a_bertrand

I'm using the services of those guys for my VPS needs: http://www.tektonic.net/ Extremely cheap for what they offer and yet of good quality. For the requirements it pretty much depends on your own needs, but don't go under 512 Mb of ram I would say.

Well so far it doesn't look bad, even if the interface look a bit... messy maybe too many windows even if I know that you want to reproduce like an hacker desktop. So congratulations for your progress and good luck with the project!

All depends what YOU want to do with it. Some engines are good for RPG, some others for strategy etc... so you must define your requirements and then evaluate the engines depending on what you want to do. But I'm a guy which doubts that an engine will do the work for you and think that most of the time it's better to do all by yourself or use some framework to help you but not much more.

well be prepared to have your host turned down by the legal owners of the code (not me). Now to come back to your question about how much it costs to make custom code it depends about the complexity of your requirements and who you hire. Costs varies to cheap (5$ or so per hour) to more (up to about 150$ per hour)... If you take a kid you may get those things cheap. So it would be better to come with a list of things you want to be done and then people can say how much they would require to do this work.

Well not my fault but you have been scammed by those guys. Ask for a refund a buy yourself a correct license or use some free script.

Ravan scripts are illegal copies of McCode as far as I'm aware. Therefore it's an illegal license you got. You should ask for refund in my opinion.

1) Yes there are... and I believe not so few: http://ww2r.playcomet.com/ http://ww2a.playcomet.com/ http://ww2.playcomet.com/ http://www.fightingflattops.com/ http://beta.hoitcg.com/hoi/index.php http://www.operationgamma41.com/ http://www.majorcommand.com/ ... 2) I never play mafia games I don't like them. To catch me a game need to be special, well explained, with a story. A game a played quiet a lot: http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/

Even if agree that software (free or not) should be as bug free as possible it is NOT possible to have 0 bugs inside a software. If you don't believe me, check once how many open bugs PHP still have, or any other. Why do you think you get at least once per month a Microsoft Update? It's basically bug fixing. Same goes for any development and you learn it quickly in the hard way while developing. The more complex the soft is the more bugs you will have. Now to come back to McCode, pretending that it doesn't have bug is simply and purely stupid. However for sure you should get and answer while reporting bugs and hopefully get a bug fix. I shall take example, I do use from time to time a 3D tool called "Modo 501" which allows you to make 3D models, put textures on them, paint them and render them. Now, from time to time it crashes and you loose what you was doing. Is that ok? No for sure it's not, but you cannot even expect that it never happens and you cannot pretend a refund if you get one crash from time to time.

I shall add just one thing: 100% out of the box means a game you buy to play for yourself, not a game engine which should host other players. So if you expect to have a full functioning and UNIQUE game for that price you are simply a fool.

Well it depends if he runs on Linux, as Linux 32 bit kernels can handle more than 4Gb of ram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension Just need the PAE kernel.

I would be more worried about the performances and what if the game starts to be successful and uses a bit too much CPU, will it be kicked like it happens all the time from lunarpages? If a game owner doesn't have the resources to pay an hosting like by equinox, then he should re-think about his goal.

Well just open your eyes and you shall see it on the top bar written in big "Chat"... hard to find indeed.

No I didn't made it, it was just to show that it's possible to create a mafia game yet a bit differently. Actually I totally agree with Peter, it's extremely repetitive, and you have little diversity, I mean, ok you did some of the fights, then what? It's always the same wait a bit, press ok, and see how you fight... how annoying.

I don't like mafia games as most of you knows. Yet wanted to see how some may look like and I must say it goes way beyond those McCode games, at least you know how to use it and it has some screen appeal. For the game play... sorry it's really plain: http://mafia.goodgamestudios.com/ Comments?

grant: removed your signature... was way too big.

there is a good reason why browser don't have all the same support for HTML5... currently HTML5 specs are NOT released and just draft more or less. Which means the standard is not yet fully defined. Which means as well that browser cannot really implement it as it's not yet clear as how all things shall works, and google don't really follow all that HTML5 / CSS3 instead create their own "dialect" which is not a wise choice.

