PotBS: Dev Diary @ Official Site

New Flying Labs' teammember Justin writes about some programming challenges with his blog entry titled How Chickens Move:

Several weeks ago, Joe tasked me with an interesting problem: avatars' position and motion information was being sent back and forth between the client and server WAY too often. We weren't even getting great-looking avatars for all that data - they were popping around on the client when they went any faster than a walk. So we came up with a plan, and I completely ripped apart the old system - completely making a mess of all the towns in the game in the process. Replacing a system like that takes some time, so everyone had to bear with me while avatars walked backwards, slid around without moving their legs, or shook violently like they'd had more coffee than even I drink. (Team Brady makes pretty frequent dashes for the coffee shop down the street, just so you know.) That was just the avatars - you should have seen the chickens.