Some of you may remember me posting about an online Medieval Fiction and Roleplay club about six months or so ago, to see if there was interest in such a club. I've gotten good feedback from the various people I surveyed, so finally having more free time with my new job and the cheating whore out of my life, I decided to gather a team and go ahead with the project.

Recently while learning CSS I came up with this website : aherostory.myjep.com

The one problem is with starting such a "community", with personal member dossiers and a basic rp character sheet system, etc. is... well.. exactly that. I'm no programmer and do not know PHP, so I can out in an effective amount of time put up a functional system. I could definatly learn, but that would kick back the project a few months which would most likely damage my staff's help.

What I was wondering was if any of you PHP programmers out here be interested in joining up on such a project.

One a side note, anyone interested in medieval fantasy fiction is more than welcome aboard. If you are interested in helping to develop the rp system, world, history, etc, there are always spots open on the founding team. At least for the moment. Not to mention that I wouldn't mind having a few massassian buddies on the project.

Let me know if any of you are interested.

Interesting. My friends and I have been playing D&D this summer. That looks like fun.

Basically the idea of the club will be fiction writing (short stories, poems, "epic" stories) and playing rp sessions online. The current system has no dice rolls, we're not going to work off D&D. The character creation will involve recieving certain amounts of points based on your level to place in your attributes, skills and the likes, chosing your spells and weaponry. Roleplay sessions will run with a storyteller (dungeon master) detailing the adventure while the players interact. It will be up to the storyteller to "police" godmodding, and the likes. The system is still in development so I may eventually go with basic d20 dicerolls. Its not very difficult to script a dice script into IRC.

Would it run similar to online text rpg's? I have played a few of those too. I might be interested in helping, although I am no coder

I never really played text rpgs? Do you mean the kind that go something like :


You are standing in a room full of monkeys. To the north there is a wall, lined with cages filled with excited monkeys. To the south there is a door you just entered through. To the east there is a window and to the west another wall and a lot of cages. There is a disgusting, very sour smell in the air.

What do you do?
A) Go south through door
B) Open the cages
C) Look at window

etc.???


If thats the case thats not how we'll run

Pretty much. I wasn't really a fan of those anyway

Thats definatly now how we'll be running it, that would be terribly aweful so fear not

As for helping, I need some good writers to develop certain kingdoms if you are interested

Some of the current in progress documents can be found here

If you look at Bryn.doc thats how we want to flesh out the kingdoms. At least in the first draft.

Btw, I failed to mention in my first post is that we mean to have a dynamic and evolving story line that advances with membership fiction. Obviously we can't follow every single piece that will be written, so most of the time we will run key events in the form of the competition, where we describe the event and have people write about it. The winning story will become canon to the world fiction and the winner will find himself award with various things that could help his character.

For example, if the event is about a certain kingdom's leader's death, the writer may decide to write that his character becomes king of the kingdom some way or another. If that writer is the winner, his story becomes canon and thus his character's new royalty is the reward.

And I thought this thread would be about if we consider PHP coding more programming or writing.

Anyway, what is it exactly what you need coded? For simple storytelling with a controlling lore master I think a forum would be enough.

What cheating whore? Don't tell me you're having marriage problems already!?

Brian really needs to check his own forums more often...

Er... I didn't get married. Jess cheated on me and kicked her out of my house and out of my life. Months ago. She's due with the child soon. Once we know if the child is mine or the other *******'s, we'll see what happens. In terms of childcare I mean. I'm never going back with the woman. So marriage never occured

Are you set on PHP? You could probably find some great RoR people who would do this for the fun of it.

The site and database itself.

By that I mean :

News script
Member dossiers
Character sheets
Organized Fiction library
Forum

And a forum-like mini-game I want to get going. "Fiction combat" is the best thing to call it at the moment without going into details. One fighter posts, the opponent posts. They do this for a few rounds and finally each get a deathpost where they describe the end of the combat (killing opponent, etc.) Basically its like 2 people writing a run-on story but against one another. A judge evaluates writing, continuity, realism and style to select a winner. Been doing this in the DarkBrotherhood for years and its really fun.

