Here's a quick status update what I have done so far for 0.3:
- Player listings have been implemented. (that is, you can see who is watching a game)
- You have to give your name right away before you can even watch games. I think I may cut this feature away as I believe it may be convenient for users to not have to give their name unless necessary.
- Dfterm3 is more eager to (forcibly) close down Dwarf Fortresses and the plugin has been modified so as to not lose connection so easily. However, I have not once succeeded in getting the old plugin to lose connection randomly so my "fix" is just me making a guess what caused the disconnections and fixing that part.
- You can now see when a player joins or leaves a game.
- You can now manually set Dwarf Fortress paths in the administrator interface if you want to.
- The Linux version works better now (you can actually launch Dwarf Fortresses and it works) but currently, the Dfhack console will go crazy and gobble up all your processor time.
Those are the major, user-visible changes. There are also some small things changed such as the server now remembering who last played the game instead of tracking the last player in the browser.
Below are some features that I think are important but I'm not sure. I'd like to put these ones in.
- An installer and a simple GUI that lets you turn on and off the server without going to the command line.
- A canvas-based interface for increased performance. (lethosor has worked on this part a bit)
I think I should do a release shortly because, well, why not? I wanted to have the installers and GUIs for 0.3 to make the software more newbie friendly but I might have to push those for 0.4.
I'd also like to rehaul the web interface part because at the moment, it's kind of a mess from inside. However, I think right now there are more important things to work on so the interface isn't that important as long as it works and is not a pain to use.