Zeggy

ezrpg1.0.1-upgrade.zip is for people who need to upgrade from 1.0. ezrpg1.0.1.zip contains the whole (upgraded) v1.0.1 script.

Cloud servers are virtualized servers, allowing a single physical server to run multiple instances of a cloud server. (Similar concept as a VPS) Because it's virtualized, these servers exist as a file (or multiple files) on hardware. This means the cloud server can be moved between different physical servers, or copied, etc. The advantages of this for a web server is that you can duplicate the cloud server and deploy it among servers all around the world very quickly. You can also scale the hardware, adding more ram, more hard drive space, more resources spread among many pieces of hardware over a network. Cloud hosts take advantage of this by offering plans that you pay for according to how much you use, allowing you to have a server that uses far more resources than a traditional single server could handle. For an example, take a look at amazon web service's EC2, probably the biggest cloud hosting service in the world: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ You can see that you simply pay for "instances" (virtualized servers) by the hour. Another example is google app engine. You can see you simply pay per unit of resources used, instead of having a fixed monthly cost: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html#Billable_Quota_Unit_Cost The pricing difference is also important. In traditional hosting, you pay in advance for a month of service, whereas cloud hosting you generally pay for how much you use. Using an analogy, traditional hosting is like having a monthly mobile phone contract, while cloud hosting is like getting a bill at the end of the month. Of course, not all hosts follow this kind of payment scheme, there are always exceptions. An example of when you may want to use cloud hosting is when you need to support massive amounts of traffic, even for a very short time like a few hours, like if you get slashdotted. With cloud hosting, you can simply add more resources and pay for the increased usage for those few hours, as opposed to upgrading your hosting plan or buying a new dedicated server like in traditional hosting.

It's called propositional calculus or propositional logic. It has ties with set theory, philosophy, computer science and maybe more. Comp sci usage examples are sql queries (set theory) and artificial intelligence (specific facts => theorem based on facts => deduce more facts) It's useful for proofs, theorems and inference. I'm not really sure if it's strictly taught in only computer science courses since it's got applications in many fields.

A and B are either true (1) or false (0) values. So for example, the expression A OR B will return true if either A or B are true. These are the same expressions in an if statement in PHP: if (A || B) { //expression returns true } else { //false returned } To express the outcomes of an expression, you can use a truth table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table In your example: A dot B is dot product so you multiply the A and B values together. If both values are true, then it's 1 * 1 = 1 = true. If a value is zero then it's 1 * 0 = 0 = false. If both values are zero then it's 0 * 0 = 0 = false. So that part of the expression returns true only if A and B are both true. That line above the A dot B means you take the inverse. True => false, false => true. So now the expression so far returns false only if A and B are both true, otherwise it returns true. The next part confuses me because I've never used the + symbol in logic (just like you've probably never used the + symbol exclusively in an if statement). I'm going to assume it's the same as an OR because it makes sense: 0+0=0, 0+1=1, 1+0=1, 1+1=1. So next, there are two simple ways to simplify the expression. You could make a truth table of the overall expression - what's the outcome if A is true and B is false, etc., and find some easier expression that fits that truth table. This is kind of a hit and miss though, and requires intuition. The other way is to split up the expression into smaller parts (like I did above) and go through the individual expressions, and see if you can simplify them one at a time, and eventually combine them. If you have notes, you may be able to find a list of rules for simplifying an expression. These are pretty common, such as NOT A OR NOT B => NOT(A OR B) or A -> B => (NOT A) OR B. The NOT symbol is ¬, and all the others also have symbols, but you should be able to find them on the wikipedia article. My keyboard can't type them out here :P

topwebgames.com bbogd.com mpogr.com

If you learned how to build an airplane, then I think you'd understand how planes work. Likewise, if you learned how to write forum software, then you'd be able to understand how other forum software works. 'How fast' you get to a place with your own plane over a commercial plane is irrelevant and untrue... you're confusing the metaphor and taking it too literally. If you can't understand how forum software works, how do you expect to write one of similar quality? The OP is asking for a serious forum software to use and I'd think quality is an important criterion. Writing your own forum software also has a huge time cost even if it doesn't cost money.

