PBM News Blurb - March 21st, 2011

[Gads]

Hey Hatch,

I've also checked out your website and blog. Your game sounds a great idea and wish you every luck with it.

We're (Gad Games) also in the process of developing our own game for the web. A fantasy RPG. It is called Ilkor: Dark Rising and we hope to have a beta release for the public at the end of the year.

I was interested in learning about your chosen technologies. I'm surprised you might not be catering for IE. Personally I am a Chrome user, but you'll be ruling out a fairly large user base. Whether we like it or not, IE has the majority of the market. The fact you are using JQuery should allow you to be far less concerned with browser compatibility. Not so?

For interest sake, we're using a C# MVC implementation. JQuery is our client-side framework aswell, but we're targeting HTML5 and CSS3. This is largely to do with the requirement to make use of the new browser features such as a client-side datastore (great for caching map and player data) and of course the canvas which we're using to render our maps.

It does mean only the new browsers will work with our game, but by this time next year the majority of the browsers out there will support the features we're coding against.

We're using two types of databases. MongoDb for the map and SQL for all other data entities. In-between the SQL DB and our server-side logic we're using Memcache for our caching solution.

We've a number of other 'bits and pieces' but the above is our high level artchitecture...oh and we've gone for a 'long polling' client-side implementation for our async calls.

How are you planning to handle mapping? I would serious suggest you look into HTML5 / Canvas and MongoDb.

Cheers,

Sean.

What language/framework are you using on the back end? I see you're using SQL for storage and JQuery as a frontend JS lib.

PHP, Javascript with JQuery, and MySQL. No framework. I'm writing everything from scratch other than a few things involving JQuery, although I did use an free login/registration script, which I may end up replacing in the end.

I use Notepad++ with the FTP plugin as my IDE. I'm using Chrome and FF as my browsers. I really dislike IE and may end up putting code in the game to tell people who get to the main page with IE to GTFO.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com

[Ramblurr]

Indeed, unfortunately IE versions 6-7 have the majority market share by far, and they support only a few, if any, of the CSS3/HTML5 features.

Fortunately, IE 9 has been released and has received very positive reviews, not to mention its CSS3/HTML 5 support+performance is finally on par with modern versions of Chrome and FF.

oh and we've gone for a 'long polling' client-side implementation for our async calls.

Awesome! Comet is something I think more web developers should consider when designing their architecture.

Regarding mapping and modern technology, for games set in space I would love to see a nifty application of WebGL to present interactive 3D starmaps. Navigating in 3D is tough however, and a lot of thought would have to be put into the interface and input model to make it easy and not confusing/disorienting. Maybe a sort of fake 3D would work, where the user can freely move in 2D and the 3rd dimension is semi-fixed.

[Gads]

I agree with you comments, though not so sure I agree with you on IE6-7 having majority market share.

According to the stats; IE does have overall market share (56.64% as of Feb 2011). However, that figure is broken down into:

IE6: 12.02%
IE7: 08.35%
IE8: 35.68%
IE9: 00.59%

[source]

You'll see that IE8 has by far the highest user base. The trend over recent years has seen people upgrade their browsers quicker and more frequently than in the past. I don't see this trend slowing down.

So our strategy is based on this. We think that by this time next year, IE9 will have a much larger user base that will continue to climb quickly.

Couple this with the fact our game is only going to be in beta this time next year, we felt it is better to build it on a platform that by the time our game has matured, the bulk of the browser user-base will be compatible.

IE8 gained 35% of the market in about 2 years. IE9 has just hit the streets, so I am expecting it to do similar things, if not quicker.

The other browsers (FF, Chrome etc) already support the HTML5 features we plan on taking advantage of.

Indeed, unfortunately IE versions 6-7 have the majority market share by far, and they support only a few, if any, of the CSS3/HTML5 features.

Fortunately, IE 9 has been released and has received very positive reviews, not to mention its CSS3/HTML 5 support+performance is finally on par with modern versions of Chrome and FF.

oh and we've gone for a 'long polling' client-side implementation for our async calls.

Awesome! Comet is something I think more web developers should consider when designing their architecture.

Regarding mapping and modern technology, for games set in space I would love to see a nifty application of WebGL to present interactive 3D starmaps. Navigating in 3D is tough however, and a lot of thought would have to be put into the interface and input model to make it easy and not confusing/disorienting. Maybe a sort of fake 3D would work, where the user can freely move in 2D and the 3rd dimension is semi-fixed.

[Ramblurr]

Ah! Well I stand corrected. I definitely think your forward thinking will pay off.

[ixnay]

Thanks for posting these technical details! I am investigating options for a development platform, and this info is invaluable...

[Hatch]

I was interested in learning about your chosen technologies. I'm surprised you might not be catering for IE. Personally I am a Chrome user, but you'll be ruling out a fairly large user base. Whether we like it or not, IE has the majority of the market. The fact you are using JQuery should allow you to be far less concerned with browser compatibility. Not so?

