June 23, 2006
Just a quick note to say that Jmac, Zarf and Andy will all be in Columbus for Origins next week. Look for the guys decked out in Volity company swag. When not roaming the trade show floor spreading the gospel of Volity, we'll probably be hanging out in Looney Labs' Big Experiment. We'd love to meet you!
June 01, 2006
The Python Volity libraries now support external bots and bot factories. This means that anyone can write a Python bot factory for any Volity game -- it doesn't have to be one of the games written in Python. Operating a standalone bot factory is very much like operating a game parlor. (See the Wiki page on Bot Factories for a full explanation.)
The Perl Frivolity libraries will soon be upgraded to support the same features.
May 06, 2006
Two items of interest today:
- Gamut 0.3.5 is out. It has lots of new features, including a new online user manual. It's the friendliest Gamut yet.
- The core Volity team's started a development blog over on volity.net.
April 20, 2006
We are pleased to note the launch of Volity.Net, a friendly Web front-end to all things Volity. While it's meant to be especially welcoming and attractive to players, it will also house nifty tools and applications of interest to developers, especially those wishing to register their parlors, rulesets, and UI files with the volity.net bookkeeper. Special thanks to Rob Oliver of Arcus Digital for the great design work!
Meanwhile, the volity.org website will continue to serve as the central development resource for the Volity open game platform in general, just as it always has.
In other news, Gamut version 0.3.3 came out today. Among other things, it introduces a nifty new icon designed by Andrew Plotkin, based on Rob's Volity logo concept.
April 11, 2006
Starting with the brand-new version 0.3.2, Javolin's name has changed to Volity Gamut. We wanted a new name that recognized the fact that this program had become more than just a Volity client written in Java, and is now the project's official client (as well as its only one, until some upstart third party thinks they can do better).
March 29, 2006
We've launched our developer beta with version 0.6.0 of Frivolity, a collection of Perl libraries and programs for creating and running Volity parlors. It features extensive (and largely rewritten) documentation as well as a complete example module for a Tic Tac Toe parlor, ready to run. A ruleset document and UI file set for that game are also included to help illustrate how all the parts work together.
Python programmers can also get in on the act with Andrew Plotkin's Volity libraries, available from his website.
Our next step involves bringing the volity.net website up to speed. Developers can already make limited use of it in order to register and maintain their parlors, UI files, and rulesets; links and details may be found from the Developer Overview wiki page. The website isn't much to look at right now, but we're working on it.
Both developers and players can continue to use our public bug report form to send feedback and critiques about any part of the current Volity system.
February 09, 2006
Volity.net is now in a "soft" beta state. We are inviting people with an interest in the system to download Javolin and play the handful of games we have available, but are not publicizing the thing too much just yet. There's still a lot of (well, the entirety of) the cool Web-based support application to be built, and definitive developer documentation to be written. But: games! And a bugform for when they don't work!
Two of the games are adaptations of real-world card games, Looney Labs' Fluxx and Your Move Games' Space Station Assault. We are still putting the finishing touches on these (SSA really needs online docs!), and would especially appreciate feedback on them. We are adapting both games with permission from their respective publishers, and intend to showcase them during our "hard" launch as prime examples of what Volity is capable of.
I apologize for not updating this page in five months, but since winter began the core team has been in a frantic enough development cycle to subvert most efforts at presenting any sort of organized summary. If you're fine with summaries of a less organized and (far) more frequent nature, however, I direct your attention to Planet Volity, an RSS-based one-stop news feed for all things Volity. And I do mean all things, from mailing list entries to blog posts to CVS checkins. Strap on your waders and take a look.
September 19, 2005
We published Javolin's very first alpha release today! It's currently available under a number of binary formats, as well as source. Still not ready for prime time (yes, I rather missed April's called shot) but it is usable by developers. It will even be more usable once I finish the developer tutorial I'm working on.
Now that we've hit this milestone, I expect the core team to focus on bringing Javolin into a beta-ready state, so expect relatively frequent releases for a while. They'll be announced on the volity-announce mailing list, and I'll keep the pages here up to date.
August 05, 2005
Since May, we've been working hard making Volity less of a moving target, spending more time hashing out the finer points of the protocol than hacking on code. As always, refer to the Wiki to see the current state of things, and the volity-devel mailing list archives to see how we got here.
Andrew Plotkin has joined the development effort in a major way, implementing most of Volity in Python. It's not as complete as the Perl stuff (yet), but it's enough to create playable parlors in Python.
Meanwhile, I have released version 0.5.0 of Frivolity, the Perl implementation of the whole protocol (parlor, referee, bookkeeper, and a cheesy text-only client). I expect this to be the last major release of these libraries before we go to beta; coding efforts have now shifted to getting Javolin ready for public consumption.
We still hope to have a public beta of the whole system up within a few weeks. Stay tuned.
April 24, 2005
There haven't been any official, versioned releases since September, but several things are worth noting just the same.
The Volity wiki has become the most up-to-date source for Volity platform documentation; if you're seeking the latest stable Volity information, start exploring it, beginning with the links on its front page.
Unfortunately, due to rampant spamming, I had to restrict editing access behind a password. Fortunately, it's very easy to find out what it is. In any case, though, you don't need a password to just browse the Wiki, which I suspect is what I suppose most visitors will want to do anyway.
-
It didn't work out so well the last time we tried to call a shot, but we're doing it again anyway: we intend to have a public beta of the entire Volity system in place by the end of August 2005. It will include a stable and friendly graphical client, extensive developer documentation, and a Web-based system that makes the process of adding game servers to the network easy and fun.
The CVS tree continues to be active as we work towards a major update of Frivolilty and the first release (finally!) of Javolin.
We've launched two new mailing lists, both about Javolin. One is for developers, the other for endusers. As you might expect, only the developers list is receiving any traffic at all right now.
September 14, 2004
Version 0.4 of Frivolity has been released. I feel that this is the first really clean release of our reference implementation; it's certainly the best-documented one so far.
I've started updating and adding pages around this website, and breathing life into the Wiki again. As Volity enters another research-and-documentation phase, I hope to keep volity.org more fresh than it has been.
May 17, 2004
Version 0.3 of the Frivolity Perl
libraries are now
available on SourceForge, under the server-perl
package. We've also updated the text-games-perl package
with new example code, but this package might be going away soon, as
we hope to encourage developers (including ourselves) to instead
release game modules as independently downlaodable packages.
Perhaps more interestingly, we have completed first draft of The Volity Developer's Guide (Perl Edition). This documentation makes possible (in theory, anyway) the first community-developed Volity game modules. We've already recruited a handful of friendly Perl hackers to join in this effort. If the idea of easy creating Internet-playable computer games in Perl appeals to you, give the Guide a read... and if it still appeals to you after that, drop us a line.
January 11, 2004
Oh, lots to do, but we're getting there...
We have been creating Frivolity, the reference implementation of Volity's server software, written in Perl (because we both know and love Perl, but Volity game servers and clients can be implemented in any language, and for any modern platform). This exists as a collection of Perl libraries that one can browse and download from Volity's SourceForge page.
Work on our client application, written in Java, has begun. While the open protocol will allow anyone to create Volity clients of their own, this application (yet to be named) will be the one officially supported by the Volity development team.
We have registered the three obvious volity.* domains, and plan to host and maintain the central Volity network "bookkeeper" component at volity.net, and provide Web-based tools to give volity.net accounts to any player or game programmer who wishes them, though (as the essay shows) any existing Jabber server may also be used as a Volity host.
We're aiming for a public release of some sort by July 4, 2004.
