Progress Report

Hey Lasoons,

Another year is upon us and we'd like to share our current progress state with you. At this time we're still pretty heavy into the development of the new client. As you know, switching to flash has been a huge undertaking and we're striving to create the perfect product, but doing so does force us to have to recode an entire game and server.

Some of you may be wondering why we're redoing the server as well, and the reason behind that is that we're trying to resolve several issues that we've had with the current server. One of the major issues is the packet format which is not compatible with flash. Putting that aside, another major issue is lag. While we've tried recoding several parts of the server, andwe've come to realize that we should have implemented it a different way which is exactly what we're doing. While we can't promise no-lag, we're trying our hardest to get to the point where there is none at all.

In terms of the game client, we've finished the new friends window [client side, serverside is partially done], chatting is fully functional (with smilies!) and they do look really nice if I do say so myself. (See below for a preview)

Users joining a room / multiuser (basically the ability to see other users join rooms) is done, though we're trying to work out a few kinks with the pathfinding engine. It is a bit buggy in the current version, but we're working on optimizing and improving it. This alone is one of the major sources of lag which we're trying to improve upon. We've essentially recoded the whole room system to work with spaces. This includes the server's ability to store a server-side 'image' of the room, so the server can tell if two users are walking to the tile and prevent them from standing on the same tile, or walking through each other. This will be a huge benefit to Lasuni as it will allow queues in rooms and racing style games.

We've revamped the loading screens [as seen in prior blog posts], we cut back on the graphics and made them look a bit nicer too. This will also decrease the overall file size that's loaded so that means a faster loading time to be in-game.

As for what's left to do, the list goes: Inventory, Equipment, OMG Help, Room Creation Window, Settings Window, Spaces [partially done], Furniture Engine [partially done], Avatars [partially done], Website Updates [partially done]

Now a lot of you are probably wondering about a deadline and such, but we're sorry to say that we can't make any promises as of yet. When we get a bit closer to releasing, we'll definitely inform everyone about a proper release date / party.

Anyways, the new year is nearly here, so we'll see what it brings.

Until next time~

The Future of Lasuni

Hey all,

Just wanted to give you an update on the development of Lasuni. First lets look back in time to March, when we first announced we were working on a new interface / UI. We started building spaces and working on a large, but mostly iterative update to Lasuni that would include spaces and a slightly different UI [as seen here]. As many of you are aware Lasuni is currently built on the shockwave platform that is quite simply out of date and not supported on many platforms [no Linux support, limited Mac support]. So midway through the development of Spaces we decided to switch Lasuni to flash!

There are many benefits for us in regards to using flash, but the main and most important feature is that the barrier of entry will be much lower for new users [and existing ones!]. From the offset we decided that we wanted to get this big update [which is essentially re-writing the entire client, and a large proportion of the server] out quickly, to surprise the Lasuni community with a much larger update than you might have been expecting. However, it’s been taking us longer than we would have hoped to complete the update.

There are significant improvements that we’ve been baking right into the core of Lasuni, such as it’s no longer confined to a set size window. You can re-size Lasuni to be as large as you like, or even play full screen! This enables us to have much larger rooms that don’t need to load in additional rooms - as such North and East Hubble are no more, replaced by one much larger room, Hubble! The new Hubble is equivalent in size to 4 current rooms, rather than just the 2 rooms Hubble consists of today.

Also, we haven’t been entirely truthful [sorry] on the blog in regards to the new UI. Whilst many of the features of the new UI we’ve been talking about are true, such as the search bar in the inventory window [seen here], the windows all have an entirely new style and look. Every window has been redone to make them easier to use and more consistent with the new look of the Lasuni client!

We haven’t only been focusing on the Lasuni client though, part of this update we really want to start pushing Lasuni up to an experience that will be much more enjoyable for new users. Currently we feel the experience is pretty confusing and a number of users don’t even access the client after registering. We are working on numerous other additions that will hopefully improve Lasuni for new users. But I’ll save some of those updates for a later blog post.

So that’s all for now, I’ve included an image of how Lasuni will look in the same area as North Hubble with the updated UI and windows. Hopefully you’ll like it, we’ve been working pretty hard on it!

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TL;DR? To summarise, Lasuni is moving to flash. It’s taking longer than we hoped - sorry, but it should be worth it!

Click to see full size!