I'm halfway joking about not using IE. I rarely use it myself and I'll probably make a half-hearted attempt to test with at least IE 9 and try to fix any incompatibility issues that come up, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it.

Keep in mind that I'm really only developing this game for myself. I could care less if it's a commercial success or not. If I cared about that I would be developing it for Facebook. Don't read this as some type of political statement against commercial games. My feelings about this are only for MY game, which is burning a hole in my soul right now for me to get it out of my head and onto the web server. I think about it constantly, and have trouble getting my brain to shut down about it at night to go to sleep.

Mapping? I'm doing it as a complete brute force hack. For system maps I set up two nested arrays to start at the top left corner and loop through square by square until it reaches the bottom right corner. At each square I check to see if there's something that needs to be displayed in that square and create a new image anchor, or else display an image anchor that shows a black square. The cool thing about star system maps based on squares is that you can easily build them with a grid of html img anchors.

Most of the game is just hacked together. I'm not a professional coder, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing some things badly and will probably have to do a lot of optimization at some point to handle more than a few dozen people playing at the same time. My CSS file is a spectacular mess right now. Heh. My functions PHP file is 2600+ lines of code and growing every day. I really need to split it up to be more manageable.

Honestly though, if I get 100 people playing this game at some point I'll be happy enough with it. Maybe it will have a lot more people, maybe less. I just need to get it finished right now and then I can take a deep breath and think about the future of it.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com

[Gads]

Will good luck Hatch. I say go for it! It really doesn't matter what the reasons are for wanting to design, write and run a game in my opinion, though 'wanting to do it for yourself' surely has to be one of them. Without that it will fail.

So many people never get around to doing what they actually want to do, so its great to hear from people like yourself. I've been wanting to design a game for a long long time and am just so happy that I've finally taken the leap and got stuck in. We've got so much work to do, my biggest worry is thinking we've taken on too much!! :-)

Cheers,

Sean

I was interested in learning about your chosen technologies. I'm surprised you might not be catering for IE. Personally I am a Chrome user, but you'll be ruling out a fairly large user base. Whether we like it or not, IE has the majority of the market. The fact you are using JQuery should allow you to be far less concerned with browser compatibility. Not so?

I'm halfway joking about not using IE. I rarely use it myself and I'll probably make a half-hearted attempt to test with at least IE 9 and try to fix any incompatibility issues that come up, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it.

Keep in mind that I'm really only developing this game for myself. I could care less if it's a commercial success or not. If I cared about that I would be developing it for Facebook. Don't read this as some type of political statement against commercial games. My feelings about this are only for MY game, which is burning a hole in my soul right now for me to get it out of my head and onto the web server. I think about it constantly, and have trouble getting my brain to shut down about it at night to go to sleep.

Mapping? I'm doing it as a complete brute force hack. For system maps I set up two nested arrays to start at the top left corner and loop through square by square until it reaches the bottom right corner. At each square I check to see if there's something that needs to be displayed in that square and create a new image anchor, or else display an image anchor that shows a black square. The cool thing about star system maps based on squares is that you can easily build them with a grid of html img anchors.

Most of the game is just hacked together. I'm not a professional coder, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing some things badly and will probably have to do a lot of optimization at some point to handle more than a few dozen people playing at the same time. My CSS file is a spectacular mess right now. Heh. My functions PHP file is 2600+ lines of code and growing every day. I really need to split it up to be more manageable.

Honestly though, if I get 100 people playing this game at some point I'll be happy enough with it. Maybe it will have a lot more people, maybe less. I just need to get it finished right now and then I can take a deep breath and think about the future of it.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com

[Hatch]

So many people never get around to doing what they actually want to do, so its great to hear from people like yourself. I've been wanting to design a game for a long long time and am just so happy that I've finally taken the leap and got stuck in. We've got so much work to do, my biggest worry is thinking we've taken on too much!! :-)

That's definitely true. I've been wanting to work on my game for probably over 5 years now but was daunted by the amount of work to do it all by myself including frontend and backend programming. Then almost 4 years ago someone told me about Travian and I played it for about 6 months along with about 40 other people I talked into playing and I started trying to figure out how they did things and realized they don't have a lot of backend stuff going on there.

So I found a login script I liked and got it set up then started from the first page and expanded out from there. It's been very slow, but it's really picked up this year as I got a roadmap laid out and started making ToDo lists for myself. I've got the entire design of the game in my head and most of it out on documents, so I usually just pick something and start coding on it. The design ends up changing some as I go along, but I think its usually for the better since I tend to overcomplicate ideas in my head and simplify/streamline them a bit once I start coding them.

The only thing I don't have completely laid out yet is combat, but I'm hoping to start getting the framework for that going in a few months.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com