Shadowrun Awakened

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Shadowrun: Awakened (SRA) is an Massively-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game under open source development. This Wiki was put in place to support the development and production of this project. Our Members Charter contains the primary description of our goals and attitudes.

History

Shadowrun: Awakened was originally started in 2006 by James Wood, but almost immediately foundered. It was not until 2007, with the recruitment of Stephen Turner and the sudden free time of Erik Ralston that things really took off.

March 2007, the project was blessed to find Aaron Adrignola who put his web skills to work establishing a website, forums, and wiki dedicated to the project. Game Design was heating up.
April 2007, software core design was underway and the project was eager to begin construction. Fundamental game design was over and we started to analyze how we were going to get it to run in a computer.
May 2007, we discovered Project Darkstar. Realizing that this could immensely shorten our required development time, the decision was made to utilize this open source revelation instead of our custom Distributed Cell Architecture (DCA).
June 2007, Server and client technology hit numerous issues with their chosen technologies. Reexamination leads to resolution.
July 2007, We proceed using C#, XNA, and ICE. Development reboots.
August 2007, Client team takes a detour through ODE.net and BulletX physics engines before settling on the PhysX Engine (utilizing a managed wrapper). Server team fleshes out a huge architecture for the game on their side, start working with data, and start networking. We are on a clear path.
September, 2007, The project as a whole has a giant recruitment push and we add many new members, double net traffic, and gain some great new developers. Client team puts together the basics of our GUI system using XNA's 2D capabilities. Server team performs a small-scale test and we decide on using an OODMS technology in server as a Data Layer. Our initial candidate is Gentle.net.
October, 2007, We gain our 100th forum member. We go up on MySpace. We pick up Castle Active Record. We drop ICE for .Net Remoting during prototyping, we may see ICE later. Client, being most of the way to Game Engine Alpha, loses some momentum as we put more resources into Server to get it back to its feet. The first prototyping of the Commands & Snapshots design begins.
November, 2007, Server shares its first simulation and reaches its GEA status in only one month. Client's GEA list is reduced down to only animation. We christen the engine technology "Awakened Engine".
December, 2007, We upgrade to XNA 2.0, many enhancements are added to our ability to simulate (including triggers, heightfields, and convex colliders). GEA is declared as achieved despite animation being stymied by XNACL being trapped in XNA 1.0.
January, 2008, After the upgrade to XNA 2.0, we hit a rocky time trying to include animation. Also, the desire for realistic lighting & shadows begins to undermine the factors that led us to C#.
February, 2008, Capitulating to our doubts, we change directions in development AGAIN to dig ourselves out from under the performance hole created by managed code.
March, 2008, We reboot development back into C++ with PhysX and OGRE leading the charge.
April, 2008, Reconstruction of features in C++, Physics & Graphics
May, 2008, Reconstruction
June, 2008, Procedural meshes
July, 2008, FMOD integration, Cross-platform support (Linux), serialization of levels to/from file
August, 2008, Level editor work begins, integration of QT
September, 2008, Level editor continues