RPG Gaming - Bloodmoon Games

Starting to redesign my site

2009-11-22T17:47:00.005Z

Will be moving the blog to the http://www.bloodmoongames.com website. am in the process of making a new site where the Bloodmoon Games RPG content is a section of the main site.

So keep your eyes peeled ;-)

Started looking through the site

2009-09-08T08:21:00.000+01:00

Found a few issues with some of the links then made some more have to fix them tonight

Have been relearning java

2009-08-18T11:07:00.000+01:00

I've been looking at the different tech and haave decided that java is the way forward for me. I'm still thinking through the way that I will build the maps a lot of people are making them a set size and then build a large file that stores all the information.

My solution will be similar as in that I will have a lot of information that will represent the map data but that is because I want to generate the maps once and use multiple. For example in 3D, or a tiled based game.

So to reduce the size of the information being loaded by the tile based game. I will store the information in layers the first being the land tile information I will store in an image if I use 8bits I'll have 256 tiles which is way too little to cover everything so I'll use 24bit images.

This first layer can be used as a mini map in the game the next layer will be height the next will be object locations.

Cities, town, villages, caves, ....

Will have a tile icon to represent them by moving over a (object) layer point we will load a new map.

I've still got to figure out how I will represent a road running by a river by which I mean that the tiled game might be one tile for one thousand points on the map or ten thousand points but a river and road might be only 80 points apart.

Tiled based version of the map

2009-05-15T08:46:00.000+01:00

So I've been looking at different tech to render the map and have decided that I need to render it in a tiled based format I've looked at ISO, hex and square based tile maps I'll start building a square based map soon and just have to decide if ill get back up to speed with java or learn sliverlight

I need to figure out a better graphics tech

2009-03-31T22:47:00.000+01:00

I really need to figure out a better gfx tech for the maps, with 90,000+ points and that's just the start. It's already having problems rendering the content.

The AJAX and SVG that. I am using aren't really up to the job of handling the amount of data. At the minute I've worked out how to scale the map properly that was the hard part.

My next step is to make the algorithm faster I can do this by using SQL and storing all the points in a DB. But is that the best way? I eventually want a 3D interface for the data.

Map Render v1.0.1 Update

2008-09-06T19:52:00.000+01:00

I've updated the map now to have points of interest use an icon similar to the Google maps place icon when you mouse over the icon you will see the name of the place. I've tried to have the icon be a click able link but it won't let me click the link just reloads the map centered on that point.

I've added four points at the moment but will add more once more of the countries are defined. And I'll add a page to my projects section to talk about the map tool. I've embedded the map in three pages at the minute and will continue to embed it into more of the wiki pages as time goes by.

Map Rendering v1 Implemented on our wiki

2008-09-05T23:06:00.003+01:00

I've just got version 1 the Globe Map finished. Well it seems to be stable though I still have to enter all the polygon information for the map. You can zoom in and out of the map and pan. The current map holds the coast of one of the continents. My eventual aim is to have multiple maps throughout the wiki.

The Rollout continues

2008-09-05T12:21:00.002+01:00

I've just rolled out the complete site using the molecular engine all pages are now running through molecular. This means that I can start to work on getting the map tool published. While there are currently only 87 thousand points plotted My test environment is able to render the map. Unfortunately some of my tinkering has broken the map tool. Basically what is happening is that when you click on the map it calculates the point on the full scale map that you are and then renders that block scaled to the magitude that you are currently using but for some reason its rendering a completely different point off the map.

Once I have this fixed I will be able to generate multiple maps for the Swords & Scrolls knowledge base.

And the over haul begins

2008-08-29T12:12:00.006+01:00

As I've had to start rewriting lots of content for the wiki of Swords & Scrolls I thought that I would post a note here.

I've reordered the wiki to start with the Guides and written a extensive Character Generation page. Not that its 100% yet or any thing but just made it easier to generate a character. I've added content for Combat, Dodging, Multiple attacks, Init Modifiers, Leveling Characters, Added a new Book of Armour and have split the Weapon table into Bladed, Blunt and Missile weapons.

The Dodging & Multiple Attacks Section will be removed tonight and integrated into the Combat Guide.

