PHP, Zend Framework and Other Crazy Stuff
Archive for February 23, 2006
Let’s patent Web 2.0…
Feb 23rd
If those mega corporations ever manage to win in the struggle to impose a software patent regime in Europe there’ll be hell to pay… Anyways in what is one of the more memorable screw ups (has to be a screw up in some way) the US Patent Office has seen fit to award Balthaser (an internet design company) a patent which covers “methods, systems and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the Internet.”
And in one sentence Web 2.0 (or at least the rich-media bit) has been effectively patented.
Either the US Patent system is playing a joke well ahead of April 1st or they’re seriously telling the world that in the US you can pretty much patent any software idea regardless of how general or broad, and start charging everyone else license fees.
Most of us know software patents are little more than an excuse for big companies (in Europe at least small to medium enterprises loathe the very thought of a patent system!) to squish the smaller guys out for 20 years. Second Europe opens up a host of pre-patented ideas from the US will charge through the EU Patent Office on trolleys pushed by an army of those weasly characters we call patent lawyers. Anything to get them in before the natives win out.
Maybe in another few years the publishing houses will get a Literature Patent Office set up. That’d be fun. “ION patents a system of text representing a future or mythology based plot”. Ha, now try writing Fantasy or Science Fiction you lowly authors!
Well looks like the cat is among the pigeons, maybe some prior art find will dump these chaps by the roadside. Then again it’ll only be a matter of time before another idiot claim is made…
A QS Evolved progress check…
Feb 23rd
Quick review for the unaware. Quantum Star SE is a browser based space strategy game written in PHP I’ve been working on in jumps and starts for a while. Back in September I got around to revisiting the project and started rebuilding it from the base up using a reusable framework I helper create called Partholan. QS is a fork from the much older Solar Empire project. I forked since maintaining Solar Empire and getting anything done was nearly impossible due to poor design, the absence of security, and a reliance on spaghetti procedural style code.
Having released QS Evolved 0.18 and picking up several minor bugs… Nothing major reported as yet except for a failed schema install I can’t replicate. Hopefully someone can find out how to replicate it and debug it. One other minor bug was a missing directory, and a template path mishap causing the installer to load the wrong header html hence the wrong CSS file (still scratching my head over that one).
Since the release I’ve updated the database for the game and module tables and regenerated all the TransferObjects. This brings the basic nuts and bolts of the Data Access layer back up to date. I’ve since completed character creation, fixed a minor DAO bug which failed to correctly report failed SQL queries, and redrafted the Universe Generator class.
With these basic in place I should have Star System game pages available and loading along with the normal run of the mill navigation system for Fleets finished. Not sure where I’ll move after this (it’s maybe two days away). I’m thinking to add at the very least Homeworlds (specialised Planet instances) with a Shipyard and several ships available for purchase. That’ll round off Character Creation, Star Systems, Navigation and Ship Purchasing for a nice base test release (got to keep the testing coming in consistently).
From there its only a matter of a few hours slogging to have Resources and Mining ready. Ports I’ll peek at but I want to have some time to think over how Ports will work. At a minimum Port should act as trading depots for Resources and Components. The key here is Trading – I may skip this one for the moment and return to it but Trading is a definite addition. The lack of massive Resource counts and prices make Trading a more viable (and less expontntially dangerous) feature in QS Evolved.
A few ideas have popped up on the forums in other areas. Hades has made an intriguing suggestion of allowing destroyed ships spawn Components as salvageable remains. Never considered this, but the separation of content from the game engine in QSE makes this quite an easy behaviour – all Ships even keep a serialised array of all installed Component IDs for easy reference. Its great to see the game’s flexibility making such out of the blue suggestions possible with little effort.
Still there’s a lot of game elements I need to code for before worrying about content all the shop, trading, combat and facility features need to be coded into the game engine along with the more detailed Ship and Planet Models. Hopefully as all this progress builds up I’ll see more developers chip in to add bits and pieces. It’s certainly easy enough to do basics…
