Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 218/308 (8/4/08) I am sorry for having been away so long, but I was crushed and nearly dysfunctional for some time when Adobe sprung the 9,115 Flash player, which mandated a new security model and permanently broke the game.

I was genuinely happy at the beginning of December, until Flash 9,115 came out on the 19th of that month. I had put ten years--TEN YEARS--into this project and was finally developing content after teaching myself Java, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, PHP and ActionScript; having spent thousands of hours developing the server engine and client and creating all the tens of thousands of art assets.

After several efforts in January I was forced to conclude that there was just no way to make the client work without starting nearly completely over. Not only was the new security model going to require thousands of files to be altered by hand, but the script interpreter was not really backwards-compatible as claimed. I flushed nearly $600 down the toilet and paid for the Adobe's new version of Flash, hoping all I would need to do is re-export everything to achieve compatibility with the new player, but to no avail.

I advise all to look for open source solutions to meet your needs, so you are not locked into a proprietary tool chain which can be changed without warning and destroy all your work and effort, overnight, with no recourse. I made a horrid error two years ago, when I chose to move from the previous HTML and Java-based clients I had written. I was lured by the promise of sockets, animation and forward compatibility, and ported my entire asset base to Flash (then still owned by its original developer, Macromedia).

I have taken the game server down. If you are looking for a web-based game, please take advantage of one of our advertisers in the side panels. The website is staying up, while I work on the next generation of the game--which is under way, per my message of two weeks past--and for which I have made absolutely certain to obtain the source code for the engine!

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 197/308 (7/15/08) Just wanted to note that I broke ground on the new version this week. The learning curve is very steep this time around, and the demands of life and work are considerable, but work has begun again on this project.

First Tikid, Hour of the Rogue, 51/308 (2/20/08) I shook Ray Harryhausen's hand tonight.

First Tikid, Hour of the Horse, 30/308 (1/30/08) Committed and bought the Actionscript 3 reference, an expensive 3.5-inch thick collection of dense documentation, in hopes of solving this issue at lunch today.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 22/308 (1/22/08) Aaaaand... we're back.

The computer on which the site resides lost its power supply, and it took this long (8 days) to get a new one and have the tech put it in.

The problem with Adobe's 9,115 Flash plugin still exists. Unfortunately, it will have to continue to exist for a while now, as my window of opportunity for working on the problem has closed--I have to concentrate on a major project at work now, and may or may not have time to get back to this soon. My next free time will not be before the next weekend's mornings, sad as that may be (but I'll find myself picking away at the problem before then, I'm sure!)

First Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 7/308 (1/7/08) I'm beginning to think that this security protocol is BUGGED... I can connect to Hegemony via telnet, issue command and get response. I can use Flash versions 9,28 and 9,47 and see them connect and run. Flash version 9,115 will NOT connect, or even send the connection tickle. Unless it is running locally in Flash player... if it runs via the browser, no attempt at connection is made. Run via the player, I can see the connection attempt. Checked the firewalls, even disabled them. Ran things up and down the port scale. Rewrote the game server to handle the port request in-line on the same socket. Everything I can think of, and no result. Anyone who has downloaded the latest Flash player is locked out of the game, including me.

First Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 6/308 (1/6/08) Spent most of the afternoon working on quests, attaching new quests to locked doors around the City. Tweaked the tools I wrote yesterday a little more to show the scripts and objects attached to each scene, as well as the quest scene links. Noticed the player icon's arms aren't correctly positioning in the 115 release, either... Don't know if it is me or a Flash player bug in the AS1 interpreter, suspect the latter since it works fine in older versions.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 5/308 (1/5/08) Got up, the rain had paused, by the time I got my shoes on it was pouring again. There are big chunks of glass all over the walkways outside my apartment from a window which blew out yesterday. The window looks like it got replaced but nobody cleaned up the glass. I'll try to make a dash for the office if it lets up again for a bit.

In the meantime, I did get around last night before bed to setting up a few more simple quests. It is indeed easy enough to replicate a quest... but I need to go make some small, repeatable maps to go behind the locked doors now. I keep getting closer to mass production of material, but it always seems to slow down to a tinker's rate when it comes down to creating it.

Updated: Still pouring outside. Working on adding maps behind quest doors. Just made the decision to remove access to the greater world and concentrate on the City of Antra for release (about time, too). This means I can push a lot of Abilities off my plate, too, as their teachers are located elsewhere. It does mean losing Lakedown, which I love to death, and the Ryuzhin Ferry after so much recent work, but it cuts down vastly on the scope of what needs to be finished in terms of user-accessible content. It can all come back later, in another release.