I've also worked out how the amount of armour you are wearing effects your ability to dodge attacks etc.

I plan on making the Character Sheet eventually a PDF but until I get that far a wiki page will do.

So Keep an Eye on the game as it will change over the next while.

The ultimate nightmare

2008-08-27T12:10:00.004+01:00

So last night I sat down to explain to the wife what roleplaying is. So I bought some dice and went on-line to http://www.bloodmoongames.com/rpg/Swords & Scrolls. It should be said that this is probably the first time in 5 years that I've actually attempted to generate a character. Christ was a pile of shit I was hosting the latest version of the system on a streamline.net server and they lost all of the content on me the bastards) so I had just rolled out an old backup of the system so when I went to generate a character I found it to be nearly impossible. As I wrote the game I could figure it out after a lot of head scratching.

I have decided to start again and rewrite most if not all of the existing content before moving on to other content. Firstly I'll look at rewriting the Generate Character Section of the site.

This is a call out to any one interested in the game that wants to help. If I have any takers I'll make an administrative section to the site available to them and give them write access on the wiki.

So What have I been up to?

2008-05-19T14:44:00.002+01:00

Well I've started to move the Bloodmoon Games website into a CMS which I'm writing in PHP this website change will allow me to allow others to manage content on the sites I'll also be importing the Blog into the look and feel of the site with some improvements.

Lately I've been helping the AROS community by mapping the OS3.1 API completeness report. AROS is pretty cool as its attempting to build a new OS for running on x86 and other architectures.

The mapping code has been updated to be a molecular module so that the new CMS will be able to use it. having a couple of problems storing the coordinates in a DB and am going to move hosting yet again. But this time not for the same reason as that last time. I just need higher bandwidth on the map building code. Along with more control over the server setup.

I need your help

2008-02-15T11:54:00.003Z

The Idea about this whole map and knowledge base is that I want to get to a stage that you the gamer that is interested in FREE Role Playing games can have this world to play in. Of course I would love it if people were to write short stories about the world and submit it to me for inclusion on the site. I want people to write stories and Bio's on people and I'll add them to the site hopefully I'll be able to give write access to members of the Bloodmoon Games Editorial Committee (BGEC) who will have the ability to change all of the content of the games.

Also if you are writing a Free RPG let me host the content of the game on Our RPG section you will retain copyright of your game but we will try to build a community around all of the games.

So drop me an email at ac_sweeney@yahoo.co.uk

87,000 points and rendering

2008-02-15T11:40:00.003Z

As you know I've written my own web based map viewing program to allow people to zoom in to the maps. and scroll around. os whats the problem I hear you say well the algorithm is quite slow but since I've got it written I'm going to attempt to write the algorithm in SQL. Why SQL simple the fact that SQL will allow me to extract all of the map that I want and automatically scale the map saving me having to do that bit with PHP.

the current map width is 1.4 million pixels and the height is 1.2 million. The current map has started to slow down since there is 87k points being scaled and rendered. I've got my php rendering to drop a lot of the points that are on the same scaled (sX,sY) position and I'll look at gettign SQL to do the same.

it should be noted that working out the algorithm took ages as I had the major bug that when you zoomed in and out on the same point the location that it was zooming into was different than the location I wanted. Turns out that I wasn't calculating the (zX,zY) points correctly I was calculating them using the new zoom level not the old level and thus they were off each time.

Currently the system only renders an SVG map of the world and I've just started defining the map of Caplo. But the nice thing is that I can have several maps.

One world map, one map for each city so that you can define locations, shops etc...

Whats been happening.

2008-02-04T17:26:00.000Z

Well quite a bit.

I've release my first opensource app jChess basically the ability to play chess online there are different types of chess games too Standard of course, Omega and Grand Chess are also available they are played on a 10x10 board.

The second open source project is almost ready for release too code name molecular you'll love it. Its a PHP program that will allow you to have a modular designed website/application the best bit is that you can use it three different ways.

1. use it as I designed to render XML and transform with XSLT to your site design.
2. use its modules seperatly in your own programs.
3. figure out another way to use it.

