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.comI 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
