Progress Update 2018-06-01

Hi all, sorry I missed the last update. I’m busy this weekend so sadly I will miss this week’s usual update as well. I will continue to be a bit busy next week but I’m hoping to gradually resume progress.

Last week I started on the RWE launcher. I started off writing it as a WinForms app (like Mappy), however I wasn’t really happy with how things were shaping up. WinForms has some architecture/design choices that I don’t really like and this was making the experience of developing the program quite frustrating. To see if I can address this I’ve been doing some research into alternative platforms.

Finding an appropriate platform is quite difficult as I have a lot of requirements. The most important one is that it works cross-platform on at least Windows on Linux. Secondly I’d like to be able to reuse work I’ve done to read TA file formats. It’s also nice if there are some high quality libraries available for networking, and so on.

This week I’ve been looking at Electron to see if this might be a feasible platform for the launcher. I hate Javascript and bloated Electron apps as much as the next guy but it’s possible that the development experience could be quite good. The launcher is secondary to RWE itself, so it being pleasant/easy to develop is a good thing as it will allow me to focus more on the actual engine. I plan to build a new prototype here and see if it goes in a good direction.