If you've been following this site for sometime you probably will notice that the site was offline for awhile and no work appeared to be going on in the platinum library.
In a nutshell, things got really busy around our house. Eilonwy (our baby) was born. This left us little time to work on the game engine. In addition, the company that was founded to further the development of this new technology ended up failing due to lack of funding and to a lesser extent lack of interest (ever try explaining advanced game engine concepts to manager and money types? It's not really an easy thing to do).
Anyways, since the company failed I had to take a day job.
In July I was offered a full time job to help with development of another large scale clustering technology called DNX.
DNX is a technology designed to monitor several thousand machines and the install I work on currently monitors over 100,000 machines with close to a million services being watched at any one time on the live system.
This experience has shown me where the strengths and weaknesses were in my design approach for both libplatinum and Dream RPG.
So here we are, I am still employed full time by the developers of DNX and have become the de-facto lead dev on the project.
A few days ago I got a message from someone asking what had happened/was happening around here since it appeared that the site was gone and a parking page was in its place.
We had decided to sell our entire portfolio of over 60 domains as well as all the other assets that were owned by Aegis, the company founded, among other things, to further develop Dream RPG and its related technologies. We performed a mass migration of all domains we owned over to godaddy.com and their cash parking / domain aftermarket. DreamRPGOnline and a couple others were intended to be kept back for possible future development, but they all ended up over there anyway.
Afterwords, we canceled all our hosting agreements and ended up losing all the web assets (artwork, pictures, text etc), when the servers were de-activated and re-sold.
A few weeks ago, Jennifer and I were talking and she brought up the game Mud N' Muck we had been developing together. This got me seriously nostalgic for the days when we would spend 6 to 8 hours each day working on the game, the engine and the other related technologies. It also reminded me that we both put a LOT of effort into this project and it would be a real shame to just let it die like that. But we really can't afford to re-create it either in time or money, at least not right away. It costs a lot of money to host a site the size of Dream RPG Online, not to mention the fact that the game servers were rather pricey too.
The other night the answer came to me, the answer is to re-create the site, the engine and everything as an instructive site and use google knols as a way of both publishing and subisdizing the further development. Knol costs nothing for the publisher, nor does it cost the reader. There are some contextual ads placed on the site, and the revenue is shared with the person sharing their knowledge. I think this will be a great way to both get the message out "free hosting without annoying popups" and subsidize future development. Additionally, since the source code for libplatinum is essentially complete, re-creation should be a much faster process since we only need to adapt a few things to scale a little better, add the OpenGL and input wrappers and that product is complete.
The future is shaping up to be very, very exciting so please stay tuned!
Sincerely,
Dreamer