It’s been a rough Spring for EpicTable development machines. I had a hard drive go bad in one, a virus so bad I had to go all scorched earth on another, and a third (um…Windows Vista machine…need I say more) that finally, after months of limping along, just refused to boot.

(Okay, everyone make a Will check to avoid telling me I should be using Mac or Linux machines.)

As a result, all EpicTable development is suddenly on Windows 7. With Windows XP end-of-life and Windows Vista…um…being Windows Vista, it was only logical, and it’s what I’d planned. I’d just planned it for after the alpha. Sigh.

The glass-half-full view is that I can now continue sprinting towards an alpha release with brand new, shiny OS installs. (The weakest machine already sings under Windows 7, and it used to be painfully slow under Vista.)

I’ll admit it: Changing the messaging layer took longer than I’d expected. Persistence did too. Last night, I fought through a nasty stack overflow in a lambda function that bypassed my catch clause and crashed the CLR. (That’s .NET-speak for, “The ogre broke through my wizard-locked door and thumped me a good one before I got him back under control.”)

All that aside, I have a shiny new messaging layer that will prevent me from ever having a port forwarding discussion. (Omnidon, I know I owe you a blog post explaining how I’m doing that.) I have chat messages and game state synchronization and the participant introductions described in the last couple “protocol” posts, all going over that new messaging. I have objects moving on the tabletop, and that movement is conveyed to the other participants, again via the new messaging layer. And I’m partway down the path of separating the concepts of game organizer and GM. (They’re basically already separate inside EpicTable. It’s more a matter of whether I have the time to implement the UI that would let the game organizer grant another participant GM power.)

If all goes well, I’ll use EpicTable next week in a limited way with my own gaming group. And I swear I’ll open it up to others on this site once I’m satisfied that it holds together for my own group. There are still rough edges. The first alpha will still be mapless (just because I haven’t returned to maps to tidy things up there and integrate my map markup tools). But I’m still here, still working feverishly. I’m exhibiting at GenCon this year, so I’m…um…highly motivated to get this to a releasable state soon.