Updated: Spent most of the day creating a way to display links to links to links, as quests had just gotten totally out of control when I tried to write ten of them in a row. It was fine until all the rows in the dozen database windows suddenly started looking alike... then I needed to stop and write a better tool. Now hopefully I can finish my goal of ten new quests, complete with sets of rooms for each of them, as I've got a way to pull any quest and look at its linked list of scenes.

Really going to have to take a look at creating something similar for any given scene... would help a lot in straightening out some particularly impregnable knots.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 4/308 (1/4/08) We interrupt the interesting updates to tell you that if you have the latest Flash plugin 9,0,115,0) from mid-December, you are not going to be able to access the game, due to an abrupt new security regime. I actually now need to build and run a separate server program which serves up an access list before a socket connection will be allowed. Web pages like the How To with "examples coming soon" over two weeks old since the imposition, er, release of this plug-in (9,0,115,0) is not helping here. Anyone still at the previous version (9,0,47,0) should be able to connect no problem.

Updated: OK, I believe I have whipped up a little server I've named "Hegemony," which will run alongside the World of Antra server and apache servers which feed the game content, and provide the necessary response to the socket policy call. This, of course, assumes that Adobe's implementation works as advertised on their end too (and I have the whole MIME thing right in Java, like that would happen, lol). I'll test some more tonight, as well as I can without a remote host, and hope it stops raining outside long enough tomorrow to trot in and try it out on the live server.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 3/308 (1/3/08) Copying another directory... can't believe how long some of these take (this one's items). Started it an hour and a half ago. That glorious USB 1.1 bus... on the server where I have USB 2, it's about 10 minutes...

I did manage to fix the problem with experience awards last night... had to add another lookup to the attack routine right at the end--with the check for quest completion now occurring before the standard monster xp award after a defeat, the information which used to be pulled once for efficiency at the top of the routine is now possibly stale before use. Attack is one of the longest and most complex routines in the code so every effort was made to keep it quick, but it occurred to me that with the introduction of Endurance limiting the rapidity of attacks, an additional lookup would have plenty of time to burn if it needed it, plus it only happens after a defeat, not every single blow.

The other thought I had was that leveling was no longer a matter of hunting rats at 6 xp apiece. I came out of my first quest with 87 xp--almost enough to hit level one and become a "real" character! Now hunting a couple of rats would be appropriate...

Updated: OK, put up a new build. Immediately saw that the #$#Q@@!~~! icon for characters isn't positioning elements correctly and totally looks like @$$... that's going to be fun to debug... is it an older version of the Flash Player, is it that file isn't in the right format... augh! Haven't had a problem with that, it's been rock-solid for a month. Put it into release and it immediately breaks.

Updated: Problem with client signalling on port 8080. Seems to work fine from local and remote machines running Flash version 9,0,47,0, but not properly on the local machine under 9,0,47,0 and not at ALL on the local machine after an update to 9,0,115,0, current as of December.

Hi ho.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 2/308 (1/2/08) Started the grcs directory file copy... it's only 83.6 Mb, but the copy is still working in the *index*... the penalty for that 83.6 Mb being thousands of small files instead of a few large ones. Wonder if it will finish by the time I have to leave... Took five whole minutes to just get my left shoe on this morning as I still can't bend myself. Getting it tied it was another struggle. Hope my shoelaces don't come lose between here and work.

Maybe I can hobble home at lunch and start the next copy?

Updated: OK, I put up a "temporary" build just to see if the code would compile. It compiled! And even allowed login from the new build of the client on the first try... I'll do a full copies of all the new graphics over the next few days to match the new engine and client builds, but that takes hours and hours and must be done incrementally as time allows.

Noted that experience is not awarding properly on quest complete and discharge, but does show in the client display... it's not being recorded in the store, however. That was the very last thing I was tweaking before I went to bed--remember, it was at 22:19 last night that I completed the first quest ever!--so it is no surprise it is bugged.

Still, that the build worked out of the box on the release server was especially gratifying! A few missing graphics are easy to repair or replace... the infrastructural stuff is far more difficult when it doesn't work!

First Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 1/308 (1/1/08) Conundrum... must get to office to do upload, yet cannot put on pants or even sit well in front of computer due to PAIN. Seriously. Made a few attempts to make coffee, but gave up and made tea as there was less reaching for things involved. The cat is frantic, as I usually hold her and rub her ears while the coffee brews, and I can't even bend down to pick her up right now. We'll see how it goes today.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 365/307 (12/31/07) Had an idea for quest scripting so good I got out of bed last night to code it in. Provides a simple data representation of scene by scene events during a door quest.

