Posts filed under 'cantr ii'
About a month ago I started writing a blog in relation to my thoughts on someday develop a new game next to Cantr. Since I did not want to make these ideas public yet, I thought I’d just blog for archival purposes - for myself to keep track of thoughts and links, and for players to read back once the game is up and running. I quickly found myself blogging a lot more than I expected, however, and on subjects varying more and more, albeit all computer / programming related. It feels a bit pointless to blog too much on a password-protected page. Since I used pmWiki as the background tool for the blog, I also implicitly disallowed any comments on posts, never mind things like enabling RSS feeds.
I also decided that it was kind of silly that I had a relatively nice looking blog behind a password-protection, while my own website was starting to look really dated. The design of my old website is already about five years old and I’m bored with it. Besides, since it is written in plain HTML, it is not quite as easy to keep it up-to-date as a wiki or blog style site. And some blogs look really like proper sites. So, I decided to move my old site out of the way, create a new one powered by WordPress, and integrate it with my newly founded blog. You are looking at the result. All the previous entries of my hidden blog have been entered below.
My photo album, for me the most important part of my site, has always been badly integrated with the site itself. WordPress, however, has plugins available to use with Gallery 2. Since my current albums are in Gallery 1, the transition should be relatively easy, and it should be possible to integrate it all nicely into this site. That might take a little while to do, though, so until then you can find my pictures still here.
At the moment of writing I’m also still looking for a nice theme / skin for this site, so be patient and the design should gradually improve …
October 30th, 2006
On Friday morning I saw a link to the intruiging but utterly useless Whitespace programming language, which in turn refers to the language in development Kaya. Kaya looks pretty cool. It’s based on Haskell, which I don’t really know, and thus not object-oriented but functional language. They call it a scripting language, but it’s really more a general programming language, I think. It has many features geared towards server-side web development and it has nice quirky features I didn’t know before. It is a clear attempt to keep the language simple but take good things from many languages. The community on the mailinglist is also very friendly.
But then, I spent hours and hours - well, doing other stuff in between - trying to get the Kaya compiler to compile and run. I missed all major libraries it uses - probably a sign of how outdated our Cantr II server is, which is a bit of a worry. Eventually it worked (this RPM search engine was invaluable), but then I get compiler errors on the most basic tutorial examples. And the documentation, except for one non-exhaustive tutorial, is practically non-existant. So it’s both cool to see a language in it’s very early yet promising stage of development, but it’s also clearly risky to use it on a bigger scale.
Then Monday and Tuesday this week were almost entirely spent on server management. For unknown reasons, the server had rebooted on Monday morning, and we had the wrong mysql server version in the boot script, resulting in all kinds of SQL errors about corrupted and missing data. It took hours before we figured out what happened and then quite some time to get it all back up and running. And from out of shock we finally set up proper automatic daily backups for the database … which I see now didn’t actually work.
I really want to make it a project to simplify things in the next few months. Clean up the server and remove obsolete stuff; clean up the Cantr organisation and remove unnecessary elements; clean up the Cantr game design and remove unnecessary features.
I just read an interesting blog with an interview of some of the most prominent programmers, including the designers of C++, Linux, Ruby, Python, etc. Very interesting. Especially the sections on what books they recommend. Linus Torvalds and Bjarne Stroustrup both recommend Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language. Linus goes on recommending Patterson & Hennessy, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Crawford & Gelsinger, Programming the 80386. David Heinemeier Hansson recommends Beck & Andres, Extreme Programming Explained and Peter Norvig suggests Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Finally, both James Gosling and Tim Bray suggest Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley.
Through this interview I also just found the Dojo Toolkit which is somewhat similar to Google’s Web Toolkit, but both more advanced and in a more premature state (that is, some of the examples don’t seem to work on my computer). Interesting drag-n-drop features.
Note to myself: I really need to figure out what Ruby on Rails is all about …
October 11th, 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.
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):
September 24th, 2006