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Development Update #1

Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2020 9:19 am
by Duckula
Hi All,

Apologies in advance but this update is a bit more technically focused however I will sum up at the end.

Over the past few months a lot has been going on behind the scenes working on the code that makes up The Major BBS / Worldgroup. As has been mentioned previously, the first goal is to move the existing codebase into a modern development environment (Visual Studio) and being able to compile the modules in this environment instead of Borland. While moving the code has been occurring, the focus has been on compatibility with add-on modules (e.g. MajorMUD, Tele-Arena, etc) that we were originally written using Borland. We have now implemented a method that will allow us to mix and match (that is, run old Borland and new Microsoft Visual C (MSVC) created modules at the same time) therefore preserving compatibility.

While this requires more testing, it is a big step forward as old modules for which the source code is no longer available and can not be re-compiled under MSVC will still run.

Here is a summary of the progress of moving the codebase to Visual Studio:

- APIs (Such as the Btrieve database functions, messaging engine, the gcommlib library, etc) - approx 60% converted
- Apps (Teleconference, Email and Forums, etc) - approx 70% converted
- Internet Connectivity/ICO (Telnet, DNS, FP, Rlogin, etc) - approx 75% converted
- Core server application (wgserver.exe) - Complete

This still leave quite a number of offline utilities and other peripheral items but it is a great start.

Our plan is to deploy the converted modules to our official demo BBS (once it is launched) and use it as the first beta testing site and then expand the beta testing to several BBS's to identify issues/bugs and resolve them as they are found.

On a side note, work is being done on a proof of concept API to allow add-on modules to be written in c# - stay tuned for more on this.

To sum up: Things are progressing well on the development front, progress is being made each week and we are excited about being able to get a beta testing site running. While I don't have a timeframe for this, we are working as hard as we can to make this happen. Once we are satisfied that the core product is stable and compatible with old modules, we will start working on feature additions/changes.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything specific, please post in the General forum under the Project Phoenix sub-board.