Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to announce the eighth development release of the gzochi game development framework.
The project description, from Savannah: gzochi (/zoʊ-tʃiː/) is a framework for developing massively multiplayer online games. A server container provides services to deployed games, which are written in Guile Scheme, that abstract and simplify some of the most challenging and error-prone aspects of online game development: Concurrency, data persistence, and network communications. A very thin client library can be embedded to provide connectivity for client applications written in any language.
This release was a long time coming, and there's a lot of new stuff in it! In addition to resolving some serious bugs in the server and reference client implementations, the release includes several new features:
* A new storage engine based on an in-memory B*tree that makes it faster to start developing with the gzochi framework
* Support for integrating game application transactions with external, transaction-aware processes, such as relational databases. (An example application that shows how to do this with Guile DBI is included.)
* A new server lifecycle event to notify game applications when the gzochid container starts up
* New statistics about transaction duration published to the web administrative console
* ...and more! See the NEWS files in the distribution for details
In general, the distribution should be easier to build and to run: There are fewer external dependencies (Serveez is no longer required) and the surface area of the framework has been reduced (the synchronous reference client library has been removed; some shared libraries have been consolidated). The server and associated programs can be run from the build tree using an "uninstalled environment" similar to the one provided by Guile.
This is a development release; the framework is likely not bug-free. Nonetheless, there's extensive server and client documentation, and the distribution includes three example games with heavily-annotated source code. For more information, visit the web site at
http://www.nongnu.org/gzochi/ or check out the project page on Savannah, at
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gzochi/ -- you can pick up the release from the downloads section.
Regards,
Julian