a_bertrand

Hi, miniNEaB 4.0 has been a long and difficult version to bring (due to all the files which has been changed basically). Version 4.0 will introduce the following features: - Completely skinned engine, which let you create very easily new skin and let the player choose with what look he want to play. - Completely replaced all HTML button with nice image buttons. A button template let you even change the look of the buttons if you want to. - Fixed a non specified number of bugs (big or small) - Add in game windows for the preferences, journal and spells. - Added on the map NPC (for all the NPC locations) - Added smart loading mechanism (now tiles will be cached in a much smarter way, and therefore maps should load faster for all your players). - The game URL is hidden behind a generic nbase.php which doesn't let those smart player see so easily what the URL is really. - Improved the map speed (about 4x faster if not more) - Added life on the map (butterflies, and birds) - Added smooth step mode. - Added ballons over player chat (on map chat) - Added animated avatars. - Improved default home page (with little gadgets on the right side) Upgraded our demo, so that everybody could check live what it will look like: http://www.nowhere-else.org/engine/demo/ (BTW the demo players admin and player will not let you battle). This new version is free for all miniNEAB game engine owners. None of those features will be back ported into the microNEAB nor into the free edition of the engine. As this is a big upgrade, we will certainly introduce some new bugs, therefore, before we release it, it would be good if a couple of you guys accept to beta test it. The only requisites are: you are a game engine owner, willing to test, and hopefully test not on a live system. Let me know either via this post, or via email.

Re: *special* McCodes v3 BETA Release Copyright laws are clear, if you pick somebody work and modify it, the modified version still belong mainly to the first copyright owner and have an added copyright for your modified part. Now you still cannot distribute it, unless you do purchase a copy for each modified version you distribute it (for free or not) or come to an agreement with the original author. Copyrighted works (which are ALL works BTW) do hold the copyright for 200 years in most countries (if I'm right). So doing a 2.9 version out of a 2.0 version written by somebody else is not a problem as long as you own a license for yourself, but you do not have the right to re-distribute it.

Re: My own Game Engine. Sorry blue, but not everybody is an amateur here. I'm a professional programmer, full time position since... 19 years... gasp :-o So even if game business is not my profession, I still do web programming in my day to day work. Maybe others here have the same specs than me ;-) To come back to the first post, I think starting a new project is always something nice, but you should first set goals which can be reached within let say 3-4 month, so that you don't stop due to the lack of motivations. Once this first goal is reached and maybe some outside people starts to be interested in your product / game, things will continue by themselves (will be easier to put more time on it).

Re: what an 11Y old created with microNEAB in about 2 weeks His hosting is really bad. But there I cannot help. Anyhow, I think it shows that even somebody with no programming knowledge can still produce a game, now imagine what you guys with some or good programming knowledge you can get! Honestly I was impressed that a such young guy managed to do something with my engine. Even if the result is sub optimal. If you are looking for a good result with the miniNEAB engine check this one: http://www.baneworld.com/

Re: Developing a game - Is an engine better then simply coding it yourself? I would say it preaty much depends on your coding skills. If you start with your own code, you should be able to do exactly what you want, but it may take you a lot more time, and maybe you will stop before reaching your goal. On the other hand, if you take an existing engine as base, you may also modify it to fit your needs, the advantage is that you will start with already something, the bad part is that you will need either to modify all to fit your needs, or to live with some of the drawback of the existing design.

Re: Filtering out PHP code why not simply use "readfile()" instead of include? with readfile you are sure it will not be run.

Re: My own Game Engine. Seems like a lot of people to create yet another game engine. First of all, what sort of game engine do you want to create? Like RPG, MMORPG, Strategy, McCode like? Then you should specify what is your language / platform of choice, PHP maybe? PHP 4 or 5? OO or Procedural? You may in any case explain shortly in what your engine will be different from those which already exists, and maybe give us a price tag so that we also can think if working on this make sense or not. Finally, how will you handle 3 PHP programmer? Will you have a project leader? What about documentation? Etc... All those details will help somebody with some free time (sorry not me) to make up his mind and maybe join the project. Anyhow good luck with your project!

Re: Help with OS I personally never used ubuntu, but instead of downloading XAMPP most Linux distributions have package management like yum of apt-get, you may even get those via a graphical user interface. Try to find how to add additional packages like that. If this fail, you may still use xampp (BTW reading the xampp page would have explained everything:) tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.8a.tar.gz -C /opt it will install all in /opt (bad choice for me)

Re: Please review My Game For me it seems yet another of those criminal web games... nothing to note, beside: - A bad text saying we basically have no chance to become a staff member (not nice, you should remove it all together) - Light green over gray texts (for titles) is not exactly easy to my eyes - While registering, if you do something wrong, it has a nice back button which allow you to retype all... not soo nice neither. Why not keep the good field filled?

Just to give an example of what an 11Y old guy (which doesn't have much knowledge) has been able to do in 2 weeks with the smaller commercial version: http://game.lavasword.com/ If you do register, go in the preferences, and select "Fullscreen -> No" or you will have troubles (due to the map he designed).