The third thing that I'm really proud of is the map viewer for Bloodmoon games it works similarly to the way that google maps works by allowing you to zoom in and out. Currently it takes a polygon map and scales it to your zoom level you can move the map by clicking on a space or using the control bar. I haven't gotten dragging working on it yet but the zoom functionality seems to be Bug free. The code for the map viewer will be open source too ;-)

All of these will be available in the next release.

We are coming back

2007-12-08T13:35:00.000Z

After loosing all of the content of our site and the hosting company "streamline" being unable to recover I've moved to a new hoster and done a new site design. I should have this up fully over the next week.

Streamline.net screws up website content

2007-10-05T14:50:00.000+01:00

Hi,

Firstly sorry for those who access the site for the fact that there is no content on the site for this previous week. This is due to the fact that Streamline moved the site from a PHP4/Linux server to a PHP5/Linux Server and in the process renamed all of the data files that the wiki uses to produce the content. I have been working with Streamline for the past week one email per day due to the poor customer service that they have I will be moving the site to a new location shortly.

I would not recommend http://www.streamLine.net to anyone period they do not seem to be able to follow simple instructions. see below for the current ticket that is with stream line it should be noted that each response is a different day as I wait for them to contact me, also the start of the ticket is at the bottom:-

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

We have report this to the engineers to look into for you

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

--------------------------

I do not know what each files name was as they were a wiki data store

for example there would have been a file :Gaming.txt somewhere in there.

I want htis fixed ASAP This has been several days.

Look to your backup files.

I want a manager/engineer to ring me tonight .

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

Please can you advise what the files names were previously so that we can forward this to our engineers to investigate. We are now aware of any server change which has resulting in file name changes previously.

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

--------------------------

Technically there are none missing they have all been renamed.

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

Yes we can see the data folder and teh files within. Please advise what files are missing and we will investigate.

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

--------------------------

beside the htdocs directory there is a data directory look in there

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

Here is a list of the file we can currently see;

htaccess del
.htaccess1 del
admin del
amiUpdate del
cgi-bin del
copy.php del
favicon.ico del
images del
index.php del
layers.gif del
robots.txt del
site.css del
sln-php-info.php del
test.php del

Please advise if this is not correct.

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

--------------------------

IF you go into the data directory they all have different names.

For example there should be one called ":Gaming.txt" at least there was one before the move to this server.

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

What files are missing from the web server?

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

--------------------------

what has happend to all the files in the data directory they have lost thier file names thus breaking my website.

Did you copy the files to windows you told me that this would be a linux box. the file name sturcture that I had would only work on linux.

I need this fixed ASAP

thanks

Adrian

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

This has now been actioned for you,

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

We hope your Tuesday is going well, have you seen our excellent Search Engine Submission product?

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

This issue has now been escalated to a senior engineer. We hope to have the issue resolved within 24 to 48 hours.

If this issue has not been resolved after this period, please update this ticket to let us know.

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

--------------------------

Yes please I was planning on moving hosting later this year due to this issue so now I won't have too.

--------------------------

Hi Adrian Sweeney,

Thanks for your query.

We currently have PHP5 on most of the linux servers, if you require we can transfer your domain over to a server that has PHP5 on

Kind Regards,
Support Department
Streamline.Net - The home of good value web hosting

We hope you had a nice weekend.

--------------------------

bloodmoongames.com is not registered by us (but might be a transfer).
bloodmoongames.com is on our hosting system.
--------

About a year ago I asked if you were planning to upgrade to PHP5 soon your answer was that you would be.

with PHP support ending 1st Jan 2008 what are the chances that you will be upgrading to PHP v5.2.4 or better

OK I'm back from the dead

2007-10-01T15:42:00.000+01:00

1. Upgrade the server to PHP5.

PHP five is the development language that I use for the site and I found out that the hosting company wouldn't upgrade but since PHP 4 support is being dropped they have changed thier minds.

2. Update the Site content in a more easy fashion.

With everything that has been happening I've been thinking of the different ways that the site could be updated and the bug bear that I have is that of creating links to different pages. So I'm going to rewrite the compete structure of the Site to allow me ot post a new page and tell the site to create new links to it automatically based on specific keywords.

