Otherworld - a game I'm working on

About graphics, I was trying to install Imagemagick on my computer but I was totally pulling my hair out concerning it. It's not enough I have Imagemagick installed on my computer, I also need to have Imagick installed in apache (or what ever you're running php through), and if they're not the same version then it's not going to work. I have php 5.3 and it said that it only works on 5.4 and up, but it still had a file for 5.3 so I installed that. The problem was that it constantly said that the number of file types associated with Imagick is 0, so even though it can recognize it has the class, it can't understand any encoding whatsoever. And even on the off chance that I would get it working, it wouldn't be on the server anyway, so there's no point in even trying. I copied the dll files from Imagick to Imagemagick and ones from the filters folder into the root folder but nothing worked. I spent hours on it. In the end I uninstalled the whole crap pile and I don't even want to hear about it anymore.

 

I was originally going to use Imagick for weather maps. With it, I could make circles to represent low and high pressure, then use a blur filter to get the pressure between the highs and lows. But I ended up going with a much simpler system instead. I might write a new system in the future but for now it will do. Currently the chance of rain is overall high, so if I notice that it rains far too often, I can reduce the chance.

Also one thing I was considering was avatars that change as a character ages. It would go from baby to adult to elderly person following certain internal logic. I would need something that supports vector graphics for that. But the problem is that if I find a solution, then decide to move servers when the finished version is released, the new host might not support the graphics, unless it's something common like Flash. And Adobe is insanely expensive. If there was a free solution that was easy to install and use, I would take it.

 

Concerning dynamic resources, I had this idea of generating random new fruits when a person explores a location that hasn't been explored before. Tropical regions would have the highest chance of producing fruit, temperate would have a lower chance and cold would mainly produce berries. Random fruits would be named with a combination of syllables drawn from pools associated with the current region and often also a color. If I used parent archetypes like cherry, plum, berry, fruit, bean, assigned values for them and the child types would inherit the values of the parent types, it might even save me some work. It would be possible to inspect the fruits and it would describe their structure, flavor, color and maybe also scent. Good fruits and berries would taste good while bad ones would either taste bland or plain bad like rank fish, smelly socks, soap, grass, barf etc. I could use some new ideas for adjectives that describe flavor.

 

I was working on the random fruit generator yesterday. The categories are generic fruit (usually tropical), berry (that can resemble a blueberry, currant, gooseberry, strawberry, drupelet, mulberry or generic round, oval or elongated berry), citrus fruit, pome (apples), drupes, root vegetables, flowers and beans. Tropical fruits generally taste like a mixture of 2 to 3 things, usually other fruits, but some can taste bland (cucumber, zucchini, bread, potato, crayons, tofu, chalk, almonds, squash, cauliflower), sour, or downright weird (sweaty socks, fish, shrimp, cheese, onion, garlic, crab meat, vomit, snot, cloves, allspice, coffee, tea). They can also have added adjectives. I should make it so that if it adds a primary taste like sweet, sour, salty or bitter, the related tag will be attached so that the resource can be used for projects.

The flesh type of the fruit should also affect it's dicability and how it behaves when dried. Things like strawberries will turn brittle when dried, but things like dates will turn leathery.

The flavors for berries, pomes and root vegetables are more simplified, and drupes can only taste like other drupes, while citrus fruits taste like other citrus fruits (or in rare cases, like cucumber).



The likeliness of a new fruit type being generated increases towards the equator. Outside of the tropics, only root vegetables, pomes, beans and berries can be generated. Tropical fruit and citrus fruits are bound to the tropics.

I still haven't 100% figured out the system, so I should think about it thoroughly before I start saving anything in the database.

 

I had this idea that I would like to have a system that allows mixing soluble resources into liquids, and they could no longer be separated unless I implement something like distilling. If you put something like water in a container, then add salt or sugar, in the current system they would remain as separate piles, but in my idea they would merge to form a mixture. You could keep adding water or salt to change the salinity, or you could boil it to evaporate some of the water to make it stronger. Brine could be used to ferment various things. It could also have hidden aspects like yeast, bacteria and mold. Some bacteria would be useful like lactobacillus and others could be harmful. I'm just not sure what would be the easiest way to implement this. Currently each object represents one resource or item type and there is no mechanic to support mixtures. Implementing each possible mixture as a resource type is out of the question. I need to be able to point to a table that lists the contents of each mixture.

