Ok, I had time today to load it up as far os the 3 gem front screen.

I am not sure if people have had problems getting this far, or if the problems were further on but it worked fine for me


Before I go home tonight I will try to actually enter the game area - just too busy right now to do more than load it up


Simon

Right, well I\'ll upgrade my work box to sarge (its currently woody) and I\'ll have a play today if I get time.

Simon

Wouldn\'t the best place to attach a PvP forum be to /dev/null ?


They never listen to responses anyway (unless you count flaming back as listening) So may as well just put their posts in the bit bucket.


(Appology to non geeks, yes I know you probably did not understand a word of that)

Sorry about the wait all, but as was posted by Mehallie http://www.GuildWare.net is up for public alpha testing.

Features are still being added, but we are taking applications for people that want to move their guild site to, message board et al to GuildWare.

Hope to see you there


Simon

Ok its nearly ready.

There are a couple of small bugs I want to iron out before I open it - I would do them tonight but I am a bit too tired to think cohorantly (and I want to test out the basics just to make sure you can atleast sign up and then complain that the rest of it doesn\'t work in the message boards!.)

I will hopefully be posting the link to it on here tommorrow or wednesday at the latest (as long as the real world does not interupt)

Simon

Right, we are both feeling a lot better now and I am finally getting a chance to sit down and do some serious coding on this.

Hopefully I will make some decent progress today!

One other thing - whether I am involved in a guild or not - this suite will be totally guild neutral - ie it will provide hosting for as many guilds that want and site creation tools (it is not quite giving you a strait HTML page - however I think you will like what it offers)

In fact it will work better with more guilds on it (if not all guilds on it) simple by the interation it offers by using a common database.

Ok enough of the concept of it and down to writing the rest of it.

Then I just need to get a domain for it.

Any suggestions? (bear in mind this will be a multi game suite and so the game name should not be in this domain - the game name will be a subdomain eg horizons.domain.com or planeshift.domain.com)

simm

That would be quite possible - for now I\'d just like to get it running but it is deffinatly something which can be done.

if we can come up with some form of authentication between the PL server and the site (not too difficult) an interface could be provided to do creations at that point.

Let me get the system online - see what people think to it then we can discuss adding this feature.

(decided to skip modualising the code - too many problems with variables losing scope - serves me right for using global variables I guess - will keep things updated)

simm

Sorry I haven\'t been back on this topic for 2 days, my wife had to go into hospital, so I am sure you will all understand.

Hopefully she will be better soon, when she is I will do some work on this (hopefully this week)

To answer a couple of questions:

Hosting costs: As I said at the moment I dont pay anything - I am hosted on a comercial websever that will also be doing pay as you go game server hosting. The machie is reasonably high spec (dual xeon) and my friend is charged in the 98 percentile for bandwidth use - I think the pricing is somewhere around ?300 per MBit/s (around $450 US - dont know the exchange rate to euro\'s offhand) If opening this site up to public dramically increases his hosting costs then I will post how much it is costing and hope that that amount is forthcoming.

As many have said it is unlikely to add to much bandwidth - I code my pages to be small - since I hate long loading times. The sites themselves are perl code which (for those not too familiar with web servers) is compiled into memory and stays there until the server needs to page it out - so very little disk access is involved - except for the DB access.
The site was originally coded for the comercial game market (EG, Horizons etc) so it has built into to it the pay/non paying member system. This does not mean there are any banners on the site - it just means for non paying members I have the option of limiting functionallity (posts/hour, being able to host events, inbox size etc) however like was mentioned planeshift being a non paying game I would not intend to charge for the planeshift areas - unless I have to (since I cant afford to finance such hosting myself) I dont think this will happen - I just want to be open about the possibility from the start.

Most of the basic features are already up and running however it needs 3 areas writing to allow me to open it up

1. Public area sign up
2. Guild creation and management area
3. Guild sign up altering (currently it is coded for a single guild only for test reasons)

Also I need to modulise the code both for maintenance reasons and to allow it to be used in different games.

This should not be too much work - though I will remind everyone - this will be pretty much untested stuff - especially under stress - so treat it like you do the horizons code and report any bugs found.

Lastly there will eventually be areas for organisations, such as role play taverns, raiding societies etc, though at first there will only be support for guilds (until I figure out how I want to implement such organisations - I have a few ideas - just narrowing it down) However I do not want to make areas for server/game message boards - 2 reasons - every other one I have ever seen has been mainly used for trolling, flamewars, etc  and I dont want to have to moderate that nonsense, also the bandwidth involved with the above.  only the community boards give useful purpose and that is what I intend to create a good environment for. (server wide/game wide boards can easily be hosted with such as ezboard.
Right time for me to get some food - I\'ll try to keep you updated.

if anyone is curious about the current suite they can find some of it on http://shadowrogues.shinystudios.com

I say some of it as it is password protected to members so you cant really access the best bits (and it is for one single guild right now - and that on horizons) give me some time and I\'ll give you a link to the full one - once it is there

simm