Wasting my day a bit, I stumbled on some videos I did not want to leave out of this blog:
On a totally different note - Cantr got a review today in a large Polish online gaming journal, Gram. It looks so cool to see my familiar screen shots among the other games … and Cantr is described as ‘genius’. Makes my day!
Add comment November 12th, 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:
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.
Add comment October 5th, 2006
Last night I studied the basic concept of AJAX and I am intrigued. I used it for Cantr to implement automatically updating events lists without reloading the page, but of course when this is used from the start in designing a webbased game it can be far more powerful. Gmail has always amazed me by their power and speed, and it is clear that one can learn from them, or their imitators, on how to develop these things.
As I said, I am totally unsure about what kind of platform to use, but although I really enjoy programming in C++ and would love to be an expert in 3D game programming, the likelihood of me ever getting a succesfull game finished that way is rather limited. Webbased is still the future, it seems, and I’d better investigate more of this kind of technologies and use them. I noticed that RunEscape has a pretty cool and fast 3D interface, while using a Java applet. So even webbased it is possible to get a reasonable speed with decent graphics.
The big question is to what extent a faster game like RunEscape is really bound to have the pointless chatter they have in the game, as opposed to the roleplaying quality of Cantr players. Can a faster game be controlled sufficiently?
Some important links on AJAX components (other than the above):
Add comment September 24th, 2006
Just set up this site and the game site using pmWiki, as a very first tiny step towards developing a new game. I also set up a Subversion repository and added some very few lines of code stolen from the Cantr II server code, including a simple function for database access and some basics for exception handling. That’s all there is so far!
I’ve been looking into 3D design software. Maya is very cool software, and I saw a really interesting book on how to use it, but the software is sooo expensive. So I guess I’ll have to stick to Blender, which is impressive, but not quite as friendly and especially just the colors of the interface make it depressing to work with 
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Add comment September 22nd, 2006
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