Sorry, Werewolf fans; I failed to get the bookkeeper kicked up after tonight's scheduled game was supposed to start. My sincere apologies for the disappointment.

Starting games manually and joining games through the website or Gamut's Game Finder window still works perfectly well; it's just the embedded scheduling tools that are causing these problems. I hope to have them fixed soon.

For reasons I haven't determined yet, the Volity Bookkeeper - the central watchdog server for all game activity on the network - falls over exactly ten seconds after a scheduled game is created.

It's nice that it's so predictable, because that means it will be less difficult to fix. But until I do fix it, I've taken the scheduling system offline.

I'll make sure that the bookkeeper survives through the Werewolf game scheduled to happen on March 30. I'll post again when things are happier.

We're moving the main volity.net server from one hosting company to another today, Feb. 3. Everything should be fairly seamless, except for the necessary transitional burp when everyone connected to the volity.net Jabber server (including all current game-players) will get kicked off.

If you note anything else out of the ordinary, file a bug or otherwise give us a holler. Thanks!

We clearly missed the Jan 1 deadline I mentioned in November, but are making progress anyway. The demo is looking quite sound, technologically; it's now a simple matter of information organization and documentation, so that everything will actually make sense to eager Volity hackers upon release.

For now I'll stop naming dates. It'll be done when it's done, and that'll be soon!

Gamut's Game Finder window appears to be broken; when you click on any game's name you get nothing. I'm not sure why this is happening, yet.

For the time being, if you have Gamut installed you can play and join games by going through the games' links here on volity.net; it will launch Gamut and add you to the right tables.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to fix things soon.

Update: It was a problem that only appeared on Mac OS X 10.4 using Apple's latest Java version. We worked around it.

It's been months since any of the core team last made a blog post, and things look a mite more quiet then they actually are. Most notably, we seem to have missed our Sept. 30 deadline for a web client alpha release. While it's a thin replacement for an actual demo, allow me to write a brief update on things here.

Mid-August saw my first successful tests of the web client, playing Tic Tac Toe against a bot. After about a month more of tuning a tweaking, multiplayer support seemed to work, and we were on the verge of a releasable demo.

And then I lost my job, which provided an unfortunately sizable distraction. We tried to get a release out in early October anyway, but it was clear (after a rather unimpressive live demo we put on for some local friends) that it still needs more work, so back to the drawing board we went.

And there things remain, for now. I'm pushing back the alpha release date to Jan 1. Yes, this is originally when we said we'd have the beta done. But, being off by one letter isn't so bad.

A belated congratulations to Andrew Looney and the Looney Labs gang for Treehouse taking home the Origins Award for best board game of the year earlier this month.

If you haven't checked out this game for yourself yet, why not try our free online edition?

So as Jmac said previously, I have indeed made SVG Tic-Tac-Toe work with the web based testbench. It's only proven to work in Firefox (with a little tweaking it should work in Safari 3.0). Anyway, it's neat to see even if it isn't likely to be the focus of future development.

The SVG file being used there will also work in Gamut and Testbench as well, without further modification.

Progress with the web client is coming along nicely since my last blog post on the topic. Unlike the current volity.net website, we're developing this as open-source software, and you can track its development by following the "web-client" directory of our public Subversion repository (which you can browse online or check out locally.)

As mentioned in the forums earlier, I've created an HTML port of Testbench, and put online a couple of demos showing it running different kinds of game UIs. Here is Tic-Tac-Toe running as pure DHTML, and here's the Flash version. Andy Turner has also gotten an embedded-SVG version going, and I'll leave it up to him to announce that. In all cases, the example UIs may be found in Subversion.

Meanwhile, I've got a prototype of the server-side user-managing daemon written (also in Subversion), and am on the verge of using it to make some basic Jabber services available through the web, such as a roster view. From there it's actually not a tremendous leap towards having it manage games as well, thanks to the solid state of the Volity protocol. Once we have anything to show off, I intend to continue working in the sunshine, setting up a test copy of volity.net with all the new stuff mixed in, and inviting testers to come play with it while I work.

