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This page outlines the developers' intentions for future releases of Zinc.
Users should post feature requests using the
feature request form. Before posting a feature request you might like to
scan this page to see if we already intend to incorporate your idea into a
future release, and also you can
browse feature requests submitted by other users.
Another way in which you can provide us with feedback is through our
discussion forums,
in particular the
suggestions
forum.
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Next Version: 1.1 |
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Zinc 1.1 will represent a significant rewrite of several core aspects of
Zinc. Because of this it will not be network compatible with
previous releases. The aim is to fix incorrect design
decisions that will hamper the future development of Zinc.
From the users' point of view, the major changes will be as follows:
- Overhauled map system -
The map user interface will be overhauled to allow greater flexibility.
Some of the more technical changes are as follows:
- Overhauled map data structures -
The map's data storage will be a hierarchical data structure that can
easily be saved to and restored from XML. The design emphasis is on
future extensibility.
- New network protocol -
The original Zinc network protocol used hand crafted methods to transform
messages to and from plaintext for network transmission. This proved to
be expensive in maintainence. We then adopted Java serialization, however,
this has turned out to be brittle and difficult to extend.
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Unassigned Proposals |
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This section lists features and improvements that have not yet been
assigned to a definite release goal.
- Thread pooling for VMs
- Non blocking IO -
Currently Zinc servers and clients
spawn a new thread for each connection they accept.
Java threads have considerable overhead and so this approach is
resource hungry. Use of Java 1.4's new IO API's would allow a single
thread to service all connections in a single thread.
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