Orion Engine Blog

Team Foundation Server – Up & Running

Eric DeBrosse — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:46:08 +0000

The new server hardware is up and running now. It’s a Pentium dual-core system with 2GB of RAM. This box will be used as the new source code repository. It’s running Team Foundation Server 2010. I used to use the database server to host Visual Source Safe 2005. But now, the existing database server is just going to be used for the game databases only.

All of the Orion Engine solutions and projects are now converted to Visual Studio 2010. Also, everything has been successfully added to Team Foundation Server 2010. Once the source code tree grew really large, Visual Source Safe just became too slow and cumbersome for remote developers to use. I’ll be able to use my new Team Foundation Server to allow outside developers/partners to easily access portions and/or all of the local source code repository.

Upgraded to Fedora 13

Eric DeBrosse — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:47:02 +0000

I finished upgrading the operating system on the web server/gatekeeper server today. I installed a fresh copy of Fedora 13 Linux. Everything seems to be working fine so far.

New Server Hardware

Eric DeBrosse — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:23:13 +0000

I have the entire source code tree upgraded to Visual Studio 2010. However, I’m still using Visual Source Safe 2005 for my source control. I’m in the process of building a new dual-core server that is powerful enough to run Team Foundation Server 2010. I still need a SATA hard drive and another stick of memory. I was going to use my database server, but I don’t want it to be loaded down with all of this other stuff.

Team Foundation Server

Eric DeBrosse — Fri, 28 May 2010 04:26:59 +0000

I’m in the process of upgrading the source control (version/revision tracking) for the Orion Engine source code. I’m moving from an ancient Visual Source Safe 2005 database to Team Foundation Server 2010. I need to upgrade the memory in the server, before it will let me configure TFS. I hope I can get the TFS server up soon. I’m also upgrading the entire source code tree to use Visual Studio 2010.

Need People to Help

Eric DeBrosse — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:23:21 +0000

I need to find motivated people who want to try and help me continue this project. I need to find tool programmers, and 2D/3D artists. If you are interested, then feel free to contact me.

Attribute Sorting

Eric DeBrosse — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:38:48 +0000

In order to finish the animation system, I need to finish the mesh data attribute sorting code. The vertices must be sorted by the number of bone influences, as this determines which vertex shader should be used for each batch. I hope to finish this code soon!

Down Time

Eric DeBrosse — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:29:27 +0000

I’ve been taking a much needed, long break away from the project. I’ve been working on it for many years now. However, I hope to resume work soon. I’d still love to get the character animation code working. That is going to be the next step. I’ll post more updates here soon.

Been There Web Site

Eric DeBrosse — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:20:25 +0000

I’m pretty much finished with the account management system for the game. All of the required functionality seems to work great. I need to get my testers to try out the web site now. Later, I may do more work to further harden it against attacks by malicious users. However, it’s already pretty tight I think. I’ll continue to review the code for a bit, to make sure there are no issues that need more attention right now.

I’m really glad to have this piece of the puzzle in place. Now I need to get back to work on the engine again. I was getting really close to having the character animation system ready to test!

Account Management System

Eric DeBrosse — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:19:31 +0000

I’ve been working on the account management system for the game. I’m creating the web site on my Linux Apache web server using PHP. I finally figured out how to get PHP to connect to the MS SQL Server used by the game. I learned how to create sessions, which will help keep my site secure. I also installed an SSL certificate for my domain, so that I can use full encryption on the web site.

I was going to hire someone to do the work on the account management system, but I may not need to now. Everything is coming together nicely. I need to do more work to prevent SQL injection attacks, but I should have it all ready very soon.

Web Hosting

Eric DeBrosse — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:25:06 +0000

I got tired of Godaddy raising their web hosting prices, so I decided to setup my own linux apache web server. This was inevitable anyway, since I want my account management system web site to be behind the firewall along with the master game database server. I’m not going to expose my SQL server directly to the Internet. I simply copied all of the web site and MySQL databases from the old server to the new one. Everything seems to be working well.