I have put up a new post on my blog with an overview of a feature for my new RPG that I think is really exciting. I was not kidding when I said I am creating a digital world! My goal for this new game is to create a living breathing world that evolves on its own and can be shaped by players.
I would appreciate advice and suggestions directly regarding this new feature and also regarding the map and how to improve it... It is pretty rough right now.
Also I am going to post a short description of the game world/lore for this new RPG and I would like your help choosing a name for the game world. I think I will be using the name of the world in the title of the game, so this is a pretty big deal. :-) More info on that will be soon.
It has taken me less than 1/2 an hour to import over 50 different characters already into the system! If only I had known how to do this while making Chip N Dales MMORPG, huh?
The blog will be about a few things. First off it will be about developing the new game, which is an RPG. Second, it will be about programming from the perspective of someone who has little time or professional ability. Thirdly, it will be about random shit.
This July, I thought of making a couple of updates.
1) More houses. Now that I know how to add houses, I think I might work in the housing community by either putting another community or add more house to an already exiting community. There will be a poll in the Game Discussion until July 1st about which will be chosen.
2) Achievements. I saw in many games, online or not, with achievements. I thought that there could be a system with them. A list of 20 achievements will be added July 1st. Prizes Will be given for those who complete them. These achievements will be of varying difficulty.
Other suggestions that are doable by myself will be put here.
The player who refers the most people to the site wins the trophy of their choice!
The referred members must be ACTIVE. (Recent posts and the user's point count will be checked.)
If you're caught cheating then you are eliminated from the competition.
The members that you got to join must private message kerbykong so they can be tallied and verified. This starts and ends during my summer break (and most others too) Giving you plenty of time to do this.
If you have any problems or questions please post here.
I am going to try to do some fixes for bugs this december, lets see how much I can do!
(12/04/2010)
Got the CND server back online so you can play multiplayer. There are still a ton of glitches related to this though because I had to move the sever and change a lot of scripts to direct them to the new server.
(12/06/2010)
Fixed a lot of the glitches that I started a couple days ago. This includes problems with choosing your character, although some of the newer characters such as Obi-Wan still are not working because I lost some of the newest data since last time I was working on the game. Also fixed is the save point information, so now you can save your characters location again, but trophies list still isn't working. I also added a new feature, if you hold your jump button down longer your character will jump higher than they used to be able to.
(12/08/2010)
Minor fixes to the discussion boards recent posts list. Also made it so when you change your account settings it does not repost you as a new user on the discuss page. The contest page will not display any contests that contain the word 'closed' in their contest duration field... That way old contests which are closed won't be displayed. The biggest thing is that I fixed trophies so now you can pick them up, save them to inventory, recall them from inventory, etc. It should work fine now all of it. Oh and I also enhanced jumping further by making running jumps for forgiving. Before you would sometimes push the jump key as you run off a cliff and find that you did not press jump soon enough, despite feeling like you did. Now it is more forgiving with that, and you can wait until your character is at the very edge of the cliff before jumping. This will allow players to jump further slightly off cliffs and more importantly it will give a better sense of control over their character. Just in general I changed a lot of the player physics to better match games like mario brothers. I feel like that gives players much more control over their character. This includes increasing the maximum horizontal speed, decreasing friction, and increasing gravity.
(12/10/2010)
Fixed the chat server so now you can chat with other players. There may still be some errors seeing which other players are playing CND and chatting, so I am not done with it yet. Also fixed the mapping system so you can save your maps again and edit your worlds. Because of the new server I had to make saving maps different, it now breaks your maps data into pieces and uploads those pieces one piece at a time to the server. If you exit or otherwise somehow mess up the saving process while it is in the middle of saving your map, you will need to revert the map to a previous state using the reverter tool. You can see on the map making webpage that theres a new link to the old world reverter script that will allow you to revert back to old versions of your maps. Fixed a glitch keeping you from choosing your character. Made the ground less 'slippery' (further adjustments to player physics). Fixed a glitch that causes your character to occasionally look like they are falling for a split second as they are standing still.