Would you build your own plane because you don't understand how commercial planes work? :P

You can do this on sign up by sending their password in an email before you turn the password into a hash for the database. But why do you want to send a user's password in an email anyway? It's very insecure and the user doesn't expect you to use their password in any way other than authenticating them. Besides, what's the point of reminding a user what their password is, just seconds after they've entered it into a website?

On a website like facebook that's just not true. There are all kinds of people on facebook, so there's a market for all kinds of games including in-depth rpgs. It just happens that the most popular games are casual social games since those have the largest audience - people who wouldn't normally consider themselves gamers. That's purely business though - social game developers don't care about content, they care about a proven business model that earns them money. If you wanted to, I'm sure you could launch a moderately successful strategy game or in-depth rpg on facebook, but obviously it wouldn't have the same reach as the top facebook games. If you're looking for a purely game-oriented social network, bigpoint is a very well-known one. There aren't many social network platforms specifically for gaming.

It's written in javascript and full source code is available: http://www.thiswebgame.com/zeggy/full.html It should be pretty easy to integrate into any website, all it needs is jquery :)

This is my entry to a coding challenge! http://www.thiswebgame.com/zeggy/ The challenge was to create a 1-player business micro sim in under 24 hours and under 16kb. My game's really simple so it just took 6 hours from planning to completion. What do you think? :D Full source code is here: http://www.thiswebgame.com/zeggy/full.html

Sites like digg, reddit, stumbleupon, etc are really good for traffic if you're lucky. When my game was launched I submitted it to reddit as a news article, and received a decent response. It reached the front page of the gaming subreddit, but only around 17th place for a few hours before it got pushed down. Even so, it got me over 100k page views, hundreds of members, traffic increased 3000%, etc. I can only imagine how much traffic you could get if you get to the front page. Although you should watch out, your host needs to be able to support a huge influx of users if you try this. If your site is down while it's on reddit, it will quickly get buried and nobody will see it. This should all be the same for digg, although it's probably more difficult to get to front page of digg. Anyways, I also advertised on reddit. Minimum is $20 a day, and your link gets shown at the top of reddit (or a subreddit - a subreddit is just a category). Although, you need to choose your targeting carefully. I ran a site-wide ad and it received very little pageviews because there are so many competing bids. When you choose a subreddit to target, if you're lucky there will be no other competing bids. About half of the time that my ad was being run, it was the only one for that subreddit, so it got about 10 times the amount of views and clicks as a site-wide run. Best results I got were 5000+ views and 50+ clicks per hour. The traffic is nothing like hitting reddit's front page though, or any normal reddit submission (which is free!). I'm going to look into other social news sites too. Would appreciate it if other people posted any experiences as well :)

Mailing lists are legal if the list is opt-in. If nobody validated/confirmed their email for the mailing list, then it is spam.

Just wanted to share an image of some interesting game mechanics.

That cost per user you looked at shows commercial pricing for businesses, which isn't released yet. The pricing is for company internal apps, which is why they price by users, ie. employee count. That link is the current billing scheme. Yeah, you need to set a daily budget, otherwise if your website suddenly becomes a huge hit and gets millions of visitors, an unbudgeted account will suddenly find a huge charge on their bill :P And if you go over budget and your website is suspended, it's basically like other web hosts when you use too much resources. The difference is that you simply increase your budget in the admin panel, instead of buying a new server and configuring it, etc., or upgrading your hosting plan which requires you to wait for the hosting company. Yep, I agree, the datastore isn't suitable for every app.   You work with individual objects in the database, and it's possible to use it as an oop database, so objects can have ancestors, children, inheritance, etc. And about your last point, yeah, I still maintain a vps for non web-based services and whenever I need shell access for some things.

Personally I don't like it much because it looks like the kind of interface for a desktop game. A browser game is is not full screen, and needs to work for different resolutions and browser sizes. Those images are basically text with 10-20 pixel borders and margins. Also, it seems like the design will be pretty heavy on loading images. It's just my preference though. Other than that, it looks pretty good. Just not practical.