3. Implement the maps application

Ok I've lost most of the content its on my laptop at the minute and I just have to gain access it it. I'm going to generate maps from the global list of data and then upload the maps. to the site.

Sorry about the delay in posting

2007-06-19T11:42:00.000+01:00

A lot has been happening in my life, that has stopped me working on the site. My fiancée hurt her leg at Christmas and I've had to spend a lot of time looking after her. We also bought a house and I've spent the last two and a half months fixing it up so that we could move in. Next month we are getting married so hopefully by the end of august I'll be back to developing stuff for the site.

On a new note I've been talking with a RPG shop who are going to publish a poster for me that lets people know about the site. I've also been looking into pushing the wiki out to allow people to register to become authors of the content.

Interactive Map Update.

2007-02-16T14:06:00.000Z

Recently I've been developing an interactive map that I can use with the site. Currently I've gotten the map to render, pan and zoom. but the eventual size of the map will be massive with a drawing space of currently 3 million points by 2 million points the polygon rendering would be too heavy for the site, So I'm thinking of making the map produce a list of images and as the main map is updated it will automatically regenerate the desired images which will be auto loaded to the server to replace existing images.

This is really great because I will be able to the detail a map of a city or village and that city/village will appear on all desired images automatically. Also I should be able to produce image maps to place over the image so that you can jump to the location in a map and view it that way.

Changed the URL rendering to work better with Search engines

2007-01-14T22:25:00.000Z

just made a change to the site, all the colons in the URLs are now spaced on either side this should allow a higher Search engine ranking for the pages this optimisation also benefits from the previous updates that added the title information to all links and removed the query string information from the URLs

Sorry again about the CSS in IE

2007-01-12T14:33:00.000Z

IT seems that the CSS file in IE again refused to load, I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to fix this earlier.

this should be fixed now and I will update my files at home to have this fix.

Interactive map

2007-01-12T14:21:00.000Z

Hi just incase you have been wondering where I've been for the last couple of weeks, My time has been spent working on an interactive map, I've currently gotten the map of caplo entered but I need to add so much more functionality to the map that its going to take a while.

I've made it that I can render an SVG map and you can zoom in nothing as nice as google maps but it does the job if I do say so. By developing this map I can for example have a page talking about say a village or a city and I can embed the map and tell it to render the map from position x,y and with a specific zoom level.

so as I update the single map I can update all the maps as I go along. I also have the option to render the maps as images to make the load faster, again the map can be updated and a publish button would produce all of the required images thus allow updated images to created and uploaded to the site.

Also I added the RSS feed of this blog to the home page of the site but unfortuantly the server is running php4, while I'm developing php5 so I need to rewrite the function to use the really old dom functions with the RSS feed.

Ado

Latest Christmas updates released

2006-12-28T18:59:00.000Z

I've just released some updates for Christmas, I've rewritten some pages to describe the sections better, part of my general development of the site also covers background software that is used to run the site. I've added a new contact us section to the site.

The other changes were basically me reading the site again and again and changing the rules. For example the when originally play testing the game the players would do special moves and only had to spend the fatigue points this made them rather powerful, I've changed this to the player has to roll attack first then they get the benefit of the special move the "Parry/Strike" special move has been replaced with a separate "Parry" special move that can be combined with any of the other special moves except of course for the "Backstab" special move for a minus modifier. Also a special move now takes up the complete attack phase no extra attacks available.

updates on the site

2006-12-21T10:21:00.000Z

Last night I restructured the Swords & Scrolls Maps section of the site I've renamed it to KB for knowledge base and created a new location called Telmius it is the name of the planet that the game is set on. I've moved the two continents into this section and created a new sub-location called People where I will start by listing 'The Royality & Leaders of the countries of Telimus' starting with Caplo and moving up though Novax until I eventually end up in Mur

Hey a post actually about role playing how refreshing

2006-12-18T19:13:00.000Z

I've updated the content of the site over the weekend, I've added content about Power scores to the system as well as Special Moves and Weapon Specialisation. I've also got some changes to implement into the live site which are about how the classes work, I've moved the combat based skills (Brawling, Weapon Blade, Weapon Blunt & Weapon Missile) to be class abilities as really they should never increase. except possibly though spending experience

Bugger I didn't know

2006-12-18T19:10:00.000Z

AS I use linux at home I didn't know that the CSS file was not loading for Internet Explorer. I can only say "Sorry" to any IE users out there, and my advice would be to try firefox as it seems to run everything fine. it turned out to be a simple error so again Sorry.

