oxidati0n

Used this modification as a base in my game (but recoded to work with my entire codebase), and it was prepared nicely. Thank you for sharing.

Just some updates: We've implemented Stock Market and Lottery features today, hope you'll come and join us as we launch. :)

I see you've used CodeIgniter, that's exactly what I've used at http://www.criminaloutlaws.com but with a lot more edits and commitment. Good luck with the sale, but I can tell there's going to be too much work involved.

I know I can do much better than copying Torn, but my first attempt is to build a familiar interface to player's and then work on that to build our unique aspect of it. As you can see, not everything is copied to Torn and it's probably just the menu as far as I'm aware. We don't have any frontend developers on board, neither do we have designers, so we're just trying to build something that we can workaround for now. Thanks!

A lot more leading innovations have been put live, and we hope to bring many many more! Please do check out the game and let us know what you think. Plus, it's essentially hack-proof now. We have very high grade security, and basic rules of safety implemented so everything is well protected and fast simultaneously.

I think H4x0r666 :P

Sure, send me a PM with a bit more info.

I agree, we're a bit off track.

I'm looking to buy criminal-outlaws.com If anyone knows the owner Renegade or Boom, as it says on the website, please forward them to me. I'm presuming they're members on here because they intend to use it for a RPG game as stated on the website. I am willing to pay a good price. Thanks.

We recommend people to join! It's mostly complete and bug fixes are coming out every day.

Cleared my entire inbox. That might make things work :)

There are only a few places left to join our beta focus group.

Even I use a hotmail, so it doesn't necessarily degrade the professionalism of a person. But his language isn't exactly appealing to another either.

Hello, We've come to a great level of programming in our game, but to any standard, that won't quite cut it and to help us complete what we are doing then we are going to need some people to join in a focus group. You will have one of the most prestigious jobs in the game, which I will describe a bit later. These people will be required to be an active player, and available a couple of days a week. Anyone who is not logged in after 10 days will automatically be removed from the beta list, and their role will only last six months as our plans involve changing beta testers to make sure the game is not biased in its direction and caters with a good variety of minds. However, that does not mean we'll wash our hands off you and probably mean you could be given an opportunity elsewhere. The beta testing period will start on our official beta launch being on the 24th August 2011 which is when your role will begin, and you will see the latest features and debates available to you before anyone else where you'll also be able to debate exclusively with the team about what to do with the mockup or development and whether to put it live. I want people who are serious gamers, and care about the overall game and not just themselves, as they are exactly what I'm looking for. The beta testers will not just be testing in the 'beta' period, as they will be testing beta features when we launch out of beta and in full production. We've also employed some more temporary programmers and technicians to help with the protection and future development of the game, and also we're also seeking some good designers after receiving some not-so-good feedback about the game feel. Also storywriters are on the list to be employed, as we have had little focus in that aspect. We're a very small team but with big ambitions and intentions to reinvent a space (or even improve upon it). It's like the game you always wished MCCodes would be, to be a tad more ambitious. What will you get as a result? A special membership on your account as a 'Beta Tester' and free PRO membership as long as you are a beta testers. It will also give you a great advantage to create a trust relationship with our team, and get to be a part of something special (which is what we'd like to say). Welcoming applicants immediately. Application is only by PM or by e-mail (bilawal[at]ferple[d0t]com) - without the brackets.

If you read again, I said MySQL should only be for user-generated content. Assigning items to users is defined as 'user-generated content' in technical terms. Regarding the framework, not necessarily, it depends on what you use, we use CodeIgniter which only loads what you need so we avoid requesting non-critical files within our app. We store our arrays in external files, and just the way you make a MySQL request for items, we make a file import for the items array in a PHP file. And yes, we use most of them, as each type of app have different needs, we wouldn't consider using all of them unless they are needed. Even MySQL can be a cache in itself (which in one way is for us), which can be argued as another optimization technique.

hey runthis, I've cleared it. Try it now.

We've announced our beta launch which is confirmed to be on 24th August 2011. This is the date where all the features will become available and the entire core system will become activated so the game can begin running like any other usual game.

Go on, I'll have a go.