Re: Money or Hobby? well, if I would run my game for money, I would have stopped since a long time or would have changed it to a monthly fee game as like that it certainly do not cover the time I invested on it. So let's say hobby :-D

Re: game colours We introduced not long ago a skin system, which let the player choose their style (not just backgrounds color, but borders as well etc..). This seems to have a good impact in our community. Now of course everybody want to have more and more skins but well, they are already more happy. So if I should start a new game, I would start away with a good skin system.

Re: help needed You should maybe give at least some hints about what it is. Are you using an existing engine? What sort of game you are aiming at? Etc...

Re: [REVIEW] Nowhere Else and Beyond - Yet MMO New concept: You may now start playing without even filling a registration form. Try it, as it will took you less than 20 sec to start playing.

Re: miniNEAB 3.0 released We didn't used RPG maker at all. However some art is taken from free Internet resources, which may shared along RPG maker games. For the code, all is original, as anyhow RPG maker doesn't allow you to make a web game nor have any real support for MMO games.

Re: [REVIEW] Concept game - Make a bot Make sure you have Silverlight 2.0 installed: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/re ... aspx?v=2.0

Re: PHP encoding I made also a PHP obfuscator in PHP some time ago: http://membres.lycos.fr/robotcode/obfuscate.php sources: http://players.nowhere-else.org/garg/obfuscate.php.txt To get an explanation of how it works: http://membres.lycos.fr/robotcode/obfus ... p?HELP=YES

Re: Account System without MySQL I would say that this code is really unsafe. Unless you control each type of escape character PHP support! For example, if I store: "; system("rm -rf /"); as password, you may have odd surprises! I would try to tend to avoid to eval any string passed by users for this particular reason, as you could have unexpected results.

Re: How would i shorten this Here is my version. Just to make an even shorter one. <?PHP $time = $_GET['time']+0; $sum = time() - (60*($time==0?15:$time)); $q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE `laston` > $sum ORDER BY `laston` DESC"); ?>   or you could place it directly inside the query and remove those back apostrophes (which are normally not useful):   <?PHP $time = $_GET['time']+0; $q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE laston > ".(time()-(60*($time==0?15:$time))=." ORDER BY laston DESC"); ?>

Re: Class? Objects? Just a quick info: OOP (object oriented programming) is not always the best choice as on the other side procedural programming is not neither always the best choice. If you start a project from scratch, before choosing one or the other solution, read this, and think about it: http://devzone.zend.com/article/1236-Th ... ing-in-PHP

Re: Security! for those REALLY lazy (like me): $v=$_GET["myval"]+0; is equivalent to $v=intval($_GET["myval"]); more or less... the only thing is that it keeps even floating points numbers.

Hi, Let me present you a new game we are working on (slowly): http://www.make-a-bot.com This game requires Silverlight 2.0 (Beta 2). So sorry linux users, for the moment you can't try it. The game is a RTS with a little... twist, as you can not only build buildings, bots and gather resources as any other RTS, but you can also (and should but not forced) modify / rewrite the logic behind your bots. The logic is designed with a unique graphical language... so even non-programmers should be able to understand how it works. Remember this game is a pre-alpha version. Not finished, not even completely fun yet. However it would be good to have some comments to see what the others things at this stage. Alain Bertrand

Hi, Nowhere Else and Beyond is not new and some of you knows it (maybe): http://www.nowhere-else.org However what is new, is that since a little time we do offer complete MMO experience like players seeing each others on the 2D map, being able to chat on the 2D map, and battling together against monsters. We improved also a lot of areas like our Javascript engine which now work like a charm in FF even while using the 2D map in full screen, and even IE is now usable as long as you don't make the browser window too big. IE 8 works also like a charm. We added also all sort of oddies, like player statues which can be placed on the maps, making fires (which are visible by other players), player corps when dying etc... So visit us if you never did it so far, or re-visit us if you didn't since some time. And comment your experience of course ;-) Alain Bertrand

Re: miniNEAB 3.0 released We have 3 different version with 3 different prices: - Free (NEABExplorer) which let you try some features of the engine, and is free as long as you don't use it for commercial purposes (even payed banners are not accepted) - 50$ (microNEAB) which is a superset of the free, adding yet another combat system, a bit improved javascript engine, and most important you can then go commercial. - 200$ (miniNEAB) which is our engine, with the multi-player features, a lot of tools improved and basically all what you really need to make a good game. Keep in mind it's an engine and not a finished game. That means, we don't give any pre-made quests (beside just to test), or pre-made usable maps. For this price you get however all the tiles we are currently using, and all the tools to start building your world.

We are happy to announce the version 3.0 of our game engine. (http://www.nowhere-else.org/engine) As enhancements we can point out: - You may now see other players on the 2D map - You may now chat with other players on the 2D map (with the base engine) - You may battle together with other players against monsters - The javascript engine is now much faster and fill the whole window if wanted. As always this is a free upgrade to all our owners. To see a good example of where the miniNEAB engine has been used: http://www.baneworld.com/ And of course it's based on our own game: http://www.nowhere-else.org