Added a Search engine to the site

2006-12-06T22:35:00.000Z

Found personal search engines from google so I've added one to the site and as the site gets indexed the content will appear on it. The best thing about the personal google search is that you can add a list of sites that you want to be able to search to the list of indexed sites. But and here is the kicker you can allow it to search any page on the internet but it will give sites that are indexed a higher priority. Isn't that just kewl or what.

So if you want your site added and its a Roleplaying site then email me ac_sweeney at yahoo dot co dot uk

I've added the following site to the search

http://www.bloodmoongames.com/ (of Course)

http://www.rpggateway.com

http://www.gamelair.com

New functionality on web site

2006-12-03T11:30:00.000Z

Last night I rolled out some new functionality on the web site that is.

Latest Updates on Home page - soon to be available as an RSS Feed

Automatic page - generates a menu structure for a page that has no content but has child locations this happens (99% of the time) when generating a page content that should exist on a sub level but that sub location hasn't been created yet.

Added functionality to render the Child Menu of a page inside the content of a page.

Updated the site today to use mod rewrite rules

2006-11-30T22:04:00.000Z

Finally got the mod rewrite rules setup so the search engines will index all of the site this should allow more people to find the games.

Also I got in touch with Danny Cameron and he has agreed to try and remember most of the stuff that he had written for "2086".

I can't believe that it took so long

2006-11-27T10:25:00.000Z

I can't believe that it took me so long to get my finger out and fix the web site. Thirteen (unlucky for some) months. well I can only promise to do better, I'm glad that I decided to move to a wiki type structure as it will allow me to generate more content in a structured way. There are a few problems with the current code that I am using but I hope to fix all of those issues.

With lots still to do like
* version control
* file moving (with link redirection)
* a search facility

hopefully John should be coming on board and I can get him to write up most of the description of Mur a Spanish inquisition style country that is anti magic. Which should lead to a few quests.

Also I want to write at least one small quest for Black Ops before the end of next week.

Our Role playing site is now live

2006-11-26T17:24:00.000Z

Yes we finally got our site live on Friday night sorry for the delay in letting you all know I had to look after my nieces so haven't been near an internet connection, and since I had my laptop I added more pages to the site including more information on the game Black Ops.

Check out the site today http://www.bloodmooongames.com

Sorted the hosting issues for the main site

2006-11-24T15:33:00.000Z

Finally got the last hosting issues fixed on the server so I should be able to load the site live tonight and last night I found about 3 pages of content for a game that Danny Cameron wrote called 2086 so I'll be getting onto him to rewrite the content of that game and put it on the site as well. I remember playing this game one of two that Danny wrote and found them both great games to play. Danny liked war-hammer type games, and he wrote 2086 to be a game that you could play where you either depending on missions controlled a battle field (on ground and in space) or as an individual in a group dungeon crawling. A brilliant game that I really enjoyed playing. So my tasks for next week are to talk Danny into rewriting the game play for us to enjoy.

So where are we now

2006-11-17T19:27:00.000Z

Well unfortunately I'm still having problems with my website but those should fixed by the end of next week, and I will be releasing the new web site approx 130+ pages of content , I've agreed with John that we will be releasing the full contents for our games Swords & Scrolls and Black Ops, So hopefully by next Friday the first 130 pages of content will be publicly available, I think that the Swords & Scrolls game will end up with about 10,000 pages and we are hoping that gamers will help us generate the content.

We are also looking to hear from other gamers that have their own games as we would like to publish their game on our site.

Oh yes the design of this blogg is nearly finished with just he header image to appear which will when the site goes live. so you can use that as the key to knowning that the site is live

Welcome to the Bloodmoon Games Blog

2005-10-11T23:06:00.000+01:00

Here I will talk about the developement of the RPG Engine and the hopes for the future,