Crithum

I'm willing to hire a graphics artist based in Penang. Let me know whether YOU are interested or you know someone who I can talk to! Thanks!

Naturally, the work is all about this magnificent game!

I started work on those more/better terrain tiles. Just made some beautiful progress and I've got a total of 24 terrain textures and about 120 tile transition masks done. These tile transitions are going to be primarily used for tiling grass over water and sand. Now working on transition masks for water on sand.

Samples:

Mud (variation 1)

Tile transition

Done

• Registration
• Authentication [UC] Login
• [UC] Logout
• [UC] Choosing World - choose which world/map to play
• Worlds management (admin functionality)
• Player management (admin functionality)
• World map
• Settlement (town) map
• Unit management
• Settlement management
• Resource management
• Building management
• Activity messages
• Event queue and game engine capable of

Missing

• Authorization (access to player specific functionality and data)
• Visualization
• More buildings
• Add military units -> add battles and conquering to game engine
• Resource management
• Social features
• Tutorial
• Manual
• Story
• .. and much more

Read a more detailed list here!

I need to implement a Controller, since I’m applying the MVC pattern. I will continue to focus on player management and because I am concentrating on a single module with a limited functionality set, I actually do not need a front controller. However, I know that I will have a whole range of modules in my application (e.g. player management, messaging, trade, military activity, intelligence, etc.) and I will now try to think through whether to use or not to use a front controller.

When coding with PHP, functionality can be grouped into separate PHP scripts. Each of these scripts can act.. Read more!

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I have decided to start small - to develop functionality around player information management. At this point, a sufficient definition of a player would/could/should be something like:
"A player is a registered, identifiable user, who is playing the game. Identification is based on a username, authentication is based on a password. In addition, a player starts playing the game at a certain date and time and his initial origin in the game world is indicated by a set of x and y coordinates."

The following software development steps are very common in order to develop a working implementation:

1. Design/develop data model
2. Design database
3. Implement database
4. Implement value objects (VOs)
5. Implement data access objects (DAOs)
6. Implement tests

The first models that I typically.. Read more!

Time to do some architectural decisions. I guess they call it designing - so here we go, let's talk about the design. I do not usually go for the newest and the fanciest, because it is usually immature and just gives you more problems than you can handle. Besides, most of the time it brings you way too much to learn. I've got plenty of learning to do with PHP alone! I've never done anything with PHP before. What comes to the new and fancy, I won't be doing much of it here, either. Architechure-wise, let's go with the trustworthy Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern!

Using a commonly known pattern helps.. Read more!

So I continued downloading and installing tools..

MySQL Server 5.1

Since my web hosting provider only supports MySQL, it’s only logical to use it as the backend. So, I downloaded “mysql-essential-5.1.45-win32.msi” from http://dev.mysql.com. The installation went pretty much down with “typical” settings and “standard configuration”.

Eclipse for PHP

Then I downloaded the package “eclipse-php-galileo-SR2-win32.zip” from Eclipse.org. I have been using Eclipse for Java for many years now and I wanted to give it a try on PHP development.. Read more!

UMLet 10.4

Since I’m in a habit of putting my initial designs “on paper”, I downloaded this handy Eclipse plugin called UMLet. It’s used for drawing UML diagrams.. Read more!

I downloaded and installed some tools! Let's try to get something concrete of out of these things that they call computers. Here what I got and how it went down:

Apache Web Server 2.2.15

I was first thinking of running PHP scripts on Apache Tomcat, since I have a few versions of them on my PC already installed. However, after reading.. Read more!

PHP 5.2.13

I deliberately did not download PHP 5.3 since I know that my provider will not be running PHP 5.3 for some time now.. Read more!

There I was again. I found myself going thru my farm list. After choosing my village and finding my rally point the horrible waste of human life begins: copy & paste coordinates from notepad into the x&y-coordinate fields, then choose 44 or 55 light cavalry units (a tip: two same numbers are easier to type than two different ones), hit enter, then click on "attack". Wait for screen to reload. My farm list is currently about 50 villages long making it about 10-15 targets for each of my villages. I got four villages myself. Only. How is this going to be like when I have ten villages? Taking a quick look at.. Read more!

Crithum (the web browser game) can be made huge and complex or, it can be kept very simple.

There is a lot of stuff that can be included into a medieval game. I drew up a mindmap about the concepts of the game, which is basically a map of ideas/topics that we can discuss here on this website.

Read the complete blog post about this topic!