I’ve now put a first pass implementation of very basic networking into the core VectorStorm engine.  This is only a very, very rudimentary implementation (and will currently only work under UNIX operating systems;  I need to load it up under Windows and add the necessary extra WinSock calls.  Shouldn’t take but a few minutes).

Here’s a screenshot of the Testbed game, which talks to a special server I was running on vectorstorm.org for a short while.  It’s not doing anything fancy, but it’s passing data back and forth.  Network packets are constructed using memStores (which were already being stored in network byte order, in preparation for this), and you use one or more vsNetClients and a vsSocket to specify where packets should be delivered.

Eventually, I’ll build cryptography in.  But this was a nice first step.  And it’s in the public SVN repository now.  :)

In other news, I’ve also added what I call “String Mode” to the input system.  Put the input system into “String Mode”, and the keyboard will stop acting as an emulated gamepad, but will instead construct a text string as though you were typing into a text editor.  This is in preparation for TIG’s all-but-inevitable “Procedural” competition, where I’ll want to accept a string input by the player in order to initialise my world generation algorithm.  This also is now in the public SVN repository.  (Though it’s kind of ugly;  right now it only supports basic alphanumerics and spaces.  No punctuation or unicode characters.)