What I'll be working on

Hey everyone, just wanted to give you a little insight on what I'm currently working on with regards to the site. Updates to the site may be a little infrequent for some time as I am focusing a lot of my free time in designing a desktop application program that will run in harmony with the website. I've always wanted this to be a part of the site, but did not really have the site at the level of functionality I wanted until recently, so it has kinda gone by the wayside.

Back in my original "Welcome Back" post, I talked a little bit about building a desktop application, but I'll outline some of my ideas here. Before I get into anything though, I don't want anyone to get their hopes up just yet, because this application is still in the very early stages of development and it could be several months before it is of release quality. So, the reason I'm even making this post is because I want your feedback (via email or the comments section) on my ideas and even new ideas of your own.

These are the basic things I want the desktop application to be able to do.

• In-game combat parsing
• Solo and Companion combat parsing
• Group, Flashpoint, and Operation combat parsing
• Include a ready check
• Ability to upload your combat log to the website for more in-depth parsing
• The application should be low-profile and easy on system performance

And then some of the more conceptual ideas I have that I don't know if they will come to fruition. These depend on a couple things: 1) my ability to code them and 2) the stability of the service with just the basic stuff outlined above.

• Ability to watch "live" streams on the website
• Option to add in a twitch.tv stream of one or multiple players in the group... My idea behind this is if you're running an Operation, or maybe doing some PvP and you want people to be able to see all the combat log stuff and also your stream, the website could integrate that all together.
• Caching Group, Flashpoint and Operation combat parsing from the app so that it may be viewed for some time from the website.
• Allowing the group leader to upload all of the combat logs directly to the website with one button push. This would send all the logs, upload them under the correct user's information and create a group log.

So, these are my ideas. I'm open to any and all feedback; positive, neutral or negative.

So, if designing this application was the only part of the project, things would be much simpler. But, alas, there is a backend part... the server technology. This is the phase of the process I am currently in. The server development is coming along nicely, but I have to be very careful with this type of thing. First and foremost, I don't want to cause degradation to the services I already have in place available on the website. Secondly, it needs to be very efficient so that it can handle several hundred clients at any given time.

So, this will keep me occupied for quite some time to come. On top of it being a very complex project, it is also a new area of programming for me. So, I'm learning a lot as I go, but I'm a pretty quick learner, so we'll see. Don't worry though, I will still make sure the site is kept going strong and will probably even add a few new features here and there.

In the coming months, I will need a guild or two to help me test this in an operation setting, so if you have any interest in that, feel free to email me and we can make arrangements.

Thanks,

James