Soon I will begin bringing other multiplayer games onto my home server... I already converted the code for the Brooms Online quidditch game, but it was very late at night and I wasn't aware of how the version of the game I converted was a very old version, so now I need to redo all of it with the new version. :-( The other games besides CND will be very easy to convert because they are much less complex, except for the new muliplayer mario world game which will be done last.
(12/13/2010)
Redesigned the mail database. You cant really tell but it is all much more organized now, I am really happy with it. It will make it much easier for moderators to overview player to player mail. Moderators can now also view their sent messages and see if the players have viewed those messages yet or not (the 'new' star). All players can view their sent messages actually, but you can only tell if the other user has viewed your message or not if you are a moderator. Also I added a music button to the game in the bottom right that lets you toggle between playing music/sounds, just sounds, or no sound at all.
(12/15/2010)
Fixed a glitch that made the jetpack look funky with thing rotating around it. Fixed glitches relating to getting a house and entering houses. You can now buy a house properly (if you do not already own one). I will also be going through World 2 and making it look nicer, I know it looks awful right now and all destroyed... I already started making it look nicer today. I am really liking the controls now finally, it feels really natural. I think I will stick with these... They are very mario-ish, but a little more slow and in control than traditional mario was. Also fixed a glitch that keeps points from being displayed when you kill an enemy. Also fixed a glitch that keeps enemies from falling when they die. I was working on a new multiplayer game last year that I never released... I might try to finish it during the winter break. We'll see.
(12/17/2010)
Now up and running very well: Star Sky. Also I have been working on my multiplayer space invaders game, retro quidditch, and quidditch tonight. Also addded /hardsave and /softsave commands for mappers to make it easier to edit maps with the annoying text everytime you save. I got BO to work too and improved its functionality. I am not going to put it up today though, tomorrow probably.
(12/19/2010)
Updated CND to have Brooms Online Quidditch game on it. Made the quidditch game work multiplayer for both websites. Retro Quidditch also works now on BO. I got a script set up to check if the gameservers are offline every hour and restart them if they are... Very good for downtime! I added player indicators to Brooms Online Quidditch so its easier to see what other players are in the game. Lots more stuff for Star Sky 2 too (changed the transition from overworld to space invaders and a tonnn of small fixes to make the game feel smoother). And dun dun dun duuuunnn... I moved the MARIO SERVER! So now you can play Multiplayer Mario. The only server left to move is the Mario World Server (for the mario race game). That game is not really done anyways though so it was low priority. Something that I REALLY want to do that needs to be done big time is improve the chat server scripts. Right now its really difficult to tell who is in the chatroom and who is not... That seriously needs fixing.
I spent all day yesterday restructuring the website so the game server is now hosted on my computer at home. This will solve all the problems with my webhost letting the servers go offline. :-) I am not upset with my host; they were pretty nice about hosting my games anyways, because normally they do not do that for clients and were making an exception.
They were making the exception because the host I was with before (vistapages) allowed the game servers, and vistapages was bought out by hostMDS, which does not allow these game servers. But since vistapages did allow them, hostMDS kept allowing it. Apparently though my account kept being reverted back to default every time the server was restarted (or something like that, they were not telling my why it was happening), and every time I had to contact them to get it going again (usually taking 3-5 emails back and forth). It was really frustrating and I have been wanting to make this change for a while now but haven't because of the time I knew it would take.
Having the server on my home computer really puts me back in control of server downtime. I am paying for a pretty good speed internet right now so I don't think you guys will be unhappy with the network lag. My games always have a lot of network lag anyways because they are coded so improperly
I had to go through a lot of very very old code and make a lot of changes and now I am afraid there are more bugs then ever. I will try to go through and correct some bugs this month, with a focus on the main Chip N Dales game.
I have a contest for you this week. Write your own original poem relating to Halloween! I will pick the three best ones for users to vote on, but for now just start writing! All submissions must be entered here before November! Get cracking quick!!!
