[ANN] gzochi project development release 0.1

[ANN] gzochi project development release 0.1

[Julian Graham]

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to announce that the first development release of the
gzochi game development framework.

The project description, from Savannah: gzochi (/zoʊ-tʃiː/) is a
framework for developing massively multiplayer online games. A server
container provides services to deployed games, which are written in
Guile Scheme, that abstract and simplify some of the most challenging
and error-prone aspects of online game development: Concurrency, data
persistence, and network communications. A very thin client library
can be embedded to provide connectivity for client applications
written in any language.

gzochi can be viewed as an application server (plus client) for Guile
applications that have special kinds of workloads -- quick, CPU-bound
tasks that require transactional semantics for sending messages and
accessing data. Its design is inspired by Red Dwarf Server [0], which
does the same kind of thing with Java.

This is a development release; several important features are
conspicuously missing.  Nonetheless, there's a good amount of server
and client documentation, and some simple games can be written. The
distribution comes with an example game based on MazeWar [1], an early
network multiplayer game. For more information, visit
http://www.nongnu.org/gzochi/ or check out the project page on
Savannah, at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gzochi/ -- you can
pick up the release from the downloads section.

As a side note, gzochi is the project that initially got me interested
in Guile back in, yikes, 2003 (!). I sidelined it for several years
while I worked on Guile and other projects, and picked it up again
last fall. It's a tribute to how far Guile's come that I was able to
write this system from scratch in such a short time!


Regards,
Julian


[0] - http://www.reddwarfserver.org/
[1] - http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html