Well, I'm not heart set on PHP, no. Its just a popular language in which I know this stuff is possible. I'm not extremely knowledgeable in this field thus I welcome suggestions. .NET could work I guess too?

I like your ideas and story so far. I think I could help with writing. I had a niche for writing in high school and I have actually wanted to write for fun as of late, weird

My msn : jp_laliberte AT hotmail.com

AIM : JepFreedom

Yahoo : cyris_oscura@yahoo.com

or the channel itself is #mdtplanning on undernet but its mostly deserted when we don't have set times, though I'm still there if I'm on IRC"

Contact me on any of these

It depends on what your web host offers. Your best choices are Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET, probably followed by the less common JSP/servlet technology. PHP is good, but it's a hypertext preprocessor, not a web application framework. Just make sure you stay the hell away from Perl.

I know both PHP and ASP.NET. I prefer .NET but willing to do PHP.

Sorry dude, guess I missed that Get a "who's you're daddy?" test for sure.

I just got a phone call that Jess is being brought to the hospital. I'm awaiting a new phonecall any hour now. Then we're getting a "who's you're daddy" test for sure. At this point I don't even know what i want anymore. I want her to be my child but I would hate having my kid be brought up with seperated parents. Not to mention I'm rather hoping to finally get Jess out of my life once and for all.

He's on my server, so he has PHP5 to work with.

Ruby on Rails is a possible addition in the near future, but ASP.NET won't be happening.

mod_mono!!! ...or not.

Hey... that website isn't in english.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]He's on my server, so he has PHP5 to work with.

Ruby on Rails is a possible addition in the near future, but ASP.NET won't be happening.[/QUOTE]
Mo-no! Mo-no! Mo-no!

But PHP5 is satisfactory.

Its Lorem Ipsum and its latin. It is as form of filler text until I have content to put on there. Which is coming, worry not

This is one of the most misinformed posts I've read around here. PHP sucks, sure, but it's definitely a programming language, one that has dozens if not hundreds of web frameworks available for it. It does so much more that "hyptertext preprocessing" nowadays (well, for the last 5 years, at least).

Perl is a great language for web applications, especially if you use mod_perl and Apache. There are so many open-source 3rd-party modules available via CPAN that you generally don't have to program much more than your business logic (which is a good thing). mod_perl is so much faster than ruby, asp.net, and php, it's not even funny. I don't know much about JSP/servlets, but what I do know is that they take zillions of lines of code to get anything done and it's a whole lot of work to get java and some server up and running (and most web hosts don't support it). Virtually all hosts nowadays have perl and php, many have python (which can also be a good choice, depending on your personal preferences), and some (not many) have ruby and ruby on rails.

If you're going for portability and the availablity of programmers to help you out, php would probably be your best choice (because everyone and their brother knows enough about php to be functional).

Me and my dog don't

Bri wanna code me the website? I'll you a new pc game and ship it to you :P:P:P


On a more serious note, JG has offered to help out with the coding.

Don't you need to start a new process every request? The code has to be interpreted, which is inherently slow. ASP.NET will compile and cache all the code into CLR bytecode. I think it even JIT compiles and caches the native code. That's a hell of a lot faster than parsing a text file.

Let's also not forget that ASP.NET follows MVC out of the box. You've got the entire .NET framework at your disposal and the safety of a managed environment. Oh, and let's not forget that you can use any CLR language, like C#, VB.NET, VBScript, JScript.NET and even Perl or Python.


Eh? Oh, you mean, like, working with objects instead of just calling some function? Yeah, I guess it's pretty bad...


This I agree with. I've done it myself, it's a nightmare.


