Yesterday I felt empowered to take another look at the networking implementation for my engine again. While there's enough there to start a server, which began listening for clients and for a client to then connect, there was nothing else after that point. Rather lame really. So that's changed now, with some help from my partner, I've got some semblance of a design in place now so messages can be sent between the client and server, and we have some validation in place alongside some basic error checking to make sure someone isn't trying to kill the server.

Next up, which I may or may not work on today depending on if time permits (I've got to head out immediately after work) is to get some messaging in there so that a client can send a message and the server can then broadcast that to everyone else (excluding the original client, of course). This should give me a chance to figure out how that's going to work and in-turn flesh out more of the design even further.

Beside that I've decided to give up on my idea of allowing for multiple brush types. It's adding a level of complexity I don't think is generally good for the engine and it's making the work on the editor more complex than it needs to be. It also dawned on me that the API I've designed for the scene graph is simple enough that we could just introduce a new terrain node type fairly easily if we really need it. So going forward a "brush" is just a polygonal object w/ collision.

Finally, I'm on a quest for a Photoshop replacement. It's not even the recent drama that's prompted this, it's actually my desire to avoid Windows more than anything. So far I've tried both Gimp and Krita. The former is too destructive for my tastes, but I'm familiar with it and have used it for a long time. The latter drives me absolutely insane; no align tools, weird performance quirks, issues with modal windows (Gnome/Gtk are more to blame for this one) and a generally unintuitive interface. Unfortunately my options on Linux appear to be rather limited.