Zugg Software :: View topic

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

Zugg,
Just a little curious, since CMUD 3.31 is now a public version, what are your plans for the next version of beta? Is it going to be more changes to the mapper?

I am editing this because I just re-read your announcement post for Zuggsoft 2010, which explained my question. It looks like you will be upgrading to Delphi 2010 and adding the UniCode.

Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2010 5:33 pm

Right now my priorities are this:

Short-term:

1) Fix some of the more serious bugs in 3.31 to release 3.32 later this week or next

2) Spend at least a month specifically marketing TeSSH to businesses, writing press releases, and hopefully some demo videos for YouTube. I need to get TeSSH selling.

3) Send out an the yearly Zuggsoft newsletter to all customers (which I never sent last year) announcing the new CMUD Public release and announcing TeSSH.

4) Take a long holiday break because I'm totally burned out right now.

Long-term:

1) Upgrade to Delphi 2010 and do the Unicode conversion. This is a huge job and will take many months. But since it effects both CMUD and TeSSH, and helps expand the potential market for both products, it's the best thing to do next for the business. Even though it won't help existing users much.

2) Integrated Chat functions. Even if I don't bring back the zChat user interface, I'd like to at least port over the #commands for chatting and integrate it with the docking window system (dedicated chat windows, etc).

3) For the mapper, the priorities will be to move over as much functionality from zMapper as possible, and at the same time upgrade the graphics engine to support more features (gradients, anti-aliasing, faster drawing, etc).

I'll post more details about all of this in the 2011 New Years letter in January. But because of the time involved in doing the Unicode conversion, you probably won't see the first 4.0 version of CMUD until late Spring 2011.

Right now we should all sit down and enjoy everything in 3.x. We've been stuck in a Beta-testing phase for over 2 years now and I think a lot of people have forgotten how to just use CMUD to play their MUDs rather than worrying about new features, bug fixes, etc. People need time to convert their scripts to the new optimized string list/table code and take advantage of new stuff like GMCP mapping. I think we all need a rest ;)