Time has come for some news about Kite (previously known as Cerberus). First off no, it's not dead, it's very much alive.
Now to tell you the truth, development only started 2 weeks ago. Why ? because it's incredibly ambitious in the code. We want something that allows easy modding without modifying the core. However the design is quite difficult and lack of time put the project almost to a complete stop.
Two weeks ago, while working on Onlink savegame, I got temporarily disgusted by the code (I will still try to finish the fix
) and started imagining a clean version and decided to try implementing it. That's how Kite started.We don't have much yet, but I want to already do an overview because you all have been more than patient. The first thing to know is that Kite is based on Python. The reason is that it is easier than c/c++ and PyPy can almost match the later in term of performance.
In the current Kite world, there are only devices that can communicate to one another. A device is a piece of equipment with various functionalities (a phone, a router,...). These functionalities are plugins that can be linked or unlinked merely by setting a new type to the device. All there is to do to add a new functionality, is to write the plugin and add the type in the appropriate area. If the plugin is invalid, it won't be loaded and, for the device, it'll be like it's a functionality that does nothing and the game will run just fine.
Two devices can communicate by the mean of messages. At log in time, a device will search for a router, ask it for a new IP. The router will then return what has been asked. In order to handle new messages, all there is to do is to set up end points and defining the message type.
the third and final part is the base interface. Not much done here but we are already have the base ideas. It'll use a mix of json and python to render stuff. The only thing displayed for now is this:
Finally. here are some things we want in the future:
- One place for handling the savegame so if it fails, only that part needs to be changed.
- Command Interpreter for better debugging.
That's it for now.
