Alright I'm getting ready to do the User Generated Monster Manual and Items and Places type stuff now.
I gotta do another "version" of the database with more fields in the tables so I'm gonna add the stuff for all that crap and get it working (at the speed I go at it'll prolly be working sometime tomorrow, I'm actually kinda freaking myself out with how quick things are going but you know how that works with computer crap where you feel like you've spent thirty minutes but its actually been three hours, time works differently when you are under the microscope heh.
Anyways I was typing a lot of stuff here as I worked junk out but then I just deleted all that 'cause you don't need to read all that crap.
Here's the basic idea though, 'cause mebbe you'll have a better one.
All I'm gonna do is make all the Adding Monsters and Items crap work just like my player characters work right now, where you can add a URL to a picture of your guy that everyone can see, and a description.
And everything else (all the statistical and mechanical garbage) will be separated from that, generated by the system when it makes people fight the monster you made or distributes something you made as loot, and junk like that.
Oh and it'll keep track of the crap you added by character and not user (I don't like giving away everybody's user names that's stupid).
Hmm, mebbe I should set aside a 13th character slot for each user, something that they can't really play (or delete) who'd be the only guy that can access the "authoring" side of things, that way they can't mess crap up and delete the guy on accident or something and then screw up whatever the eventual rewards are for winning the User Rating Game.
That "13th Character" thingie just sounds cool so I guess I gotta use that for something ahaha.
Hmm, I dunno if its better to let folks add junk to the game as different characters or not, they might wanna organize the stuff they add that way, especially in a Time Travelling Parallel Universe game (ahaha), I just don't want a lot of stuff getting "orphaned."
Ah, I know how to do it, I just gotta let the monster have the id to the character who made it, 'cause that doesn't change even if you replace the guy with a new one, it'd just be assigned to the new character in that slot (there's no way to actually delete characters, you can only replace 'em with new ones).
Meh, sorry for talking your ear off but this is how I organize shit quick that hardly nobody would understand but me.
If it makes you feel any better this is the third time I've typed about this much and deleted it.
Yah there was a bunch of junk where I was all excited that players could add their own towns and places to the map in the game already too heh.
Oh yah, I didn't even talk about how you can add maps to the game as URLs already this time ahaha.
That's "okay" for overland maps but that'd suck for dungeons 'cause there's no way to do collision detection with something like that, and even for overland that's kinda lame 'cause there's no way to distinguish different types of terrain.
I haven't even gotten into all that stuff with the cartoons and animation and crap yet I'm still saving that for desert that's the fun kinda programming heh.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
No Special Pre-order Minotaur Race Yet
But its getting there.
Ain't done any graphics yet (aside from the title and these little blips for the stat monitor thingie), been trying to get the "bare bones" and "themeless" thingie working first so that I can make it easy for folks to add different graphical themes later.
I still got a ways to go and tons of things I wanna do but it works as far as Dragon Knight goes already.
Oh yah, these are screenshots of what it looks like inside my browser, y'know, 'cause this is a web game, I run my desktop as 1280x1024 and I ain't really worried about this thing working at different resolutions yet (got more important junk to do) but I do sorta ghetto-check to make sure it don't like like crap at 1024x768 and almost everything is auto-resize so far.
I been rearranging the UI to get ready for more of the standard mmo stuff like grouping and all that junk (heck right now I'm just happy that I got the multiple characters per account (and all the goddam crap that goes with that) and the chat thing working all the time on the bottom of the screen insteada just in towns ahaha).
Oh and all the "screens" in the game are controlled with all that "Display" menu stuff on the right, there ain't no more pop-up crap, everything "pops up" in the center of the game screen, I been trying to organize all the controls so you don't gotta move your mouse much to play the game.
Hmm, mebbe I should make that menu over there context sensitive.
Ah, I gotta move the who-is-online inspect-other-characters thingie to that too.
Oh, and the "message of the day" thingie (bah heh).
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Another Smoke Break
I got my character-separated-from-user thing working for Dragon Knight.
12 characters per account with a character select screen and everything rewired so that it works off of characters instead of users.
Chat and the forums and stuff too, that's all by Character.
Even redid all the admin stuff and tested my junk out by stealing a character from one of my fake users and adding it to my admin's character select screen just by changing a number in the admin pages.
Y'know, so you can like, take control of people's characters and run around as them and then put everything back the way it was without even having to log out of the game heh.
You can prolly even change what Character a player is playing while they're playing, like, force 'em to switch to a different character so you can take control of the one they're using, but I didn't test that out.
