It seems like it, but Plexus is not actually dead. The most recent development on Plexus-proper was in Oct 2008. In 2009, I started working on a new open source p2p platform, called Xus, to address the networking problems we experienced when we worked with Pastry.  I blog about Xus here.  Here is the source and here is the readme.  It’s fairly ambitious, for a one person open source project.  I have the bottom two layers of the architecture working and I’m doing the file sharing now (Git + bittorrent + rsync).  I also have some monitoring working with it.  I’d like Xus to be very easy to work with for developers, with diagnostic tools, firewall configuration aids, and what-not.  When I have reasonable functionality with file sharing, I will return to the Plexus project and change it to use Xus instead of Pastry.  By the way, it’s called Xus because it’s the back-end of Plexus .

Next on the list is switching from Groovy to Scala.  This is because Scala is around 20 times faster and provides all of the advantages of strong typing, but its type inferencing removes most of the pain.  It has a lot of support for functional programming too, and other cool things like actors and packrat parser combinators.

So, that’s the update.  Xus first, then Scala.

Ramps get created now, unfortunately they only face one direction.

Took 20 mins to generate

Here’s a little messed up vid : Messed up screencap, heh

To Do: (minor)

Get ramps facing right directions

Get stairs to work.

Map more textures, models

To Do: (major)

Octree – ogz importing (this will allow for very fast imports out of sauer)

Real time importing (see if I can work something out with the livis crew/code)

Here is a post about our new implementation of mobile code, which allows you to attach Groovy scripts and libraries to your maps.  It’s more than that though.  Check it out if you are interested in leveraging the potential of peer-to-peer networking…

And here is a post of our old philosophy document from the p2pmud project.  This is here because Plexus continues with the same philosophy.  P2PMud was our 2D, dynamic HTML, peer-to-peer MUD.  It was a neat MUD — it lived in a single web page (using some code from tiddlywiki) and used AJAX to communicate with other peoples’ MUDS in their browsers.  Anyway, Plexus is more-or-less an extension of that, which was an extension of other projects, leading back to the first MUD we wrote in September of 1988.

If you want to comment on these two, please put your comments here, even though the posts are in the repository wiki!

September of 1988?  Oops, did I just let the cat out of the bag?  This release will indeed be TEAM CTHULHU’s 20th anniversary release!

Happy 20th anniversary TEAM CTHULHU!

Our mascot Cthulhu stands guard over the the application, and clicking him will close it down. Grab his mighty tentacles below to use his awesome powers to resize the window to your liking.

Kudos also to a few elite Java hackers James Williams and Dmitry Bondarenko and Anthony Petrov without whose web pages we never would have gotten it all to work properly!

Grass, and barren stone.. Hopefully we can get the ramps sorted out, then we can move on to further aestheic improvements.

Mmmmm

furroy pimping it above.

zot pimpin it above.

and our supa-sexay logo on the back!

anyone else with balls big enough to be seen in public dressed like this, just let us know!