try getting Volity's latent-but-eager development base worked up about helping us create the first passel of web UIs, both old and new. (Personally, I'd love to see a fully web-based Werewolf!) I certainly welcome folks to mess around with game UI development even at the current stage, but we figure that it's not worth really ringing the dinner bell until we have a fully demonstrable test environment for developers to play in.