Over the holidays

Time was limited of course, with moving, buying a house, selling a house, and holidays, but nonetheless a small update is in order:

• Revamped (rewritten entirely) Chat system
• We once again have an OpenFire XMPP server running on the uni server. Accounts are created by the server to match universe accounts, and some chat channels are running.
• The chat UI was rebuilt and is substantially more functional! It runs in the bottom center of the game now, has autocomplete for commands, and supports whispers, say (in game speech), channels (global exists right now, later others), and custom commands (who, reloadui, etc). It's somewhat nicely styled to allow scrolling but not get too much in the way of the camera. As always polish will improve over time as annoyances show up. 
• Whispers in chat communicate via direct message in XMPP, without the game server being a part of it at all. So you can, in fact, use any other XMPP client to join the global channel or be online for whispers (and whisper back).
• Server stability
• Did a bit of work on the server to prevent some weird hangs, we'll see if it works, but so far so good.
• Dynamic reloading
• The client can now reload the ui, reload assets, etc.
• It can also be run in a mode where it monitors the client database file, and if it changes, reloads it dynamically and reloads the zone. It makes updating visual effects fairly seamless. I can keep the visualizer open while a game is playing, save from the visualizer, and the new effects appear in 4 or 5 seconds.
• Incremental database building
• The old build from google docs for the majority of the game data would destroy everything it built previously, and build it all back up every time. I moved to an incremental approach based on the last editted timestamp of the document, so it is much much faster.
• We also have a polling system for updates :)
• It also can update live while the zone runs, swapping in changes on the fly :)
• So basically you can run a local zone and a debug client set up to automatically pull changes from the database, compile them and establish them in game in 10 seconds. This should make the editting process way way way faster. The old reload/test cycle was 3 or 4 minutes at best, the new is 10 seconds. BEHOLD progress.

That's that. Next on the docket is the incendence system and the elemental skills update, for which the above were written. And then after that finally back to scenarios :)