This is great… your approach to player influence in your world is just what I looking for. Let me explain to you.

All my life I played pen & paper RPG (or TRUE RPG, as I prefer to call), but also liked to play videogames and internet games. Nowadays we can see a log of browser-based games that are nice, but lack of the interaction of a true RPG.

Well, I’m willing to correct that, making a more interactive game that looks more like a pen & paper RPG, with the simplicity of a web game. I just started to acquire knowledge on programming PHP to do so… but is a long walk. I’m already a web designer with a lot of experience in graphic design, html and css, but since I didn’t found any engine that fits my desires, I must learn to program to do so…

In my quest to become a programmer, I found your website and your amazing tutorials, but my real surprise was to find the Lantern page and discover that you also have a different approach to web gaming. Your idea of making the scenario change on player’s actions is awesome and is just what I’m looking for.

I have some great ideas in this aspect too and can contribute with design, content and planning, if you want (and need) to.

Please, contact me so we can talk about this.

thanks

Douglas d’Aquino

The bonus with that is that I then also forward port 80 in the router to that IP and then I can access the server from the internet if I am away from home.

My server receives a valid command to “move.” It then tries to instantiate a “MoveService” Class. They may succeed, or fail. If it fails, I don’t have a class for that action yet (and could default to a “IDontKnowHowToDoThatService”). If it succeeds, then I just tell the MoveService to execute().

The benefit is well defined responsibilities of all objects — so when you go looking for a problem, it’s easier to see where to fix it. Or, conversely, you have nice bottlenecks to incorporate special cases. e.g. A movement service that’s based on the type of player (“giant”,”human”,”werewolf”,etc.). In those cases you incorporate the player’s class into the action class name (VampireMovementService).

I don’t know PHP well enough to say whether this approach might work for this case or not.

Hey Ben, I can get the idea of a service, but I can’t see a way to make the objects smaller other than taking out the callbacks and having a large switch. Maybe I’m missing something when you talk about a service class, but from my understanding I would just pass the object (everything but it’s callback) to a class that takes my command and the object and tries to figure it out instead of calling the callback? I’m not saying the method I outlined is an ideal method (far from it) but I don’t seem to see how a ‘service’ method is better.

My refactoring of this has led me to creating “Service” objects who handle the responsibility of actions. A movement service, a combining service, a chat service, etc. Leaving the Player and Item objects mostly responsible for storing/retrieving themselves along with validations and such.

Here’s a post that explains the approach in more detail: http://jamesgolick.com/2010/3/14/crazy-heretical-and-awesome-the-way-i-write-rails-apps.html

Of course, all of this is potentially a little excessive for what you’re currently doing. Maybe? I don’t know how complex Lantern’s crafting system will be.

(P.S. If you had an online game where people could craft not just out of a recipe list, but create entirely new items, that would be pretty hardcore. To have powerful, player created-and-named-and-described artifacts could go a long way towards investing players in the world.

Or at least, having “extras” that you could toss in — if I add Crushed Ruby to my Broadsword then I get a Broadsword of Flame + 1 or whatever.

Just saying.)