I'm wondering if I should share this thing on that mod place 'cause its sorta drastic, there ain't no way in hell I'm gonna explain exactly what I did in some text file, that'd take like a month of typing, there ain't nothing I didn't rewire in the game except some of the web page templates and I was just saving that for last 'cause that's the fun part where I get to draw cartoons and stuff, y'know, I was sorta saving that for desert.
I still gotta add the different levels of Admin Powers and the junk for User Generated Content and some of the "funner" Database redesign stuff (like adding cooler stats for items and monsters and redoing how combat and loot works and adding character classes and all that) but that stuff is really easy compared to what I just I did.
I'm so glad this thing is working 'cause that User Is Your Character thing was so cheesy ahaha.
Oh I also figured out how to do the whole loading images off the net thingie (so I can save urls insteada saving the actual pictures in the database) so folks could post pictures on their blogs and then use the url to that for an image for their character when folks inspect 'em and stuff (which I already got working) or user-made monsters and items and towns and all that (which I ain't bothered with yet, but it'd only take two secs to turn that on heh) AND it won't hog database space and stuff, that's cool.
12 characters per account with a character select screen and everything rewired so that it works off of characters instead of users.
Chat and the forums and stuff too, that's all by Character.
Even redid all the admin stuff and tested my junk out by stealing a character from one of my fake users and adding it to my admin's character select screen just by changing a number in the admin pages.
Y'know, so you can like, take control of people's characters and run around as them and then put everything back the way it was without even having to log out of the game heh.
You can prolly even change what Character a player is playing while they're playing, like, force 'em to switch to a different character so you can take control of the one they're using, but I didn't test that out.
I'm wondering if I should share this thing on that mod place 'cause its sorta drastic, there ain't no way in hell I'm gonna explain exactly what I did in some text file, that'd take like a month of typing, there ain't nothing I didn't rewire in the game except some of the web page templates and I was just saving that for last 'cause that's the fun part where I get to draw cartoons and stuff, y'know, I was sorta saving that for desert.
I still gotta add the different levels of Admin Powers and the junk for User Generated Content and some of the "funner" Database redesign stuff (like adding cooler stats for items and monsters and redoing how combat and loot works and adding character classes and all that) but that stuff is really easy compared to what I just I did.
I'm so glad this thing is working 'cause that User Is Your Character thing was so cheesy ahaha.
Oh I also figured out how to do the whole loading images off the net thingie (so I can save urls insteada saving the actual pictures in the database) so folks could post pictures on their blogs and then use the url to that for an image for their character when folks inspect 'em and stuff (which I already got working) or user-made monsters and items and towns and all that (which I ain't bothered with yet, but it'd only take two secs to turn that on heh) AND it won't hog database space and stuff, that's cool.
Monday, June 2, 2008
DK Smoke Break
I been donking around with the Dragon Knight database, separating out the Character stuff from the User stuff, y'know, to make it into a game with a character creation screen and a character select screen and multiple character slots and stuff.
Plus I needed to do something like that just to get used to the database crap, 'cause there's a ton of other database tricks I wanna do.
And I actually got that multiple character thing working already but its gonna take a while to clean everything up enough that somebody could use it as an actual game again.
Right now all I got is a log in and character creation screen, a few pages that don't totally explode when you open 'em, and a database that says what I'm doing is working, y'know, you can't actually play the game until I add a nice character select screen and fix all the web pages I broke and add some stuff to the admin pages for character management.
Which ain't that bad, really, 'cause DK is nice and tight and tiny and smart compared to pretty much everything else I've ever looked at.
Still I need to take a smoke break for a sec even though I got wires sticking out all over the place and sparks shooting out of the thing heh.
Plus I needed to do something like that just to get used to the database crap, 'cause there's a ton of other database tricks I wanna do.
And I actually got that multiple character thing working already but its gonna take a while to clean everything up enough that somebody could use it as an actual game again.
Right now all I got is a log in and character creation screen, a few pages that don't totally explode when you open 'em, and a database that says what I'm doing is working, y'know, you can't actually play the game until I add a nice character select screen and fix all the web pages I broke and add some stuff to the admin pages for character management.
Which ain't that bad, really, 'cause DK is nice and tight and tiny and smart compared to pretty much everything else I've ever looked at.
Still I need to take a smoke break for a sec even though I got wires sticking out all over the place and sparks shooting out of the thing heh.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Easy Like Sunday Morning
Its clasic old school crpg man the map moves around and your dude stays in the middle of the screen heh.
WITH Radar ahaha.
I put it up there on the DK Mod place over here.
Minimap for DK
This is a totally cool (and easy to implement) mod for DK, its sorta like the Radar thingie we're all used to, where you move the map around when you click to move but your character stays in the middle of it, and it also comes with a prettier pic for the map.