 

I'm increasingly starting to feel like I'm going to have to scrap the flexitime system and instead use a linear progression. It's simply too much work to dance around people being in different parts of their respective timelines. Currently the idea is that one day in real life equals one month in game, but I'm willing to change it to one day being 1 or 2 weeks. So 2 or 4 hours real time would be one game day. Characters would have to spend a part of each day sleeping, forcing the player to take a break. If making the character nocturnal better fits the player's schedule, they can do that, or move the character to an ingame timezone that better fits their daily cycle.

Example: One game day+night is 12 game hours, 4 real life hours.
8:00 morning, the character is given a new batch of AP that the player can divide to be spent during the next 3 hours.
11:00-12:00 character sleeps for 3 ingame hours, meanwhile player is AFK to have lunch
12:00 new morning, new AP, player resumes playing
15:00-16:00 character sleeps for 3 ingame hours, meanwhile player is AFK to have coffee
16:00 new morning, player starts playing. The character is a bit tired at this points, having gone two nights in a row with just 3 ingame hours of sleep when they would prefer 4, but they can manage. If the player goes AFK for short periods of time, the character will start nodding off during those times but doesn't go into deep sleep.
19:00-20:00, character sleeps for 3 ingame hours, player is doing other stuff
20:00 new morning, new AP. The player plays for a while but decides to put the character to sleep early because they are both tired.
22:00-0:00 character sleeps. The player has also gone to bed
0:00-2:00 the character is awake on autopilot
2:00-4:00 the character sleeps for 6 ingame hours
4:00-6:00 the character is again awake on autopilot
6:00-8:00 the character sleeps again for 6 ingame hours
8:00 - the player wakes up and the character is now well rested, having gone through only two days on autopilot and spent half the time sleeping. The character is at maximum energy and can again tolerate sleeping less during the next few days.

Characters can get extra AP from eating or taking naps, but the majority of AP will be a result of getting a proper night's sleep.

When a player knows they will be unable to play (due to being at work or sleeping), they can automate their character's actions for those times. I also have this idea that players are allowed to trust certain other players to command their characters while they themselves are offline. That way a group with members from different timezones could take advantage of having a real human in control around the clock.

How hard would it be to set up cron jobs on the server? I assume it is a Linux server?

 

I managed to implement the new time system without a need for cron jobs, but if I'm going to have things happen while people are offline, that's going to require cron.

People can go exploring and most of the fruits they discover will taste weird or bad, but they may be able to find a few that actually taste good and can become commercially significant.

 

Currently I can do without a cron job but if I get to a stage where I need it, I'll shoot you a PM with the necessary information.

I made a revolutionary breakthrough with project design last night. In fact it is actually quite simple, but solves multiple problems I was having. I'm going to implement brain tanning very soon and then there will be leather! It's right around the corner. I had the feeling if I waited long enough, a solution would come to me and it did. I hope more major light bulb moments like this will come to me in the future.

Also I fixed the structure of two classes who weren't being truly object oriented like they should. I still use the same structure in some other classes, so I will need to fix those too, but it's a routine task.

One of the other key functionalities I've come up with earlier was projects that inherit a defining resource type from a resource in the first slot, or the material of the component in the first component slot. In the future I might implement a mechanic that allows viewing all the resources and components used in making an item. Currently most projects only use 1 to 3 resources or components, so the complexity level is low.

 

I will eventually make the components and materials viewable, but it's not a big priority. Most items mention the primary material, like if it's a stone item or a wood item. The system doesn't support mentioning both the stone type and the wood type, but it will in the future.

Currently I'm working on the farming system. I'm up to a point that you can create fields, assign squares to them, transfer squares to another field and change the color of the borders. The background mechanics for ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting are all there but I haven't yet made it accessible through the interface. I will probably need a cron job to make crops grow. I'm not sure how often it should be run. Once a day might be enough. First I need to make a manually run script and once I'm certain that it works the way it's supposed to, it can be assigned as a cron job. At some point I also need to define which plants thrive in a sandy soil, which ones in clay soil and so on. Actually I've done background research on it, but I need to figure out how to store the values in the database.

 

I haven't done it personally but I've read up on how it's done. You tell it how often to run a certain script and it will do that if the command is written correctly. It's possible to have multiple commands in a text file. If it has line breaks in the wrong spot then it won't work. You connect with ssh, cd to the folder where the text file is located then write crontab filename.txt, which will add the commands in the text file to the routine. I just read that if you're running a php file, then it needs to be called through something called wget, so you need to check the address where it's located. I'm not sure if it's always in usr/bin/ or if that was just an example. Once I know the address, I can write the txt file.

How to Create a Cron Job (Scheduled Task) for Your Website or Blog (thesitewizard.com)

We can do a test with a file that adds a row to the database when it's run. Then we can see if it's being run like it should.