Alpha and Multiple Worlds

Introduction

In this blog we are going to be talking about Blurite officially reaching Alpha stage, as well as some significant developments in our Alpha testing.

Alpha

Those of you with early access will have noticed we moved Blurite to Alpha some time ago, but I thought I'd mention it anyway for those of you who don't!

After classified days in what we called 'pre-alpha', Blurite has finally reached Alpha stage! We initially released Blurite in a 'before alpha' state, mostly due to a lack of content and not wanting to preemptively excite anyone. This should have probably happened a long time ago, but we figured there was enough content and general stability that no longer warranted the 'pre-alpha' stage.

As for the stage after Alpha, we have compiled an internal list of content we expect to have done before Beta comes around. Unlike other servers, our idea of a beta is to test the near-finished product, just before release to iron out anything important and to make sure the general flow of gameplay works well. This means all the major content, proper flows of account & character creation (these are two separate things, which we'll go over later!), interfaces and general gameplay are close to what we expect the live game to be. We will have multiple rounds of beta, including one in which there are no spawning or level commands so that we can achieve a true testing experience, as if it were the live game!

Multi-world support

Recently we finally moved Alpha to use our 'management' service, but what does that actually mean?

In our previous servers we couldn't run multiple worlds at the same time in the same way that RuneScape does. This means seamless world hopping, cross-world messaging (private messaging, clans, friend chat, global announcements), shared character state and more. We decided very early on in the development of Blurite that this won't be the case here.

On Blurite we aim to be able to support multiple worlds, ideally all in different part of the world to cater to most regions of the world (including Asia-Pacific!). This means easily hopping between worlds, having world-specific requirements, world-specific game modes like Deadman Mode or King of the Skill (we're not necessarily doing these, but they're good examples) where you log in with the same account but have different character data, and everything else you'd expect. We're definitely not the first server to have done this, but it requires a big overhaul of an existing server or accounting for it during the initial development of a server like we have done.

Management server

So I mentioned a management service earlier, what does this have to do with multiple worlds?

Quite simply, worlds need to be able to talk to each other. They also need a central place for account and character data to be stored. If you're familiar with RuneScape, you'll know that does something similar. You have 'login servers' which you log in to, and separate 'game servers' (or at least that's what we call ours) which run the actual world and its content. There are other servers in RuneScape too, but on Blurite our management service does the job of all of them. Blurite now follows a similar design, where we have a central management server which all the worlds connect and talk to when they first boot up.

The management server is in charge of actually verifying your login credentials, working out who you are, whether you're allowed to log in to a world, and then tells the world about you and how the world can get your data. Having a central server in the middle of all the worlds is convenient for other reasons other than just for storing character data, it means we can have a well-integrated website or Discord bot with all the same access to your character data! This means we can do things like show your inventory, equipment, stats, recent activity, kill count, collection log and many others all on the website. In theory, we can modify this data as well but that will be limited to admins only.

That about sums up what we had to say. The management server is currently running in Alpha and can be used right now! There's still a lot of work to do in regard to the management server. It's got to be super stable and support many more features than it does right now. We don't have multiple worlds running right now, but this is definitely something we plan on testing before beta (we have tested this locally though!).

If there's anything you'd like to know about how this works, feel free to ask us on Discord!

- The Blurite Team