Pádraic Brady
PHP, Zend Framework and Other Crazy Stuff
Keep rolling with the punches, Maug, keep rolling…
Jun 3rd
Well, stating that development is at a standstill is perhaps going too far but I’ve never in my life had such a hectic few weeks. Overtime almost every single day coupled with Saturdays in the office is just plain ridiculous. The good news at least is that this period is drawing to a close, so for today I managed to something besides work!
Not quite up to reviewing QS for its remaining bugs and glitches, I instead put a little work into Shadows Rising. As of today, players can now create a crude character, end up in a generic location, and move around the map points as generated by the world builder. All nice an debugged, and most ported from QS although written from scratch to ensure I’m not also porting across QS’ lack of standards!
I’m beginning to think Shadows Rising will be more simple than expected to code. Let’s keep those fingers crossed, eh?
QS will be back on my development environment on Saturday once I check Gentoo is indeed capable of being rebooted after my three week absence. I’ll probably spend most of Friday evening updating the usual suspects – been over a month since last I did some digging for new versions. Maybe Adodb have finally escaped its problems with the PHP RC? Who knows, I haven’t visited either site in weeks! 
Finally, today I received a forum message from iamsure of Kabal Invasion fame, who kindly pointed out an issue with displaying some sort of copyright for using the install scripts I borrowed a while back from NGS. I’ve replied with a shortlist of actions I’ll take to ensure credit is given where credit is due. Just to try and get back into action on maintaining QS’ place as a GPL compliant beast, I’m going to run a check to be certain I’ve not managed to include any more GPL material without offering a copyright notice. It’s ironic that after posting a topic moaning lack of copyright adherence, I get stung for the same issue less than two hours later.
I sincerely hope there is not a conspiracy among other game developers aimed at me. The paranoia. It’s getting worse. You! Stop staring! 
Legend of the Green Dragon Review
May 25th
Well, it’s not my doing but recently Mighty E received an unsolicited review of his popular LOGD browser based game. It’s something of an oddity in truth – an apparently professional looking PDF document a full 12 pages long. I found the review quite interesting (being currently involved in planning for a browser based RPG) but the author mysteriously failed in his undertstanding of the review target.
LODG is not, per se, an RPG. Certainly it has RPG elements but it is severely limited regarding RPG status – for example there is only one over-riding aim (to kill the Green Dragon) and no quest structure other than to explore the forest near the Village and kill hordes of random bad guys. I hear LOGD has recently made a move to expanding it’s locations – but this is more for variety than a serious attempt to conquer the RPG world as we know it.
So Mighty E gets landed with a review that treats LOGD as something it blatantly is not (says in the FAQ too). Despite its obvious flaws the review does make a good job, albeit accidentally, in contrasting one of the most popular open source browser games against a traditional RPG game. The differences are highlighted on a point by point basis – and may prove somewhat useful as a yardstick for measuring Shadows Rising’s feature against those pin-pointed in the review.
I’ve always enjoyed LOGD – it’s a well coded example of a fun game with a social element. It also has a nifty translation system in the works I’m keen to examine….
You can catch the review here:
http://lotgd.net/forum/temp/slamlander-review.pdf
And catch Mighty E’s response here:
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