Developer write-ups from PraxisMapper, a location-based game server. Written in C# and .NET 7, using OpenStreetMap data.
I'm officially admitting to myself that I'm done working on TIBO. It's mechanically complete, I'm out of ideas for creatures, and I don't enjoy the restrictions I set for myself on the art style anymore. In honor of this recognition, I'm going to wri...
We are going to walk through the logic for the Splatter demo client. This is about as simple as a complete PraxisMapper game can get. First we have the Login screen. This is necessary if we have data stored per player, which most games will. We auth...
Starting up PraxisMapper for the first time has been simplified down as much as possible. This covers the shortest, simplest path to get a server running against Release 8 of PraxisMapper. Previous versions required using the bootstrapping app, Larry...
Happy Birthday PraxisMapper! Original Plans for Year 2 After the first year of work, I looked at what I had and set some goals for what I wanted to do in the next year. Most of those plans didn't take nearly as long as expected. The biggest one was ...
One of the most important parts of a location-based game, for the typical game you envision with that description, is making the locations involved matter. If all you do is walk around, your game is just an exercise tracker. If every space feels iden...
After loading the initial data set, which is the single slowest operation in the process of setting up a new server, the next most important task for PraxisMapper is drawing maptiles. The current codebase for PraxisMapper went through quite a few imp...
Don't.
What Is This For? PraxisMapper used OsmSharp to read data from OpenStreetMap extract files, with the .osm.pbf extension. This was very fast but used huge amount of RAM when generating complete entries. A 170MB PBF file would require nearly 8GB of R...
What was this? In June 2018, Niantic ran the Beyond Reality contest with 1 million US Dollars in the reward pool for the winners. 10 submitted projects were selected to get access to Niantic tools and data, and then they were judged and scored. None ...