For years I have been drawn by the idea of creating a MORPG. My first stab, back in 2007, involved development of an emulated server for an existing game, allowing me to concentrate on server development without any of the complications associated with client development or even storyline development.

In 2008 I undertook a project entitled “Creation of a MORPG framework using Apache MINA and jMonkeyEngine” as part of my final year at university. The aim of this project was to effectively take what I had learned and turn it into a legitimate project, and investigate the viability of the game engine jMonkeyEngine for our game client. While this project worked to an extent, and in fact won me the Best Student Project 2008/9, I decided that jMonkeyEngine was providing much more than I needed or wanted. The original plan had been to continue work on the project after university, however after my dissertation was completed the project was dropped.

This year I decided to revisit the project, and started work on a new game client – this time avoiding any existing game engines, and making direct use of OpenGL (though JOGL). In the future I may try and write some blog posts with technical details or plans, however for now I just wanted to post a few screen-shots to prove it is at least vaguely working…