Merchant Empires Weblog

Stockholm Stadium

Was on the SpeedWay Grand Prix 2004 at the Stockholm Stadium yesterday evening.
Broung my Nikon D1 and shot some amazing pictures, unfortunately only one or two is usable… the rest turned out quite blury sigh (Note to self: Charge the damn battery before using).
Ah well, was fun.

Welcome to all

new members of the EU…
Hope it meets your expectations.

Just noticed...

Really need to post more often, layout of the blog looks like crap when one dont use it.
Ah well, will better my bloggless ways.

Devserver back up...

New hard drive installed and system being restored.
Sloooowly returning to normal…

Some Upgrades and Other Experiments

Upgraded the production server with apache 2.0.48 running PHP 4.3.4 plus replaced the PHPAccelerator with the similar but somewhat more featurefilled mmcache. It all seams to play out nicely except i fotgot to turn off the keepalives witch for some reason or another still causes the Postgressql connections avaiable to go exstinct…

Also been playing a bit with recoding our DB abstraction classes with SQL Relay as a base plate, could be iteresting to see how the client side caching and distributed storage of static information will play into the somewhat tricky world of ME.

So far it’s going well, lets see how it plays out…

What is Merchant Empires

What is Merchant Empires? I find myself asking this question of both myself and others lately. The path that i think we shoudl take is that of a Mass Market Online Role Playing Game set in space where trade and commerce are major components. Something along the lines of Tradewars meets Everquest meets Vendetta.

Many of the other developers seem to want to maintain the basic concept of the game as is. Largely changing nothing just extending the game how it is. I do not belive that the game will ever grow beyond where it is now without a fundamental change in the basic design of the game. Gameplay is all well and fine. You can make a really comfortable and pretty electric chair but nobody’s going to want to sit in it.

Kome at last

After a grueling trip of some 1300 Km back and forth in absolutely horrid condition with mud and snow covered roads to the south of Sweden for our yearly club meeting at FHRA the mother organization for our Fire & Rescue team, I am finally home… damn my bed never looked this good :-Z

Some shopping is always nice

Since my car got cleaned out by theifs a few weeks ago I finally got around to buying a new car stereo, was a nice shiny little thing from Panasonic, so now i can yet again have my fav MP3’s playing loudly when i cruise up and down our long little nation ;9

just waiting for a copy of my reciept from the sales guys at xybernaut.com till i know if i get a new Nav system covered by the insurance as well… Just noticed today that the buggers had broken my mobile handsfree as well :/ damn it sure is a waste of time replacing stuff…

Still no word if they will cover my tools i had in the car… ah well…

To be cliche

Testing, 1 2 3 :)

Thouhgts about the future

Been spinning the Future of ME in my head for a few days now while trying to get together even an ounce of inspiration to continue doing what needs doing to preserve the beast we lovingly named Merchant Empires-

There seams to be no lack of ideas and suggestions HOW to do things… just seams to be a lack of clarity of WHAT needs doing…

Well that i am pro a client server model comes to no suprise to any of you I am sure ;) Question is… what should be the platform… should we be innovative or go with already establisged standards… there are client server engines out there, even opensource ones.. should we reinvent the wheel to try to find a wheel that fits our car?

Ah well… I’ll be back on this I am sure.

Middy Personal Log part 4

Well Frederik was by today. We talked about Extorris. He had tons of ideas. I was proud to say “thought of that, already thought og” to much of his stuff. He is great at math and physics will help us trememdiously with the engine.

I think when we have something to show we should seek sponsorts. If the call of warlords can get close to a mill dkr, then we should too.

I have decided to clean up the code. its done VERY easy in Java using eclipse. Lots of refractoring functions in eclipse.
Also I want to use junit. Junit is a libary used to test classes with. It works as this. Whenever U write a class you also write a test method for it. So you can test that the class work. Junit keeps track of all these test classes. later in the project you always end up breaking something when you add new stuff (LIke Ragnora and Hawklan). The junit will tell you if U managed to break a class, so there is no exscuse (unless you write bad tests ofcourse)

Btw I need to get hold of smork…. damn that

Sure we'll let you build a base on our planet...

