JaeWeb

cantr ramblings

October 5th, 2006

I haven’t been writing much here, but there has been little progress towards a new game. I’m learning more and more about PmWiki, though, so this blog should become nicer and nicer .

I also discovered a cool 3D program developed by Google, although it’s a bit obscure yet how it actually works. It seems to be a simpler interface just by guessing more what the user wants. But it has so many user interface features that you really wonder why other programs don’t have those.

It is more and more annoying how I can’t seem to get over the hurdle over some very, very basic initial questions about the game:

• A new version of a land-based open ended roleplaying game - a new version of Cantr II, or a space trade etc. based roleplaying game, somewhere in between Cantr II and, say, Eve Online.
• Webbased or 3D? The former is easier to program; widely accessible; and includes fancy features thanks to Ajax; the latter is much more impressive, but makes the hurdle quite high.
• What language to use for the back end? I like C, C++, but PHP is so much faster, while Java has the cool Google utilities.

As long as I can’t even answer those, there is nothing I can do to make this project go further.

Another thing is that the current state of Cantr does not make me much more enthousiast about new games either. After growing to over 2000 players a few months ago, it is now down by 400 already - that is a loss of 20 percent of the players! And I have no idea how to fix that. Players seem more and more disgruntled not with particular features - they always did that - but overall with the game. What kind of organisational change would bring new spirit to the game? All this while the actual staff is performing perhaps better than ever.

Entry Filed under: future game, 3d, cantr ii, programming languages