Soooooooo… The last post might have been a little confusing. As part of parring back my initial goals and changing a few things here an there, I ended up moving from a c# client to a TwinBasic client. One of my other goals is to remove as many external dependencies as possible to distribute with the mmorpg client.

One of the side effects of the move is steam integration. It is pretty straight forward in .Net, but there is absolutely zero integration available for TwinBasic. Giving that tW is meant to be 100% compatible with Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic for Applications, plus other features and can compile in 64-bit… Some people consider it the successor to VB6 as the language adds more features while keeping backwards compatibility.

With the above said, VB6 came out in 1991 and discontinued in 1998. Steam came out in 2003, and to date, there is still no integration between the two. Now… Steamworks dll is basically a standard DLL. VB6 and TW can integrate with those fine. However, there are quite a bit of gotchas and I really don’t have time to figure all that out. I’ve been in .NET (and Java) land for too many decades to have patience for something that should have been solved decades ago.

You know that whole saying, time is money? Well… that is the route I will be taking soon. Roughly $1400 to pay for the integration work. And winsock… whew. TwinBasic’s road map shows winsock support in 2nd quarter 2026 (ref: github.com/twinbasic… ). I can’t wait that long. So this means paying someone to create integration for that. Until then, I am currently using Socket Tools ActiveX controls. Which means distributing Socket Tools' installer. Hopefully, that will be temporary until the replacement is integrated. Oh joy. And all of this for a 100% free (no subscription, no mtx) mmorpg.

With that said, I am seriously considering using ko-fi for one off support to help with the monthly fees and one time payments for stuff like music, art, integration work, etc. No pressure or anything. There will never, ever be any advantage, no cosmetics or any of that stuff for supporting this way. Probably an icon next to name in chat (or on map), and perhaps a different name/chat color. and name in the credits, of course.

Ah yes, the whole reason I wrote this.. So… this means I no longer have to finish building out the email/password/validation loop in this new client. Only integrate steam Ids and authentication tickets. I absolutely detest storing email and passwords as it is, quite frankly, none of my business. SteamIds however, will be stored in the database as it is needed to map to your characters.

With that said (I seem to be saying this a lot)… This also means that there is no need for an account only release as part of the “release small, release often” development. Instead, the first release will allow character creation. This game will be a skill based game. No, not a twitch game, but a classless game. Ala sort of like how Eve Online is. But.. as an mmorpg. So creating a character will be something like.. pick a name and a race. Race perks will be fleshed out as the game gets fleshed out. For instance, Dwarves might get a +5% stamina or pure hp. Elves might get a mana pool bonus, etc.

So… skill based game. Level up the skills you want to emulate the archetype you want your character to become.

So first deployment will unfortunately have a socket tools dependency and installer. You will be able to create/delete your characters. This will leave the second deployment to actually do .. something.. in a map. hmm..