Other problems arising this morning include injuring my back somehow yesterday or last night. Can't even get my socks on just yet as I can't quite reach my feet at the moment.

On New Year's List of Resolutions, #1 with a bullet: Situps. It's not a backache... it's Fat Kirk Syndrome. But it still really hurts. And yes, it impacts production... it actually took a couple tries to get out of bed, which took more time than I would have thought, and showering took longer. In the grand scheme of things, it's only a little time, but I only have today and tomorrow before I go on a Big Deadline for a month.

And so it goes.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Rogue, 363/307 (12/29/07) OK, listen up, combat kiddies: there are six types of possible defense, and three types of damage resistance. Attacking drains your endurance, and if you run out of endurance, you can't attack until you rest and recover enough to attack again.

Note that this makes monsters exceedingly dangerous, especially since monsters are level coded at last. A monster will now hit you for (level*attack_type_damage), which is a much more powerful attack. Your defense against the up-to-three types of damage done by the attacking weapon will be checked type by type, and used in your defense, along with your racial defensive and resistive capabilities.

Combat just got a LOT more dangerous, and the types of enemies you choose to engage suddenly matters. Previous versions have not scaled their damage by level, this version does.

New build has to go up Monday, so I have New Year's Day to fix it when I get it all screwed up lol. That's my last day off for a while.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Houri, 362/307 (12/28/07) I lit a torch from my inventory, and the scene brightened. I snuffed it out by putting it away, and the scene darkened.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 345/307 (12/11/07) This weekend, just walked up and down various boulevards in the City, fixing everything that I stumbled upon. This includes things like doors with no lock sound feedback, missing lamps in scenes, stuck NPCs, stores without NPCs, etc. Giving serious thought to closing off the "outdoors" of the world and limiting this release to City-only.

This would be sad because of all the work that just went into the ferryboats to get up and down the river, but good because it would reduce the scope considerably. But it's important basic game mechanics work properly, and I think right now that supercedes ferries as a priority.

I'm not speaking so much of clicking on things, taking things, moving from scene to scene... that's all pretty much taken care of; but the balance of abilities between the races, new abilities which need to be thought up and implemented, how many health a first level monster has compared to a second level, how it feels to level, etc.

First Tikid, Hour of the Daystar, 335/307 (12/1/07) Finally found and fixed the bug preventing some doors from playing their locked sound properly.

First Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 334/307 (11/30/07) Got the environmental channel streaming and separated from the music stream, so they can be turned off independently of one another. Currently there is one channel for music, and three for environmental sounds. Incidental sounds are handled separately, but probably ought to be incorporated, but I'm afraid of lag for really time-specific sound if I do it the way music and environmentals are handled.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 330/307 (11/26/07) Straightening out the riverboats took up most of the evening. There's eleven, they all need at least three links, and some still don't have their buttons in place. The ones that work, work well, although there is apparently some logic error in the Fabuluz/Northum selector switching. Had to collapse sending of the menu arrays into concatenated strings--the flurry of events was overloading the client and causing the debarkment menu to fail to appear reliably. Changing it so one concatenated string is sent and picked apart on the client side for processing seems to have cleared it up. I'm typing that out in hopes of remembering it next time I run into a similar issue as that's what delayed me most of the afternoon and kept me from finishing all of the link work on the riverboat scenes themselves. Also, some error in the attack routine is causing a failure to award xp on defeat and properly draw corpses, so I'll have to remember to look at that too. Spent an hour copying in preparation for a release this morning but then remembered the xp issue and decided to hold off until I can get in a look at that.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 329/307 (11/25/07) Everyone starts with an empty bottle now. Bottles can be, like, filled with liquids and such. So always carry a bottle if you think of it. Also, the Riverboat Fabuluz is now carrying passengers southward on the Ryuzhin. The Riverboat Northum isn't yet cooperating in the reverse direction.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Sword, 328/307 (11/24/07) Need to stop and eat, but can say that this will be the biggest update ever when it hits. The riverboats are in, and all their art is done (but their linking is not--oy!)--so suddenly transportation up and down the main artery for travel, the Ryuzhin River, is available. This should make getting around between the zones much more pleasant, and shorter. The linking is a mess though--a whole system using the interim scenes got scrapped and replaced, and so all the clickies need to be hand linked again. It's a tricky and painstaking job, and I'm going to take a break now because I just make a bunch of mistakes I had to straighten out!