Allow me to ambitiously call a shot here: there will be a fully playable demonstration of a web-based Volity game (yes, it'll be Tic-Tac-Toe) by September 15. And I still stand by our goal to have a full-blown client in beta by January 1. Between those two dates, I'm going to try getting Volity's latent-but-eager development base worked up about helping us create the first passel of web UIs, both old and new. (Personally, I'd love to see a fully web-based Werewolf!) I certainly welcome folks to mess around with game UI development even at the current stage, but we figure that it's not worth really ringing the dinner bell until we have a fully demonstrable test environment for developers to play in.

Apparently the login-and-links bar that's normally on the right edge of every page on this website was invisible to Windows Internet Explorer users for quite some time. This is the sort of screwup that happens sometimes in a project where most of the hackers run FireFox; it's too easy to forget what the rest of the world tends to use.

So, if you're reading this blog post because a heretofore blank section of the page has suddenly become lit up with links and login controls, please accept my sheepish but heartfelt welcome. We actually do have a blog and forums and RSS feeds and user accounts and stuff. Enjoy!

I'll be at O'Reilly Media's Ignite Boston event on the evening of May 31 to give a five-minute lightning talk on Volity. It will be one of many short talks covering all sorts of technical and innovative topics.

The full event happens from 6 until 10 at Tommy Doyle's pub in Harvard Square in Cambridge. Check the Ignite page for full info.

If you're in town, come by and say hi!

In recent conversations, I have caught myself implying to people that I'll have a usable client done this weekend. This is actually quite silly of me. My more realistic goal is to get a truly feature-complete HTML port of Testbench finished and announced. It will be a downloadable application that you'll run locally, even though it's all browser-based.

Testbench and the full client will end up sharing a great deal of JavaScript code, so I'm taking extra care to write clean and portable functions here; I'm really working on both targets at once.

The client itself is a monstrous huge project. The key backend component is fairly simple, and is what I have in mind when I talk about how quickly I'll be able to put it together. It's writing a decent web application around it, one usable by the general public, that worries me. Well, we've already set many precedents and components down with the design of the volity.net website itself, and I have a feeling that the client will, in the end, become an inseparable part of the site, dissolved all throughout it.

No, I am not willing to change my statement that the full client will be in beta by the end of this year. If anything's changed since the last time I put it in writing, it's that I'm now completely confident that it can actually happen.

This weekend's release of Gamut 0.4.1 - and the fact that we're into the second quarter of 2007 - leads me to more thoughts about a new direction I'd like to steer Volity in this year.

One improvement 0.4.1 brings is the inclusion of version 1.7b of Batik, the SVG library that Volity's used since the beginning. Starting with this version, Batik supports SMIL, SVG's native animation standard. I felt this was exciting enough to warrant an immediate library upgrade in what's otherwise a bugfix release of Gamut.

However, when I sat down to start playing around with this new animation power, my interest waned. As recently as a few months ago I would have dived right into experimentation with gusto (probably applying it to a card-game library I've been toying with), but today I feel that it's not the best use of my time as project leader. The difference is the presence of the as-yet-unnamed web client that Mike Sugarbaker broke ground on earlier this year.

While I'm not letting go of my ideal of making some great examples of gaming using SVG, what I really want - as declared in the State of the Volity address - is more players. And that means putting games in the browser, eliminating the need to download and install and launch separate software to use the Volity network and play Volity games. The more I heard about Mike's work over the first months of 2007, the more I became quietly convinced that it's worth putting my whole weight behind as Volity's leader, if I actually want the network to grow at the rates I called for in January.

I've asked Mike to give me a hand in joining this sub-project, which I shall take an active role in. Even though the web client will ultimately run as a volity.net service, we'll treat it as an open-source project with source code stored in Subversion, just as with Gamut. We can't declare any timetables yet, but suffice to say that I'm personally interested in getting it visible as soon as we can. As always, I will post more updates and signposts as they become available.

Gamut's been lately giving some people a hard time about not being authorized to play games, or (worse) authorized to continue a game that they started earlier! This was due to a passel of bugs introduced with the latest version of the network's core "bookkeeper" module. We've been smashing them one by one, and I'm fairly sure that they're mostly gone now.

One known bug causes Gamut to sometimes give you this message due to a failed race condition in our protocol. The next release of Gamut will address this. In the meantime, if you see this message as a result of clicking the "Ready" button, just click it again. It should work.

Several of you are keeping us informed of when things go wrong, and this helps us tremendously. You are excellent betatesters!