theWulfen 2 – Blog

Another Long Gap

February 28, 2009 on 4:04 pm | In Messages | No Comments

Surprise surprise another long gap of inactivity   However things have happened over the period, just at a fairly slow pace.  Firstly I have got all of the graphics finished that I commissioned almost a year ago.  The UI graphics are amazing, despite taking a while to get, they capture the atmosphere that I’m looking for.  I’ve cut, spliced and hacked the original source file around and managed to produce something that I feel works from a technical point of view, I still have a significant amount of work to do in order to get the file size down however as the basic UI is running around 782Kb.  There are two key files that are causing this, but I’m going to tackle them at a later date.

I have spent a significant amount of time developing a core website framework.  This framework has been designed in a very generic manner and can be used for pretty much any web application going and provides a number of very useful functions and classes that can be used throughout the site.  One major element of this framework is that it provides a very expandable backend admin tool.  For those of you who don’t know, writing the backend system of a website often takes more time than the visual frontend…  Creating a framework in this manner also means that should I create some highly useful function or method of doing something, that item then becomes available on every website that is built using the framework.  So far this framework has been used as the foundation for 9 websites and counting…  The other really good thing is that it allows me to use well tested and proven pages and controls throughout websites.  For example, the Contact Us page that is the default in the framework comes with CAPTCHA validation, form validation and composes an email in html with all the frilly bits.  It’s been vigourously tested, has hours of code behind it and is proven to work – however I never need spend any time putting a contact page on a website ever again, beyond simple styling.  Another prime example of this is a payments module that I’m currently implementing.  This will provide a single method of taking payment from a customer for an item (or items).  More critically it will provide one coding interface, regardless of the payment provider.  Currently I’m coding it for ProtX as that’s what one customer has, but I’m going to open it up for PayPal, HSBC and others as and when I need them.

I’ve started to get back into the coding of the website again, which is a good thing.  I’ve made the decision that the game will be JavaScript / MooTools driven and that the only pages that will function outside of this will be the standard ones along the top of the screen (about, support, rankings, forums & home).  Although this may infuriate some people, I feel that I can develop a far cleaner and enjoyable game, rather than adding the extra bits on afterwards.  As such I’m developing a core UI driver that handles the visual aspects of the site.  All pages now load via AJAX and there is a nice looking page transition fade in/out and resize.  I’m working on the menus that pop in and out of the page now and putting my mind towards the map side of the game.

I’ve also made another decsion (going to have to have a rest soon).  Originally I was going to have it so that players had to click a button and their creature would wander off in a direction for a period of time, during which they may see Beasts to attack or other things to interact with.  Now having messed around with a few other games, I think that I need to allow the player to actually navigate their creature around instead.  What this does is shift the emphasis from a semi-automatic system to a much more player-driven system.  This also means that the map/navigation system needs to be created first and that I need to work out some clever ways of storing the data of a world.  One cool thing that this does mean is that I can code some clever bits such as difficult terrain.