In the wee hours of the morning [BOTF MMOG Ressurection]

[CaptainNet]

I am happy to report that the rumors of my departure have been greatly exaggerated.

It is the wee hours of the morning and I have been everywhere on the net since I last posted here at AFC.

I have come to one conclusion in my travels of all things net: the best people are the trek people of the BOTF community.

I have decided to ressurect the BOTF MMOG idea and will begin work on it here shortly. It will not be at the old shadows of the federation address. Instead it will be at a new address.

I hope you all can forgive me for leaving you haging like I did. My life was filled with crazy ideas and people who wanted me to help them out with some things (net wise) which didn't pan out in the end.

The important thing is that I am back and that I will begin work on the BOTF MMOG idea right away as soon as I am done with this post.

I will post a bit more info as I get it available.

[Dr_Breen]

ahem i think missed some parts...so there's a new project (the BOTF MMOG) and the shadow project won't be continued?
i thought you already spent days of work in creating the shadow project?

[KrazeeXXL]

I have come to one conclusion in my travels of all things net: the best people are the trek people of the BOTF community.

yea you're absolutely right

to the BotF MMOG:




btw: wb

greetz Borg_KrazeeXXL

[CaptainNet]

Hello,

Funny pic of Batman on an Elephant, and I will explain the BOTF MMOG, Dr. Breen.

Okay here is where my story begins.

At first I thought I would help out a chat room on a chat service with developing a site for them.

Long story short, they were taking the software I had developed and the hosting along with the domain I provided and were using it to defame other people.

In otherwords not so nice stuff.

Which kinda torqued me off that I had put close to a thousand hours of development into the portal which drove the site for them.

Needless to say I couldn't have that sort of thing going on, so I yanked the site.

I wandered aimlessly in the desert of the net for weeks to follow just trying to find my serenity again.

You see with the worsening economy I had gotten rid of all but about 20 domain names, and the shadowsofthefederation.com was one that I had gotten rid of.

Well, never let a bad mistake keep you from working on even greater ideas.

So I dug in and worked on some math, worked on some developmental functions for php, and played with various hosting configurations.

I learned how to eat rice, and have almost given up on smoking, so I now can afford what the game would have needed in the first place, and that is a dedicated server with at minimum a 10 Meg with 100 Meg peak connection. (something which would have not been possible from shared hosting or a home server.)

Well I have the server set up now and am working on developing a new software package for the shadows of the federation/birth of the federation MMOG.

This time it will NOT rely upon using iframes and will go for more power (man do I feel like tim the toolman taylor for using that line) for the players.

Even now as I speak my trusty coding companion and side kick Bill Clinton (a furry ball of claws and paws with a purrr and a snore that could move mountains), is in my lap and we are roaring to go.

So like a wise person once told me, "It is not taking a step back, but moving onward."

Sometimes the best of luck can happen from seemingly the worst of things.

I feel very confident that this time the MMOG will be a real game that we can play in the very near future, (or at least cuss at our browsers while beta testing)

I am in the process of setting up the hosting on the server now, and will begin work on the db for the game and some rudimentary scripts.

I will be able to salvage most of what I had already developed, but somethings I wanted to change just because well they just weren't perfect yet.

So if you have ANY questions at all about what is going on just let me know, LOL

In the meanwhile I will get to work.

I hope to have some progress to post by morning.

[Flocke]

welcome back CaptainNet!

wish you better progress this time
But better don't be too enthusiastic again, it's alot of hard work and you'll need much endurance for such a project.

cheers

[CaptainNet]

welcome back CaptainNet!
But better don't be too enthusiastic again, it's alot of hard work and you'll need much endurance for such a project.

You know you are absolutely right flocke.

A wise friend of mine (back when I was designing role-playing games) had once told me to pace myself, and enjoy what it is I was doing. He would say to me, "Design the sort of game that you would enjoy playing.

Call it a lack of caffiene in my system here in the early hours of the morning, but I think that you are both right.

I know that yourself, Dr. Breen, and several others had followed the SOTF project closely and seemed excited that someone was making something like it a reality.

There is much in my story that I am leaving out for brevity's sake, but needless to say it has been a long and hard journey.

I have the server paid for a couple of months before I ever have to worry about renewing the cost on it. And even when I have to I have made sure the costs are managable and within my budget. (Primarily from giving up smoking and cheeseburgers and switching to iced tea and rice as my vices).

I think I will have fun this time.

I think I will design the game that I want to play.

In fact I don't think I will, I know I will.

I have faced adversity in the past and overcame it.

I may try to elecit the help (programming and management wise) from the BOTF community. I have the server set up to do such.

Maybe with a little help, and a few kind words, I can overcome this habit I have of giving up just before the miracle happens, and get something substantial accomplished.

With that said ...

