Bad news all, I am starting again on my Retrograde Online game. I realise I said I was bored with the whole thing and put it in the bin last year, but now I am trying to re-brand as a full-stack developer, it will be a good vessel for me to learn the many things I lack. I will be doing things a little differently this time, and trying not to make the same mistakes again. ...
Not sure why I am writing this post. Maybe it’s just a way to cap this little side project. Anyway, I am not working on Retrograde Online anymore. It is just boring to me now. This started as a way for me to learn some Domain Driven Design and React. I’ve always thought Javascript is an awful language and learning some React has only reaffirmed my belief. Domain Driven Design I found far too overkill for this project, and maybe for most projects. ...
I’ve spent a bit more time on Retrograde over the last few days. I had a long weekend and currently have no other fixations to manage out, so decided to jump back into this project. When I started looking over what I had managed to build so far I noticed a few things I could add/fix. These included the fix for UTC I mentioned in my last dev update. Now units and buildings count down correctly, rather than immediately showing as completed, even if on the server it was not. ...
Holy Penis, a dev update? Does that mean … ? No. But I have decided to focus some more time on this stupid game. I am still thinking about what I want to do with it. I may scale back my initial ideas. I probably need to focus on the core of it. Therefore, my to do list now looks like this: Come up with core of game Focus on it Expand on it Profit? Still, I have actually made an update, look: ...
I should have known this would happen. I lost enthusiasm for the Retrograde project due the way I have gone about designing and implementing things. After looking into Domain Driven Design and implementing it in my project, I realise that it is a big waste of time for me. I should have just stuck with my usual approach. This has slowed down the server-side development considerably. Secondly, learning React at the same time was a problem for me, and a total lack of unit tests has meant that things that used to work now no longer work. One bug I have just noticed after two months away is that constructions no longer count down their ticks, instead they immediately show as “completed”. They are not actually completed, that logic is unaffected, but the display time is. This is because I am now in British Summer Time, and have been since the end of March, and I haven’t run Retrograde since before the clock change. There must be a mismatch between the date time objects I am using across the client and server. ...
Another week has gone by and that means it’s time for a miniscule update about what has been happening in the world of Retrograde Online! The hottest new game that absolutely everyone will want to play 25 years ago. The last update was concerned with implementing SignalR into the React app and getting it working with the .NET back-end. I’ve expanded on that somewhat, and have now got SignalR connections for the City Constructions as well as the City Build Queue from before. I also added the updating of the queue and the garrison based on a “Unit Production Completed” message being pushed to the client. This will remove the unit from the build queue and add it to the garrision by incrementing the existing number for that unit type. ...
Another week of faffing about with the code. This time I’ve managed to implement something useful: SignalR. I’ve only added it to the unit production screen for now while I figure out how to get all the bits working together. It uses a connection identifier which is the city ID. When the unit is added to the city a notification is created with a connection ID property linking it to the connection. There is a “notify at” time too, which is the tick at which the unit will be completed. ...
It’s been a busy few evenings for me over the last few weeks and I’ve made what feels like a ton of changes to the game. I fixed that bug I mentioned in the last dev update, and also squashed a few others that I noticed while testing. There are a couple of quality of life changes I added, such as some CSS to highlight which section of the city you are currently viewing (if the context didn’t give it away - menubar titles might change): ...
This is a small update on some progress I’ve been making over the last few days. I’ve re-worked the way time is calculated and displayed in the React app. Previously if a construction took 15 minutes to complete, then the build time would have been displayed as “15m 0s”. This was fine, but as the server ticks over every minute on the minute, it meant that starting a 15 minute-long construction at, say, 18:24:35, would immediately display the count-down timer as “14m 25s” and then tick down every second until completion. ...
I thought I may as well post an update on the progress of Retrograde Online. If nothing else, it helps me keep track of what I’ve actually been doing, as sometimes it feels like an awful lot of work has gone into achieving very little. The most obvious thing to report on is the tech stack. I’ve decided to write the server in .NET 8 and C# 12 and the client in React v18.2. After all I am primarily a .NET developer, and I’ve wanted to get involved in React for a while. However I fear I may have underestimated the learning curve for React, and progress on the front-end is much slower than on the back-end. ...