It's one thing building an application with beautiful code, but when scaling, optimization comes the hardest challenge. It is not regarded by many people until it becomes a problem. Here's my top tips for optimizing your app (for PHP, specifically - and some of them may be stating the obvious, but that's the point): 1. Use a key-value store such as Redis or Memcached: We're currently using Redis with Criminal Outlaws, and by using this, it allows you to store little sets of data which are accessed a lot (users online, user counts, hospital counts, statistics, config) to speed up the app significantly. The point of optimization is to reduce as many requests as possible while retaining functionality. Redis, for example, has a read-write ability of milliseconds which MySQL is not capable of. In more simplified terms, you'd stick stuff in Redis that is not critical but can avoid a MySQL request which is significantly slower in this aspect. 2. Avoid using the MySQL star at all costs. You're all familiar with this. There's so many situations where lazy developers select a whole table of content when they only like need one field, which not only costs speed but it wastes CPU. This also helps you analyze which data you can afford to offload to another data and by using MySQL Join (the fields which are linked using ON such as userid's should be indexed!). 3. Section data. For example, in Criminal Outlaws, we've already developed a notepad option (and it costs game money to buy it). We sectioned it to it's own table from the original 'users' table, which means that users who don't buy a notepad will not have any data in the field and it will lighten up the table significantly. A lot of data, in say, MCCodes (from what I can remember) was all shoved in one table which did work but was not sustainable. 4. Don't use numbers, use timestamps. Timestamps are not only fool-proof, but they are extremely efficient to work with. At the cost, they might use up like 10 more characters per row in the database but the benefits outweigh significantly. The only problem you might face is if you use two servers, the timezones might be different, but that's up to you to fix. Timestamps can be checked upon each request, rather than relying on something else to do it's duty which when your maintaining your application can always cause problems. Timestamps can also be built to backdate, which cronjobs can also, but it's much harder. 5. Convert data to in-server arrays. We've done that significantly, we first thought to do MySQL storage. This wouldn't work with commercial scripts, but to do this is like the god of optimization. MySQL should only ever be for user-generated content and data, and by putting stuff like cities and maps in there, you're only wasting queries and CPU. It would work like this: $array = array( 1 => array( 'item_id' => 1, 'item_name' => 'Gun', 'item_price' => '910.00' ) ); 6. Use FULLTEXT and INDEXES for your MySQL data We use FULLTEXT to speed up data which may grow significantly (such as our username cache) and it's a million times faster and efficient than using LIKE (especially with wildcards). Indexes should be the field which you access a lot such as userid's, usernames, etc (no more than 10-20% of your table should be indexed, or it slows down significantly) because it's MySQL's way of routing to a request. 7. Use a framework - stating the obvious! I'm myself using CodeIgniter, and so many improvements they've done that we would probably never do, and by using them, you're saving a lot of time. After all these, we've seen our speed from like 0.40 seconds on average to 0.02 which is an equivalent of 20 times faster. There are quite a more, and when I've found some more, I'll add them. Feel free to add based on your own experiences!

I've used a desktop for years, but now, with my new laptop, I'm convinced the laptop does it for me. :)

To think like that means you aren't seeing the bigger picture. This 'shitty' government has attempted to reduce our £100bn+ deficit racked up by the Labour government for over 13 years in power, and if nobody clears it now, anyone's children and grandchildren will suffer 100x more what we are now. That's why David Cameron is doing what he's doing, because he has children and he doesn't want them to suffer and neither does he want a huge amount of the population whom are parents to have their children suffer from something that could have been avoided. We still have opportunities now, though in recession, but it's better than being in Ireland's position (or Greece, or Portugal for that matter) 5-10 years down the line just so people feel self-assured and have that "live the best now and don't care about the future" thinking. P.S. The bigger problems have been actually caused by a hung parliament, i.e. Liberal Democrats - huge student fee increases.

I would probably say the interface is something we've spent not enough time on, but the reason why we've done this, is because with my experience with games, the biggest problem lies within the code (it not being sustainable and fast - and most of the time, not working). Not only that, but because they add mods from all different types of developers, it becomes easily unmaintainable and therefore useless to work with in the future. We've totally avoided that path, which is why we've used the same architecturial process as games I've used in the past but in an entirely innovative and new way. It's the technology that has hyped me up the most, and though many of you can't utilize it just yet, soon enough you will. Once we've got the code sorted, we've made it so it takes literally a couple of hours to port over a new design which is exactly what we'll be doing straight after we launch in beta.

No, it's just that during this period we're focusing on huge database optimizations and usually our code needs refining, and to you, until we post an update, it returns an error - which, in your case, is a white blank screen. We've rolled out a fix and it's all sorted now.

Why should someone compromise on your benefit? If your payment was higher as a result of not accepting PayPal, then maybe one would reconsider. You've got too much to learn about e-commerce and transactions online. Let me know if you ever get someone to do it that doesn't scam you. If I were you, I'd create a PayPal account immediately and get money loaded on to it and come back here asking for work done. PayPal actually has scam prevention tools and you need to be very cautious before you send money - then maybe you wouldn't get scammed. I've been scammed a lot more than you, and I know it isn't easy, but it isn't hard either.

Hey lucky, that's why we're doing the beta trialling. Later today we'll offer the ability to turn off the AJAX. And more precisely, what is it, the white overlay with the loader? Dreamcoder, I've re-enabled private messages but I have a backlog of like 1,000 messages so my inbox is full. I will clear some of it later and you can message me, but I've wrote my e-mail on your wall.