Well would you? Would you let just ANYONE build a base on your planet? A military base?

Bases are by themselves a military installation. They house ships, they have defenses… Would any sane populace invite potential war and destruction on themselves by allowing this alliance or that merchant to build a base on thier planet?

Maybe we have it the other way around, maybe we shouldn’t allow people to build bases on ‘inhabited’ planets but rather on ‘uninhabited’ or ‘non-habitable’ planets, planetoids, moons or asteroids.

Hmmmmm…

Project with Call of Warlords in place - Middys Personal log part 3

Well I talked the call of warlords guys today. Regular students like me. One was a medicine student the other a student from MY university (I had not noticed him before. Anyhow the Call of Warlords was a game made with support from Danish technoliogy institute. they got 850.000 dkr to make it. Thats about 14100$. When it was at its top they earned 12.000 dkr a month, thats about 2000$. Anyhow they lost most of their customers in a HD crash… So that sucks
They dont host the game themselves but get it hosted in US, for 100$ a server. I think thats a bargain. A big server park somewhere, with techs monitoring and restarting.

Anyhow the deal was. I work for them as a student - consultant and I get 10 point at school. Its a course where students can try “real” life for a change. Actually its kinda cheating, cause this wont be much different than ME devlopment. Actually it wont be different at all, just another game. I could have chosen ME. I bet Wiz would have loved 200 hours of work from me. But ME is not a company AND I need to learn to know people in the danish game devlopers community. Its nice to have contacts. I think they are happy to have sombody to DO their game while they work on version 2. So I abuse them they abuse me… :)

The meeting was all in all very pleasant. We exchanged ideas and experience from the two games. It seems that they have the same shit as we have. Their admin part is MUCH mroe organised though. They have developed an entire admin/bug system I was very impressed. Modified phpmyadm to admin needs (no updates/inserts/delets). Also their design was much more detailed than ME. Well they actually had one, filled with numbers. Talked about extorris as well, they seemed interested and agreed that most of the ideas was good.

Their second version of the game seemed impressive. I wont tell details I am sure they would like to keep them for themselves.

All in all a nice day. This semester I will be working almost excluseively with Games.Thats nice.

The Problem with Acronyms

The new game engine the Universe Server^® or US for short gives us a few problems with our press releases;

I can see the headlines on CNN now “Hackers rewrite the US economy” :)

or “Mr Due Billing was quoted today saying ‘Never before has the US infrastructure been so optimized’ and greenspan countered by saying ‘Well we tried for years!’”

or “President Bush today was overheard today asking the Secretary of State ‘Who the hell is these guys going over my head on everything?’”

ROFL :) now THAT would be funny :)

Indeed :)

Blah Blog

So… Here we are… The long dark tea tie of the soul.. wait.. wrong book.
It’s the middle of the night (for most everyone involved in APME) and I’m sitting here at work (01:35 Local) trying to stay awake and motivate myself to work on my ToDo list a bit or at least something constructive. It’s not working very well.

I hate my hours. I come to work and the one person that is in the office when I get there says Hi, tells me if anything major has happened or is broken and off he goes to a nice warm bed. Granted there are some benefits to workig at night. I get to work on APME because i work nights (so the boss doesn’t see me paying more attention to irc, the wiki and the forum than the bank’s processing). I get to watch movies occasionally (in fact i’ve got

[Listening to: Band of Brothers - Part 5 - Crossroads - - (55:40)]

playing on another monitor right now. Seems like this would be a perfect job. Except i can barely pay my bills and I see my family for about an hour a day and try (mostly unsuccessfully) to sleep for the rest of the day.

I need a new job. Anybody hiring?