Potential Blog

In support of Cyber Security Awareness Month, this article is written as a tutorial on basic login security, including techniques to defend against potential vulnerabilities. I encourage anyone with a software security background to comment on this article. Although I have some years of software security experience, peer review is essential for building secure systems.

TIP: Any and all security techniques (including these) should be considered experimental until thoroughly reviewed by the security community.

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Students of software must be taught early the benefits of object oriented design, lest they succumb to the dark side of static programming. When designing a software component, the temptation can be to write globally accessible public static methods in lieu of instantiable objects. Even experienced developers must remain diligent to avoid being turned to this quicker, more seductive, approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Serialized object data is inherently fragile. A change in one class effectively renders any serialized data that includes the class (even deep within the object graph) unusable. This article describes how I have (potentially) addressed this problem in my MMORPG platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Alpha5 (v0.5.0) was released earlier today… and then v0.5.0.1 to fix some issues that were found almost immediately by the intrepid playtesters. Alpha playtesters should see this forum topic to learn why…

I expect everyone to be walking around at Level 16 with Double Battleaxes and Expert Regeneration skill by tomorrow.

… That gives you one hour until tomorrow. Have at it.

I haven’t stopped typing since last Friday’s incremental release, so here’s another for-the-sake-of-Friday update, which includes two dozen fixes and enhancements. Alpha playtesters can read this forum entry for the details.

For RPG Alpha Playtesters, I’ve released an incremental update (v0.4.1). Why? Mostly because it’s Friday. Also, I’ve tampered with (er, improved) a lot of code since the last release. See this forum topic for details (and comments on future releases).

This article describes an interesting design pattern that I utilized in my Potential RPG code. The following describes the pattern in general and how I’ve used it in my code. Has anyone seen this pattern in the wild? Does it have any other common forms or names? Read the rest of this entry »

All the tasking for Alpha4 is complete (… or brushed under the rug of a later release). Alpha Playtesters are invited to read the details, then try it out.

For Alpha playtesters, I’ve posted an incremental release (on the roadmap to Alpha4) with some important enhancements to island building. See this playtesting forum topic for details.

I’ve been coding furiously since … well, since 2005. Over the past week, I’ve implemented the steepest spike in the project’s SLOC History.

Posted this morning, Alpha3 v0.3.1 is an incremental release on the roadmap to Alpha4, introducing Player-Created Islands. There are some known issues and limitations, but basic functionality is testable. (This is the secret alpha bonus feature mentioned earlier.)

Disclaimer: I’m not promising how this feature will manifest itself in the final game design, but I’m very excited about the potential.

Alpha playtesters should see this forum topic for details on testing the new feature.