Think I'm gonna try to move that to the middle of my screen (and make it bigger) when I'm "exploring" and move some of the other junk around and make the pop-up "view-map" and "character detail" thingies display in the middle of the screen while I'm at it.
Think I'm gonna try to move that to the middle of my screen (and make it bigger) when I'm "exploring" and move some of the other junk around and make the pop-up "view-map" and "character detail" thingies display in the middle of the screen while I'm at it.
Drums in the Deep
Alright, so now that I jacked around for a while with that DK thingie, there's a few different directions I'm thinking about.
First, there's DK Related Thingies, like redoing the way the database works, starting with the User part of it, 'cause that's what you'd need to do to start at the "beginning" of the thing.
It needs its Authority Part expanded out from just having Powerless Users and All-Powerful Admin accounts and Banned Users, it needs a Boss account and Admin accounts that can't jack with some stuff (like the Boss Account heh) and it needs Player accounts that can add their own stuff to the database and see and edit the stuff they've added without being able to see the stuff that the other players have added.
But that actually requires a bunch of changes to the way that the combat part of the game actually works, so that players can't add stuff that's mechanically imbalanced and junk, that whole skeletal mechanics of the thing needs to be buried somewhere and automated some so that players can add their monster-and-item pics with entertaining descriptions and all that without specifying how powerful it'll be in the game.
Y'know, to imagine it in a simple way, just think about the way that only certain guys can wear leather armor, and all the different kinds of leather armor are worth the same amount of armor points, every kind of leather armor has the same stats.
But then the game decides to add +1s and +5s to it (or assigns a Level to it, or whatever) to make it better, when it distributes your thing as loot based on how tough the monsters were that you had to fight.
And the monsters also might work in the same simple kinda way that the Leather Armor you added to the game works, but I think it'd be better if you could select something like a "Level Range" for the things you are adding to the game, and have the game calculate stats and stuff off of that info, so that a Dragon don't end up being a 1st level monster and stuff, y'know, you need a human brain to make all those kinda subjective calls heh.
There's more subtle objective stuff that you could layer into it that would make it more intuitive and clever than just asking people for a level range, though, like needing to specify a terrain type that a monster likes, 'cause then a certain monster would only be summoned up by the game when a player was in the kinda terrain that the monster calls his home, and the rarity of that kind of terrain on the map would determne how rare the monster was, in a way.
And there's more things like that that you could do.
Plus, if you get to the point where you have User Ratings, and the players know the Rules, then they're gonna judge the monsters folks make based on whether they make sense to the place they were encountered and all that kinda stuff like that, y'know, User Ratings ain't just to get rid of tentacle porn (or just to make sure that the tentacle porn stays haha User Ratings Wars awhellyah a whole 'nother meta-level of PvP woohoo!).
Actually it wouldn't be nasty all the time, 'cause there's people that would feel sorry for you and take pity on you 'cause of how stupid the monster was that you made and they'd give you a good rating just to cheer you up and encourage you to do better ahaha.
Anyways the database also needs to have the "Character" stuff separated out from the "User" table, so that you can have multiple Characters per User, 'cause right now all the Character and User stuff is all welded together into one thing.
And that is gonna take some restructuring of the way the interface works.
Which gets into my third thing, where I'm tempted to redo the interface, not just to make it more appealing and to suit my particular tastes, well, not just to do that, heh, but to move a lot of the junk like the font it uses for everything and all the stuff like that into variables, so the clients can customize their setup and pick what they like and what sorta color schemes and stuff they wanna use and all that.
Which gets into my fourth thing, where I'm tempted to redo all the structural graphics for the game.
Not the stuff like, what picture pops up when you fight a monters, I'm talking about everything besides that.
Which gets into my fifth thing, where I'm tempted to start messing around in Java so I can do some really fancy stuff with earth map junk (I was already looking at OpenLayers) and paperdolls and all sorts of other animation and gameplay type stuff.
And thinking about all that Java stuff and the first thing I was thinking about with the User Dealie gets me to the spot where I just wanna make a fresh start of things by making a re-installable user account and monster and item database system with a web front end that people can add themselves and their stuff to without any of the "gamey" parts attached to it yet.
And while all of those things are things that I think I'm gonna have to do, they're also interrelated in certain ways, and they each have elements that the other ones need to have fleshed out pretty well before any of 'em can be sorta completed, so right now I'm just trying to figure out how interrelated they are, in order to avoid wasting time redoing a part of one thing 'cause I'm probably gonna trump it with something else eventually heh.
I mean, I think it'd really probably be less typing to just start over from the beginning ahaha.
And while I'm thinking about that, I'm also thinking about what'll give me the most bang fer my buck, y'know, whatever I do has to be something that'll keep my appetite growing and keep me motivated and entertained and not kill my buzz.
