I updated the game server for Been There this week.  It now supports chat commands from an administrator account to kick and/or ban users from the game.  If you kick a user, it immediately logs them out of the game servers.  When you ban a user, they can’t log back into the game until re-enabled by an administrator.

In order to support the above, I had to finish handling the disconnect event in the client.  Now when you loose connection to the servers it shows a lost connection screen, with a quit button to gracefully exit the game.

I finally fixed a nagging bug in the Been There Game client that has been around for a while now.  On rare occasions, the client would crash and you couldn’t see the error message unless you used Alt+Tab first.  Well, with the help of a minidump file (a useful subset of information normally found in a full crash dump file), I finally found out what was causing the crashes!  The modifications that I made also fixed the issue with avatars not appearing sometimes.  To fix the problem with the prompt to create a crash dump file not showing up, I now make sure that the application is not running in a full screen window before trying to show the message box.  I was trying to display it over top of the crashed window, but it would not always show up reliably.

I decided to work on the game for a little bit, for a change of pace.  I added a few new beta testers the other day.  While watching the logs, I noticed some issues with the chat server that were kind of weird.  I’m trying to track down a nagging little bug that I’ve just ignored for a while.  I also discovered that if an error message is displayed, you have to Alt+Tab to dismiss it when running in full screen mode.  So when a fatal error like this is displayed, I need to make sure that the full screen game window is closed first.

Anyway, I still need to finish the mesh skinning code that I’m going to use to render the avatars and monsters.  I think I just need a short break from it, then it will be easier to finish.