So as you can see, I haven't got anywhere with my Naval RTS game Warspite, partly because of lack of free time, and partly because of lack of motivation. Most of this demotivation is because the tech demos quickly showed how badly the pixel movement worked over a network. Even over a LAN, gameplay was jerky and annoying, and attempts to play with a remote server and any kind of real lag were awful. Since the RTS was always envisioned as multiplayer, this is a big problem.

I hope to resurrect the game eventually, either as a single player game (which would remove the movement problems but require a lot of work developing an AI to be worthwhile), or perhaps just finish it as the intended multiplayer game and hope that it would be playable enough, and the jerky feel could be improved eventually (possibly by improvements to BYOND itself). However, for the moment it is on permanent hiatus.

Recently, IainPeregrine's Get Something Done caught my attention. Since I've been failing to Get Anything Done for a while now, it's possible an external framework might help with my motivation a bit. I have about four ideas percolating, none of which have got any further than paper (apart from a few small test programs for various systems). The common feature of all the ideas is that they basically follow BYOND's traditional tile-based layout, which should help development immensely.

My current favourite is inspired by the old ST/Amiga/PC favourite Railroad Tycoon, though rather modified from that game (there's little point in making a straight copy, since the original is available to download for free). For one thing, it's intended to be multiplayer rather than single player, and for another, I want it to be rather smaller scale than RT was, with more emphasis on control and movement of the trains, and less on financial manipulation of stocks etc. In many ways, it'll be a virtual train set with a game bolted on to provide some competitive interest. More details in my next update.