Yes but I keep my point... this by no way a major release.

Well 4 MAJOR versions a year is a lot, and yet if they have nothing changed between version I hardly see the need for a major release. Sorry but software release numbers are really old and do have some meaning. Major.Minor.Patch which means, you change the major number when you really change a lot, like introducing tons of new feature, changing interface or whatever. This should not be all that often. Also a major release may introduce breaking changes. Minor means you added a few things, could be mainly improvements. Patch versions are just bug fixes or very small things. Now as Google feel better than anyone else, as always "manie des grandeur" => "grandeur mania" is their sickness and yet believe we are stupid enough to believe that new number to a software means the software is better. Nope sorry... people will simply stop upgrading every now and then.

They could certainly do a 4.0.1 for that, or in best cases 4.1 but not a 5... it would be like every patch of Microsoft means a new version of windows... we would have windows 3401312... how cool...

Yes danny and most game owners fail to bring a game to completion, ever wondered why?

Firefox 5.0 has been released... now what new? - Allows to define which site is allowed to track you and which one is not. - CSS animations - More HTML 5 (don't know yet exactly what) - Should be faster on Linux Is it worth a version 5? Certainly not. This is because of stupid Chrome versions which increase like the days of the calendar, other browser developers think they should as well. I installed FF 5 on my PC and saw... no difference beside this privacy new option in the preferences. Great...

Odd because trying it on my own IIS doesn't lead to any error. Just to be sure, did you compiled the solution? And did you deployed the files correctly? which means the directory which contains the web.config file is the top directory of the site.

First of all you should try within the Visual Studio or within Mono Develop. If you want to run it on the IIS server it must be on it's own site (and this is where you have all those issues with the paths ;) ) A site on IIS can be either set to an IP or to a different name.

Well Nhibernate is not something I use normally, but I wanted to keep on the free side of the software, so instead of using the usual library I use, I took NHibernate. I must say it's not as good as Devart LinqConnect but it does it job, at least for basic things which is what we need here I believe. For those which are not aware of what I'm talking about first read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping Basically when you develop in an object oriented way, you may wish to save your objects directly on the database without having to issue tons of SQL statement yourself. So imagine a "myobj.save()" function which would do the work for you. Well basically that's the base idea behind an ORM. Now of course objects don't live alone, they often have links to others like, for example, a user object may have all its "sales" linked to it. Well that's again the job of an ORM to grab the sales when you do "myUser.Sales" NHibernate does that for you. Also, using an ORM usually have a few side advantages: not having to care about SQL, not having issue about checking your SQL by trying each and every functions, being able to change database vendor without changing anything inside your code (normally ORM solutions support multiple databases) and avoiding any sort of SQL injections, as you work always with the data types you expect, and the ORM will take care to issue all the "escape" functions or binding needed.

Honestly I have no clues how many text-based browser games there is which are coded with C# / ASP.NET There is a few reasons for it (that I can think of): 1) First of all, you need a few more tools to start with, where with PHP you basically can get free hosting, ftp and notepad and you are up and running. 2) PHP was there before ASP.NET was invented therefore there is more history behind, even if the code base behind C# is by far not smaller than PHP as even the .NET framework (which is base of C#) is much bigger than any PHP framework you may download. 3) C# tend to be more used in the professional world where people develop shops, huge dynamic web sites, and specially intranet solutions. Those people don't develop really that much web games, and if so tend to make complex one not like mafia one. 4) Also due to the way C# websites are developed, either it's closed source (you install and configure via panels / config files) or you get full sources, most ASP.NET developers don't give away their sources, and instead give away a complete ready to use software. This kind of thing doesn't work all that well for a game engine. So unless you release the sources or offer some convenient way to extend the game, you hardly will have customers for this kind of "game engine". But mainly I believe kids (which are the primary owner / customers) of such text web games don't want to start working on something which is more than simply <?php echo "hello"; ?> files, and get scared by something which requires some background (objects, class, compiling and more) before having something. BTW without any of you trying it and / or giving feed back this will be yet another dead project :p