Jai's Ethos » General

MMORPGs

Jai — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:19:28 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about MMORPGs and how one might be able to create a successful browser-based one that does not depend on Flash. It’s a pretty tricky situation, really. Although you can cleverly use AJAX and CSS to create a party-based, co-operative against computerised enemies that occurs in “real time” that only works well for the battles themselves. We can easily add live chat to the system between guilds, parties, friends and perhaps world channels but that’s also only a part of the multi-player experience. Another key part is being able to navigate the world and come across other players on your way who you can optionally communicate with or assist. So without these visual representations of players moving about you really lose a lot of the multi-player feel that is present in Flash-based and non-browser MMORPGs. Furthermore it’s really quite tough to create strong emotions and feels for different places inside the game without linking the visuals with audio. Facebook’s in-browser chat service does not depend on Flash however they do use it for sound notifications if you have them enabled. This leads me to believe that there’s no viable alternative for audio through browsers’ in built features.

Update: It seems that a lot of this can actually be done using HTML5 and Javascript. Of course none of this will ever work in Internet Explorer but Google is already in the process of providing a solution to this problem. Which means that I would only need to focus on supporting the main browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Unfortunately Safari doesn’t support OGG playback so I would need to use MP3s for it. Or I could just ignore supporting Safari because of its caveats and still have 93% of modern users (people using pre-XP versions of Internet Explorer would be left out) able to play it in their browser of choice.

Effort Reward System

Jai — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:47:15 +0000

Whilst sitting here, trying to do work instead of going out with the rest of my friends I had a somewhat brilliant idea. See, I love going out and having a great time but I don’t have as much money as most of my friends and it tends to get in the way of doing my coursework. I also find it extremely difficult to get my coursework done. What if I only went out when I’d done my coursework as a reward for my hard effort?

Well, starting now, that’s what is going to happen. On Wednesday I have a piece of extremely difficult (if you disagree then congratulations, I’m finding it difficult) coursework due. If I get it in I can go to Red Leicester – if I don’t I’m not going out. Lets see how long I can stick to this system for.

Last semester’s module results

Jai — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:06:33 +0000

I got the results for my last semester’s modules yesterday and they were all passes (three of them being 1sts – 70%+). As it’s the first year a pass is all that matters but it’s nice to know that I got 1sts in 3 of the modules.

Program Design: 90%
Study Skills and Professional Practice : 70%
Discrete Structures: 70%
Computer Systems: 45%

I did no revision for Computer Systems, Program Design or Study Skills and Professional Practise. I realise now that I should have probably done somefor Computer Systems.