Google App Engine Google App Engine is a cloud hosting platform. This article is going to give a quick overview of the features, advantages and disadvantages of using App Engine as a host. Features/Advantages Cost App Engine is free up to a certain point. After that you can start paying for what you use, and only what you use. No wasted money for resources that you'll never use. And when you start to use a lot of resources, you don't need to worry about upgrading your hosting plan or buying another server. Scalable If your app is written well, it can scale on the platform very easily. App Engine will automatically start new server instances whenever your app needs it. Speed It's hosted on google servers! How fast does google load for you? Management The servers are completely managed by Google. You only ever need to worry about writing your app. Google User API You can directly use the google user API and let visitors log in with their gmail address. This might not be useful for every app though. More APIs App engine provides a lot of services - memcache, cron jobs, task queues, xmpp, url fetch, and more! Updates Some of the disadvantages I list below will be fixed in the next release, and app engine is constantly upgrading the platform with new features and removing limitations.   Disadvantages Platform App engine is a platform, not an infrastructure. Chances are, most frameworks and tools you use will NOT work on app engine unless they were specifically designed for it. Datastore The app engine datastore is built on Google's BigTable, a nosql database. This means you don't normalize your data, and do most of the necessary computations before you put data into the database. You can't perform aggregate functions like sum or count, you can't join data, you can't use the wildcard, etc. Not every app might be suitable for this. I don't consider this a disadvantage, but some people might. Programming Languages At the moment, app engine only supports Python and Java. That means if you want to run something like PHP, you'll need to run a java implementation of php, like Quercus. (New languages may be supported in the future, see the most requested languages here. PHP is first!) File/system access Your app runs in a somewhat restricted environment. You will have no direct access to the server other than to upload files and migrate database, and your code will have no write access to the filesystem. Limitations The platform places some limitations on each app. For example, your client-facing pages must load in under 30 seconds. Your entire app must load into memory in less than 30 seconds. If you're building a very (very) large app or using a very heavy framework, this may cause some problems.   Well, that's it. App Engine isn't suitable for every programmer or for every app, but I do think it's pretty awesome and if you're interested, you should at least consider trying it out. It's got great documentation, and a nice tutorial for beginners. If you've got any questions, feel free to ask me.

I prefer advertising on non-game sites, but still related to games, such as forums, news sites, top game lists (these don't seem to give good results).

I know this topic is titled George, but I also know there have been some questions about Dave's illustrator (the guy who drew the weapons and characters). I've been shown one of the images in its original form, and I can vouch for his illustrator that they are hand-drawn illustrations, not 3d renders.

Great idea! :) I've removed the register/login pages. You can now simply sign in with your google account, facebook, twitter, etc.

pbbg.biz is a social news website specifically for web game related news. Anybody can submit a link to their game/article/news, and everybody else votes up the submissions that they like. The most popular submissions show up on the front page, but of course you can also see new and upcoming submissions, or different categories of news. No real content is hosted on pbbg.biz. We send interested visitors directly to the links that *you* submit. So submit your news now! You can login easily with a google account, facebook, twitter, and more. There's also a tool for web developers to put a small 'submit/vote' button on their websites for automatic submission to pbbg.biz: http://www.pbbg.biz/add What do you think of the site? http://www.pbbg.biz

Actually, the only person gaining any free publicity and advertising is you, since your site is the one that's new. I'd suggest lowering the requirement for games to volunteer because I don't think you'll get many with 1000+ users at this time.

I know, I didn't say a game is defined purely by the element of competition.   Well, that's what this thread is for then :) The definition you gave is just one of the many definitions of a game.

A game isn't a game because it's fun. Most people have already defined a particular game as a game before they even experience it. If you're bored with playing tic-tac-toe or rock paper scissors, do you stop calling it a game? Do you need to play a game and enjoy it first before you can call it a game?

Let's have a 'deep' discussion :whistling: What's a game? What's the point of a game?   I am asking this because my game (boring rpg) is pretty different from most games. I get asked quite often "what's the point?". It frustrates me because people jump to the conclusion that my game isn't a 'real' game. I disagree. I think the most basic idea of a game is competition. You are always competing with other players in some criteria. In rts games like starcraft, you are competing within each match to beat the opponent. You also compete in the meta-game, trying to get better match rankings and more wins than everybody else. In pet games, you are competing for your pet to be the strongest in battles. To be the richest player. Etc. So what if you took away everything, and were left only with a simple game mechanic of clicking a button that increases your stats. Is there a point? Is it still competitive? Is it still a game?   Edit: The focus of the topic is on the questions above, I was only using my game as an example :)