ZeroShadow Dev Blog

This week I gave away a new powerful weapon on the game. Mainly so that I could test out a new thing I wanted to add to the forest. The ability release items depending on how many steps had been used in  total. This will let me set a few exclusives to give away from time to time. A new addition that will bring a bit a fun into the game I think

I also released a couple of new crimes, now they are not easy crimes, you do have to work for them, so if you expecting something for nothing on Kingdom of Riches then you definately picked the wrong game to play. You need to train ALL your stats to get on in my game.

I also hinted towards the coming Halloween event. Its sort of become a tradition for us to celebrate certain times on the year and Halloween is one of my favourites. There will be the graveyard as usual with lots of New items, collectables and NPC’s to challenge the larger players. I also have a few surprises up my sleeves. Give aways etc. So you cannot miss this time of the year for exciting things to happen in the game.

Tags: graveyard, Halloween, Kingdom of riches, NPC's

The last week I’ve been going through my old text books and magazines and realised while doing so how much has changed since I started out using computers. My first work on a computer was about 1979, on an RML 380Z machine. It was a computer with if my memory is not fooling me had 48k I think. It had very little OS, I remember using 5 1/4″ disks on it, getting teletype graphics onto the screen using PUTS, and getting INPUTS and collision detection using GETS, it was a very basic time. I was hooked from the start.

What I miss the most though is the magazines. There was one called Your Computer I remember well. It had listings of code for the BBC, ZX80, ZX81, Commodore Pet, Commodore 64 etc. We learnt to code typing in those baddly printed listings and getting them to work. Ahhh! Happy days. Those magazines had tutorials and everything, hardly any have that now. The books were better too, books were more descriptive, more understandable.

My bible when I used Z80 processors. Rodney Zaks - Programming the Z80, which I consider to be the book that got me my job as a microelectronics software engineer. I have it in front of me now, and I am keeping it, its a treasure, and I’ll even read it again. May even find the box out with my Amstrad CPC464 colour computer in it, maybe a bit of locomotive basic… Mmmm! Happy days.

Tags: BC, Commodore 64, Commodore Pet, odney Zaks - Programming the Z80, RML 380Z, ZX80, ZX81

Recently I have had a few people offering themselves as coders to me for my games. They usually start in game mailing me asking if I need a programmer, not sure if thats an insults or not, lol. Anyway I usually pass on my email and they send me details. Well I say details, its usually nothing more than a, “I can do PHP or MySQL”, no details about why I would need them, or what they have to offer that I do not already have now.

So I thought I would write a blog on this subject.

1. If you are applying to work for me. Treat it like you would a job application. I won’t be hiring anyone that doesn’t take what I do seriously. Its my living after all, and I require professionalism.

2. Show me a portfollio of your work. Examples of your coding, some sourcecode, some details of what sort of work you have actually done.

3. If you only want to be on my programming team just to get script access to the game, then thats never going to happen. I trust only a very small amount of people with direct script access, these are people that have proven themselves honest and trustworthy over and over and I am grateful for that. In this day and age of people hacking the smallest thing for kicks, can anyone blame me.

4. References from anyone you have worked with before. That way I can see if they trust you. More than one reference too, as trust is very important for the work you will be doing.

Thats all I can think of for now, lol. In summary, if you are offering me your services as a coder then give me reasons and details as to why I should, and proof that your trustworthy enough.

Tags: coders, examples, hacking, professionalism, scripts, sourcecode

I have never been able to consider a person who learnt to program using PHP as anything more than a scripter. I also get very annoyed when I hear people saying HTML coder in mails too. Er! They are scripts they are not really programming language like C++ or Pascal. HTML is more like an RTF file format rather than a coding language, its a document standard. For a start to me its like calling yourself a programmer when you learnt to program using BASICS. You may be able to make things happen but your not really programming.

When I first started out I started using Pascal, Borland Turbo Pascal in fact. I was self taught, I picked Pascal because it was so easy to pick up, and was also a great way to learn how High Level Languages (HLL) worked. You get a lot of good habits from Pascal, it does not allow you to use a variables you have not declared, it doesn’t have the irritating == and = thing. I have seen so many C, C++, C# and even Java apps break because the = was used instead of == in an if statement.

Well in Pascal you have

:= becomes equal

= is equal to

That just saves so much hassle.

Also C type languages which I consider to be C, C++, C#, Perl, PHP and such languages to be, all seem to have those irritating users that want to add as much as possible to a single line of code. Why? Isn’t that the compilers job to do, isn’t debugging and readability the most important thing.

One of my other pet hates is comments. Most people who think they know coding seem to think a comment is written after the code, and usually descibes the action you can read in  the code anyway. What it should be telling the person who did not write the code is what it was meant to do.

I write the comments first, its how I have alway worked. I write a psuedo like code of what I am wanting, comment by comment, then write the code around those comments. Its a great way to get the code planned and thought out before you have even written it. Its like explaining what is meant to happen to someone else, nothing beats that for telling you that your method is right or wrong.

My current languages of choice are Delphi 2006 Win32 and PHP 5, I use a little Delphi .NET but the apps I write for my work don’t really need the .NET framework that much. I’ve been recently playing around with Lazarus, a quick google search should give you a link to this project using a Delphi like interface with the Free Pascal project. If you are serious about wanting to be a real programmer, learn Pascal not a C based language or script, you will learn a lot more about structure and planning, and hopefully you will not get those bad habits.

Last of all, keep your code simple, split calculations, don’t put everything onto one line, think code stepping and debug at all times, when you come back in 12 months time to that code, you want to be able to fix any problem, you won’t be able to if you have not future proofed it.

Tags: .NET, C#, Delphi, Java, Pascal, PHP

Today on Kingdom of Riches I released a couple of updates to reduce cash and inflation within the game. There is not yet a problem, but I decided it was best to do something now before there is one.

The updates were as follows

1. Items posted to the items market now have a max of ten times their sellby value. Items with a zero sellby value can be sold at any price as before
2. I added a 5% tax on items posted to the auctions, along with a minimum value for the sale of $20.