Now that all my school assessments are over I have been given the chance to continue work on the skinning feature with advancements being made on both the publishing side of the network protocol as well as how information is loaded from the server and to clients
(Pending skins that are ready for approval. Note that the weird skins are merely for development purposes) Locally owned skins can now be “published” to the pending skins list where all their information and sprites can be loaded from the server and viewed by an administrator. The administrator can now also approve the skin which places it in the public skins list where anyone can then view them.
(Public skins that are ready to be downloaded) While all skin information such as the name, author and date created are sent to the client from the server, Instead of streaming the skins and their thumbnails directly from the server, a web link to the sprites on Amazon’s 'S3' service is created that can then load and stream the sprites much faster than what could be done through my own server. Future things that need to be added are the remaining pending and public button functionality such as rejecting, banning, downloading and reporting skins. But first of all, I must look into fixing an issue whereby different versions of the same skin are displayed as completely different skins. This means adding a system whereby different versions of skins can be overwritten and saved across different lists such as the pending and public lists. Pending tasks are now

• Implement skinning server functionality
• Creating inventory system and skin database.
• Steam workshop for player skins.
• Complete network game lobby UI (make pretty and complete all network game modes).
• Complete network game restart UI (make pretty).
• Research different arenas and backgrounds.
• General bug fixing, tidy up and enhancement of look and feel..