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 327/307 (11/23/07) Turkey'd out this morning, got home at 2:00 am. Got up at 7 anyway and started coding, now I need a break. Coding content at last, making quests. It's only taken forever to get to this point, where I can finally tell the stories instead of work on the plumbing! A very long forever. Although right now, I'm actually working on adding incidental sounds to one of the four sound channels I built in way back when and have only ever used one of. Doors will finally properly "thunk" again, without having to go through every single scene and add the sound to the third frame of every button by hand--although synch may be an issue... Also, dropped playback volume by default to 50% from 100%.

First Tikid, Hour of the Daystar, 326/307 (11/22/07) The questing infrastructure now supports interrogative-dispatched quests as previously, but also allows for very short quests to be given by NPC target groups, and for those who join the Merkezi Guild or play Elvs, for example, to also go to posting lists of quests offered only to those groups and click to choose from the list. Put separate pieces of art in for the "close-ups" of the posting boards so they don't all look the same. Changed the background art of the badge window to something slightly more suitable.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 325/307 (11/21/07) Got the female Barbarian and male Kuzhan files done this morning. Turns out a lot of the work is completed from the last time I tried working out this problem, so I can swipe a lot of it and save a considerable amount of time. You can tell when you are getting to a workable point when you can drop in another component and have the infrastructure drive it. When I flipped my testing character over to Kuzhan, the new art just worked without my having to do anything more than adjust the "hinting" which allows for each race and gender to have variations in height and posture. Also added an "Are you...?" question to greetings so that NPCs could confirm their identity if asked. Got the medal and FAQ trees synchronized. Fixed the medal announcement art and text. Added the links for Climb Walls to resolve to two scenes in Resident Zirkot. Locked the menus down so they don't change shape anymore when items are selected. Changed color of menu text to black. Changed color of selected menu items to white.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 324/307 (11/20/07) Actually managed to evoke enough disclipline and attention to successfully get other people's PCs, with all the costume options they have selected and currently running, including weapon state, to show up! This morning I got up and put in another hour building and testing the female barbarian icon. Now there is a male and female to be done for each of the other player races. Kuzhani, Lethani and Zhirazani are all easy enough. Tree Elvs aren't too much different, but Leaf Elv, Dwarv and Trol art may or may not be completed. Killed the annoying "And yourself?" being tacked onto the ends of all responses to similar inquiries.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 323/307 (11/19/07) Spent much of the weekend, beginning Saturday, tackling the PC display problem again. Managed to get the player's PC displaying correctly with the new method in my test case. There will now just be a wrapper for each race/gender combination, containing all the pieces of the art needed to display the character. The wrapper will contain the hinting necessary for best display for each item for that race/gender combination. This version can't go into release on the live server until more wrappers are done. I was testing with the male Barbarian, and will do female Barbarian after it... then I'll probably throw it up on live just to see how it works--although it should take vastly less time to prepare one of these wrapper files, and vastly less time to add new costume parts going forward once all the wrappers are done.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 165/307 (6/14/07) Fixed a bug preventing successful combat resolution, introduced Sunday night, I believe but which I only caught this morning.

Also added code trapping for redraw of scene on load, so that if the server bogs a little and one clicks several times on the move-to button, the scene doesn't load once for each click processed.

Enlarged the size of the icon of your pc to make it easier to see if a weapon is in use or not, when it's small like a dagger.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 164/307 (6/13/07) The FAQ window is popping open, and the database fetch script is working to pull the few FAQs in the index down for display. However, lunch is over and I have to go back to other tasks now. Largely, it's an issue of rewriting the FAQs used on the web for brevity (and currency, some of them are woefully out of date!) However, for the first time it will be possible to look up game information without leaving the game console.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 163/307 (6/12/07) Put up the build along with several hours work from this morning. Everything seems to be working. The new badge window art is in, and the close button has been removed in favor of clicking the button which opens the window again, so it works like the map window. The button is in place for the FAQ window (coming, so you can get help in game).

It looks like the text for the tool button rollover is fixed, although still too large, but the buttons are functional again after the problems in yesterday's build.

Quests are being handed out, and the label is now showing up, but they cannot be completed yet as the complete mechanism in this build is non-functional.

A note for those players I've seen back the last few days: yes, putting up a new build wipes out any saved characters. The database which represents characters, their items, their abilities and so on is changing a lot right now, so it's only efficient for me to change out all the databases rather than save some of them, and the character databases are getting wiped every time a new build goes up.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Daystar, 162/307 (6/11/07) Some problems with today's patch. The font fix didn't work for the tool buttons, and so they are almost unusable. I can't fix it until I get home... grrrr. Use at your own risk until then!

First Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 162/307 (6/11/07) Improvements in this morning's patch:
• Click pickup reliability should be improved in complex scenes
• Named NPCs should appear much more reliably in their locations. Previously, they could be set to dead and not turned on again, although they would hear and respond to questions
• Doubled terminating punctuation such as "?.", "!.", ",." etc. should be removed from the client display
• Quests are being sucessfully given in trials, at least by the hag sisters, but a snag in restocking is holding up their completion
• Graphics for badge window much improved (but not in this release, tomorrow)

Second Tikid, Hour of the Warrior, 159/307 (6/8/07) Spent a few more hours shaping the quest mechanism. At this point, a quest-enabled NPC can be approached and asked a question such as, "Do you have any quests?" and an answer received. The character is then asked if they accept the quest, and if the answer is, "Yes", the quest-giver is prepared to hand over the quest. New engineering added to the client to show the current quest title at the top of the window. More to follow as time permits over the weekend.

The small fonts are still broken in the client in today's build. I did attempt to embed them, but they did not take--either the font is purely a bitmap and unembeddable, or I didn't set it up right. Will try again, as time permits.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 158/307 (6/7/07) The client viewer for awarded badges is in and working. There are four exploration badges currently awarding. The code to allow a badging event to occur when a sign is clicked has been extended to allow a badging event when a move event occurs, so badges may drop when a particular scene is entered or exited, as well as when a marker or object is clicked.

The client background and action button graphics were reworked last night to add a few enhancements. However, I failed to embed a font, so the extremely small type used on the button labels--added to make it easier to use the menu verbs--is currently wrapping. I'll have to fix that in the client tonight and upload a new copy tomorrow, the buttons are too good to let slip another day.

The Klok should update the Hour if it changes while in a scene now as well.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 156/307 (6/5/07) The first badge is awarding, although there is yet no client display after the initial reward message. The backend was installed which talks to the quest inquiry.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 155/307 (6/4/07) Worked on quests and quest support this weekend at some length. Unfortunately, got here to find I hadn't copied the database files and brought them with me, only the source, so although the new code extensions have been compiled in, the db behind them isn't online yet and should result in "No, I have no quests available" responses from the test NPCs.

Was able to trace and fix a long-standing bug which would "jam" an event at the head of the server queue if someone logged off before a click was processed.

Helmi Ratcatcher will be available on Palace Street at the gate 24 hours a day now, to encourage sales of rat and gnar skulls.

NPCs who drop loot will now drop only one type, with coin or other item. If coin is dropped, only one type of coin will drop. This is done to prevent clutter, and increase the perceived value of reward drops. Daggers will no longer drop constantly--daggers have been moved to the "weapon loot" classification along with other items.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 152/307 (6/1/07) Some time very early this morning was spent modifying the move command to allow for the description parameter to override the default scene string. This was done so that on defeat, player characters could be moved somewhere safe and resurrected.

Yes, that means no more permadeath for characters when they are defeated by NPCs. Nor do players drop all their stuff on defeat anymore.

Here's the second change: When you are defeated, you are taken to the nearest establishment of healing, and will return with no HP or SP.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dragon, 151/307 (5/31/07) I put in some time yesterday for the first time since November, recompiling the game for the latest release of Java. I've been away for a while, and have learned some things in my travels. These lessons will be showing up in the game to greater and lesser degrees as time is found to work on the code needed to bring them into the game.

I am pleased that the site has been stable in my absence. There are still some issues which can gum up the works, but in general, things work and work well. I would like to toss all that has come before, as is usual for me when I return, but I think the most basic lesson is to keep what works, rather than begin again from scratch, so the idea is to extend, not replace.

Here's the first change: To send a message server-wide, use the format, "/b chatstring" where you type forward-slash, "b", followed by the string you want broadcast. The output will appear in the chat window as "[BC yourname]: chatstring" in all currently-on player windows.

If you are new to the site, you will find here a great variety of material, including monsters, personalities, art, maps, stories, poems and more, all relating to the World of Antra setting. If you're working on a tabletop RPG, you will find lots of material to adapt, so please dig around, as the site is much deeper than it looks, each section having additional navigation menus of its own.

A client is running which lets you wander around inside the setting itself, and interact with the characters there. It's very primitive, but the policy here is to put up what works because there is no better test for it.

Leave a comment in the forum if you would like. For private communications with your friends, there is also a U2U messaging system. (You need an account for these features, as they need a name to find your messages.)

Have fun exploring!

Netwyrm