I agree, but I don't think that's necessarily a good reason to use inferior technology. Reverting is only going to delay the onset of better technology.

Oh, and when I said "stay the hell away from Perl," I didn't mean to say that it isn't useful for web programming. I meant that it's a horrible horrible language these days and there are a ton of alternatives.

Just for clarifications purposes, ASP != ASP.NET. ASP sucks ***. Death on to VBScript. However, ASP.NET is fantabulous for aforementioned reasons.

Nope, mod_perl is a perl interpreter that runs inside apache. It starts up once and keeps the code in memory (in general) for the life of the apache process. It's ultra screaming fast, way faster than mod_php, ruby, python, etc. Again, I can't comment on Java and I don't know much about ASP.net.


My problem with ASP.net is that it's built on a completely closed platform and you have to pay to even get started. You have to buy a copy of WinXP at the very least, and you somehow have to get their web server and development environment. I'm not going to comment on how well it works once it's up and running simply because I don't know. I do know that I hated ASP and I hated Visual Basic so it's pretty likely I'll hate ASP.net too (from a coding point of view).

Interesting comment about MVC - basically stating that MVC is so great that everyone should use it under every circumstance? With perl, you get to program however you want. If you want MVC, there are dozens of frameworks on CPAN that will help you along. There are things like Ruby On Rails in development for perl, if that's your preference. Or you can take a purely functional approach.

Regardless, the flexibility is what draws me to perl - I'm not stuck in someone else's idea of what is the right way to do things. The flexibility can also be a drawback, for sure. Especially for new programmers who need guidance (they won't get it from perl!).

Well, PHP5 has a much better object model, and I wouldn't necessarily say the technology is worse. It's certainly not perfect. But you also have to consider the non-technological benefits of PHP:

1. practically every hosting provider has it, whether unix, linux, or windows
2. there's no barrier-to-entry - you can d/l and install it on practically any computer, for free
3. there's tons of free, easy-to-understand documentation available
4. there are tons of books (more than asp, perl, python, and ruby combined) available
5. there are tons of php sites that offer forums and free help when you're stuck (try to get that from Microsoft)

Jepman: While I don't wish to get involved, if you want to post your request for writers on the ISB, feel free to do so.

I just want to chime in with my two cents. Désolée Jepman, don't mean to derail.


ASP.NET doesn't have to be soley coded in VB. It can be done in C# which is a VASTLY better language, or other languages. ASP sucks because you really have only one choice and that is VB. Yes, you can do it in JScript but...no. It's even worse.

You can download (for free) Visual Studio Express for web devel. On it comes with SQL Server express. This is an instance where I actually say slap MySQL on the machine instead of that, unless a SQL Server like environment is needed. SQL Server Express isn't all that cracked up, IMO. Also, IIS 5.5 is only available for WinXP. 5.5 sucks. 6 fixed a good # of things. However, it's sufficient enough to learn ASP.NET.

And finally, I don't think F/OSS is all that it's made to be.

As JG and I have stated, you can code ASP.NET in C#, which is possibly the best general purpose language since C++.

You can develop and serve ASP.NET and other .NET technologies for free. On Windows, VC# Express is free. SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop are free. MonoDevelop is available on other platforms. Mono runs .NET on just about every platform you could want. And it's not some ragtag open source project, it was started by Ximian and is now owned by Novell.


Of course not. And you aren't limited to MVC. It's just encouraged, since in many cases, it is a superior architecture.


You aren't stuck to someone else's idea of what is the right way with .NET. It's just encouraged since years of software engineering says it IS the right way.


Agreed, that is a great boon.


Also very nice, although Mono is also free and can be installed on just about any platform. Granted it does not have full .NET 2.0 support yet, but the important things are there.


Search for C# and VB tutorials. They use the same language independant framework, so you can use VB tutorials for C#. There is TONS of stuff out there.


Okay. It's called MSDN documentation and MSDN forums. All free.

xfree86 har har har