'Cause I'm a multidimensional character, and this heavy gear-head kinda junk ain't the only level that I could be operating on that might do something good for this particular kinda stuff, let alone the only kinda junk I could be doing that wasn't related to this stuff at all.
First, there's DK Related Thingies, like redoing the way the database works, starting with the User part of it, 'cause that's what you'd need to do to start at the "beginning" of the thing.
It needs its Authority Part expanded out from just having Powerless Users and All-Powerful Admin accounts and Banned Users, it needs a Boss account and Admin accounts that can't jack with some stuff (like the Boss Account heh) and it needs Player accounts that can add their own stuff to the database and see and edit the stuff they've added without being able to see the stuff that the other players have added.
But that actually requires a bunch of changes to the way that the combat part of the game actually works, so that players can't add stuff that's mechanically imbalanced and junk, that whole skeletal mechanics of the thing needs to be buried somewhere and automated some so that players can add their monster-and-item pics with entertaining descriptions and all that without specifying how powerful it'll be in the game.
Y'know, to imagine it in a simple way, just think about the way that only certain guys can wear leather armor, and all the different kinds of leather armor are worth the same amount of armor points, every kind of leather armor has the same stats.
But then the game decides to add +1s and +5s to it (or assigns a Level to it, or whatever) to make it better, when it distributes your thing as loot based on how tough the monsters were that you had to fight.
And the monsters also might work in the same simple kinda way that the Leather Armor you added to the game works, but I think it'd be better if you could select something like a "Level Range" for the things you are adding to the game, and have the game calculate stats and stuff off of that info, so that a Dragon don't end up being a 1st level monster and stuff, y'know, you need a human brain to make all those kinda subjective calls heh.
There's more subtle objective stuff that you could layer into it that would make it more intuitive and clever than just asking people for a level range, though, like needing to specify a terrain type that a monster likes, 'cause then a certain monster would only be summoned up by the game when a player was in the kinda terrain that the monster calls his home, and the rarity of that kind of terrain on the map would determne how rare the monster was, in a way.
And there's more things like that that you could do.
Plus, if you get to the point where you have User Ratings, and the players know the Rules, then they're gonna judge the monsters folks make based on whether they make sense to the place they were encountered and all that kinda stuff like that, y'know, User Ratings ain't just to get rid of tentacle porn (or just to make sure that the tentacle porn stays haha User Ratings Wars awhellyah a whole 'nother meta-level of PvP woohoo!).
Actually it wouldn't be nasty all the time, 'cause there's people that would feel sorry for you and take pity on you 'cause of how stupid the monster was that you made and they'd give you a good rating just to cheer you up and encourage you to do better ahaha.
Anyways the database also needs to have the "Character" stuff separated out from the "User" table, so that you can have multiple Characters per User, 'cause right now all the Character and User stuff is all welded together into one thing.
And that is gonna take some restructuring of the way the interface works.
Which gets into my third thing, where I'm tempted to redo the interface, not just to make it more appealing and to suit my particular tastes, well, not just to do that, heh, but to move a lot of the junk like the font it uses for everything and all the stuff like that into variables, so the clients can customize their setup and pick what they like and what sorta color schemes and stuff they wanna use and all that.
Which gets into my fourth thing, where I'm tempted to redo all the structural graphics for the game.
Not the stuff like, what picture pops up when you fight a monters, I'm talking about everything besides that.
Which gets into my fifth thing, where I'm tempted to start messing around in Java so I can do some really fancy stuff with earth map junk (I was already looking at OpenLayers) and paperdolls and all sorts of other animation and gameplay type stuff.
And thinking about all that Java stuff and the first thing I was thinking about with the User Dealie gets me to the spot where I just wanna make a fresh start of things by making a re-installable user account and monster and item database system with a web front end that people can add themselves and their stuff to without any of the "gamey" parts attached to it yet.
And while all of those things are things that I think I'm gonna have to do, they're also interrelated in certain ways, and they each have elements that the other ones need to have fleshed out pretty well before any of 'em can be sorta completed, so right now I'm just trying to figure out how interrelated they are, in order to avoid wasting time redoing a part of one thing 'cause I'm probably gonna trump it with something else eventually heh.
I mean, I think it'd really probably be less typing to just start over from the beginning ahaha.
And while I'm thinking about that, I'm also thinking about what'll give me the most bang fer my buck, y'know, whatever I do has to be something that'll keep my appetite growing and keep me motivated and entertained and not kill my buzz.
'Cause I'm a multidimensional character, and this heavy gear-head kinda junk ain't the only level that I could be operating on that might do something good for this particular kinda stuff, let alone the only kinda junk I could be doing that wasn't related to this stuff at all.
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