I have a db to refine

Thank you,

~Joel

[jaruler]

manage your time is important, act like you have a manager driving you and not yourself. have clear goals for completion and when by and always give yourself rest man. do not do something too much and to ofyen as you will get bored with it. The things i enjoy in life i am carefull not to do al the time. that way i look forward to it again when i do it. that way it does ot bore and i look forward instead of trying to find other things to do.

I hope it pays off and you can create something special

[Dr_Breen]

I learned how to eat rice....

i could have helped you with that at least...

[CaptainNet]

Something special is being created

We are back to calling it Shadows of the Federation. I have registered and set up the server for the domain name of ShadowsOfTheFederation.info for this little project

I have just returned to windows, so I am afraid this post will be short. I am in the middle of a ton of updates but I have so much I would like to post about in the ways of thoughts I have had for the game.

This entire time I have been working on MMOG theory and design for browser based games, and I am refining db and coding techniques quite a bit to make it lean and mean, but still nothing short of amazing.

The game may not look to flashy, but when it comes to options and infinite play, the game will not be short in those departments.

Thank you,

~CaptainNet

[stardust]

Good to hear from you and that you're still busy knee deep in coding etc

[CaptainNet]

Good to hear from you and that you're still busy knee deep in coding etc

If code were tribbles, yes you could say I am up to my eyebrows in furry cooing code

I'll be glad when this windows re-install is done and i have all the updates done, then I can post a longer post with some more details.

Thank you,

~CaptainNet

[CaptainNet]

Okay here is what I have gotten done so far:

I have set up a development machine where I can code from with Ubuntu Linux installed as the OS. With relatively few distractions on that machine (i.e. my serious chat addiction) it will be possible to focus myself to the game full time.

I have contacted my doctor about problems I was facing that would have prevented me from being able to work on this or any other project in all earnest. I was going through highs and lows and it was seemingly happening on an almost hourly basis. Thanks to an increase in the medication levels of a couple of meds I am taking, this problem has been resolved.

I have registered the domain name of shadowsofthefederation.info for the project and have set up the dedicated server I pay for to host the site. I forsee no problems in being able to afford the monthly cost of this server and in all honesty it would take a dedicated server to host this game anyway.

There is a major change in the game, however. This comes in the form that the game will be done less in real-time and more in turns now. The turns will be processed by a chron job and will be processed every 15 mins.

In addition the map size has been shrank to a more reasonable 300 x 300 sector map size. This still leaves 90,000 sectors of space, so there will be plenty of room to explore and beat the heck out of the occasional species that crosses your path.

I am designing the game so that all traces of flavor, (star trek otherwise) can be removed in the event someone like paramount sends out a nice cease and desist letter. In this way the game can be flawlessly moved to being a generic space game if the absolute worse case happens.

In addition this way of designing the game to be generic will allow for people to customize it to their own sci-fi flavor.

I will leave you all with this small teaser of things to come for now ... but honestly keep the questions coming, it only encourages me to work harder and place myself on a reasonable time-table to develop the game.

"If you promise to get use out of it, I promise to do my best." --CaptainNet

Thank you,

~CaptainNet

[Dr_Breen]

I am designing the game so that all traces of flavor, (star trek otherwise) can be removed in the event someone like paramount sends out a nice cease and desist letter. In this way the game can be flawlessly moved to being a generic space game if the absolute worse case happens.

good idea. perhaps the game should be created to be a regular space game as you said (we could create some shitty pictures of alien ships) and as soon as you release it "somebody" had the idea to make a star trek mod for it

[stardust]

A good idea given the makers of Birth of the Empires got in trouble in it's early stages for using trek content.

I've got too many distractions on my machine... 4000 music tracks for a kick off.

Hope you get on better with the new meds.

[CaptainNet]

Okay,

I think we have reached the general consensus that making it a trek only game or having trek so indelibly etched into it as to make its separation impossible, would be a bad idea.

Now moving on to the good news.

I managed to get some more affordable hosting, and registered the domain (re-registered) ShadowOfTheFederation.com.

Here is what I will do and what I will need.

First I will set up a forum on that site, the link will be http://shadowofthefederation.com/forum when the hosting gets set up and I get the forum set up on it. I will let you all know when it is safe to start posting on the development board there.

Next here is what I will need.

The game will have to be designed to take in account milieu as well as the hard mechanics of actually playing.

What this means is that I will need, as Dr. Breen put it, some "crappy" graphics of ships, structures, etc. I will come up with an exact list and post it on the development forum.

I will also need to get my butt in gear and actually get started working on this. I have had a week now to adjust to the new medication levels and I think the time is ready for me to begin.

I will be developing this all from a Linux Desktop, and not windows. This means chances are good the site will be more firefox friendly than it will be internet explorer friendly. The actual differences will be mild, but with the release of IE 8 I am now refusing to even take IE into consideration when designing a page.

* inserts grumblings of monopolists here *

Okay I will keep you all posted and just as soon as I can get the new board set up I will post back here that it is set up.

Thank you,

~Captain Net