Beta 5 – ForumFixed

Part 2 at the end!

Shoop has really outdone herself once more. I honestly can’t express how fortunate we are to have someone as hard working as her 🙂

 

Forum Fixed

All the bugs you guys have found have now been fixed. There are a small number of minor bugs still on my private list that will be cured very soon, but ignoring these the forum is extremely stable now 😀

Pages and editing have also been added and displayed times are now shown as a count up rather than a static time. Thread titles are now shown for threads and I have redesigned the colour scheme too ^^ The forum is worth visiting again if you haven’t recently!

I know for many of you this isn’t the most interesting topic in the world: you are waiting for the actual game to be released (see the end of this post). But you must realise that this forum is a crucial part of the final product. Without it members the future community would lack a way of connecting to each other. In addition, the skills I have learnt during this development are required for more advance communication features later on.

Yes, this forum has been really pushing my SQL skills. SQL is the language that bridges the website you see and the server in the background. It sends information back and forth between the server and the PHP that formats it to your screen every time you press a button. It also stores all the forum data in the background. Anything you see on the forum pages that is persistent when you refresh the page is stored with SQL.

As you can imagine this forum uses a lot of SQL and some fairly advance statements as it has to link all three sections of the forum (boards, threads, and posts). Making a change on the post level can cause changes on the thread and even board level on the website. It’s been an interesting puzzle trying to figure out how to link it all together. I would even recommend that anyone who loves puzzles and has a fair amount of PHP, SQL, and HTML knowledge gives forum building a try 🙂

 

Final Update Next Week

When the next update comes I will be in Scotland starting my doctorate. The workload looks nasty, but I guess when you are going for the highest level of academic qualification it has to be. This means CCSO work will unfortunately pause once more and it won’t be until next summer that work starts back up properly. But from next summer onwards I will have left full-time education so shouldn’t have any more delays like this ever again.

So…

I’m going to be working on the gameplay itself for the next two weeks! I have been itching to get back to it since the start but kept putting it off as I wanted to try other projects first and I found it extremely frustrating before But I have a lot more skills than before, and I have had plenty of time to think about how I can tackle the problems I faced before!

The forum will be changed a little bit more to fix the rest of the bugs, but the rest of the time shall be spent on the game itself. Look forward to it! 😀

COMIC – PART 2

The glue represents how I have limited you on the forum so you can’t break any more things 😛 Have fun ^^

See you soon!

Beta 4.2 – Forum Version 3

You guys figured out a way around the defences surprisingly fast o.O Although I did notice that many of the things you did before you werent able to repeat.

Yet the damage was bad…

But I have improved the systems even more. This time working on how some HTML tags were slipping through the system and being interpreted.

NULLIFIED

Ball’s in your court, testers ^^ I believe this will be safe now 😉

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UPDATE (11 GMT)

Turns out I set my defences up too strict and kind of broke the entire forum…

So I’ve knocked them down a bit. However this brings back a few minor problems…

The hunt is on 😛

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UPDATE (17 GMT)

All problems resolved. Also added spoiler tags to the forum. Have fun!

Beta 4.1 – Forum Fixes and Updates

Over the past 24 hours… the forum has shown some cool tricks… …some funky colours…

…and the power of invisibility…

…so I decided it was time to upload a fix.

 

FIXES

• Line breaks now work.
• There’s a new formatting box full of cool features.
• HTML tags are no longer executed within the system >:T
• Padding has been added to all posts.
• Empty thread titles are replaced with “(No Title)” to allow their threads to be viewed.

Phew. Disaster averted! Or so I hope. We’ll see what new ways you guys come up with to destabilise the forum now 😛

I shall leave up the old threads for a while so you can all entertain yourselves with them. They’ll be removed soon though.

More features on their way!

Beta 4 – I spy a Forum!

Creating a forum is harder than I first anticipated…

 

Forum

Long, long ago, before this blog went public in week 24 of development, CCSO had a fascinating forum. Those of you who have been around since the beginning may well remember my adventures… my discovery, my journey, and my fights with phpBB.

Essentially a forum in a box, phpBB is a godsend to any novice web developer. You set it up and you’re all ready to go. Hundreds of cool features, amazing styles, and everything else you could ever really want.

Anyone remember that image? 26th July 2014. From one of the private weekly updates before CCSO went public.

Anyway, long story short… I lost two months on phpBB. It was amazing. I could have worshipped it. But, it was inflexible. You got what you got, and nothing more. I wanted something that I had more control over. I spent so long reading through the documentation, testing so many things, and yes I could edit it to an extent, but it just wasn’t enough in the end.

I waved goodbye to phpBB 😦

I knew creating a forum was way above my skill level at that time so I left it and moved on to greener pastures…

But now the forum situation changes!

Gah! Not quite as handsome as phpBB, but it is a starting point!

I thought this would be a fairly straightforward task, yet I grossly underestimated the confusingality* of it all. Forums are pretty complex systems, if I’m honest. There are so many variables you have to keep track of and juggle as you traverse or make changes to the forum.
*Now a word.

It was a difficult task (as you can probably tell by the intro comic). Despite this, I succeeded! I am proud of the achievement. The forum is solid and provides a good base to build upon.

I know you are eagerly scanning ahead in this text searching for how to access it. Stop right here! Here you go: Visit the index page of the alpha site. The link is there. You’ll be prompted to log in if you aren’t already as this is required to use the forum.

I greatly look forward to seeing the twisted and warped mess you make of it ^^ Just judging from past experience when I let loose testers on a new feature. Once one of you finds a bug it spreads like wildfire!

Updates to this forum are likely going to be frequent throughout the coming fortnight. I found it quite an enjoyable object to work with – at least once the functionality started to all click together – so I’m motivated to continue to work on it and add even more features.

 

Art

And where would we be without an art section? This time only one piece but there is something bigger we’re working on at the moment! I’m sure you’ll see the secret soon.

For now though… have a Drill!

Great work, Shoopiewoopie! (she hates me calling her that hehe)

 

That’s all for this week!

The beta site is coming together nicely. I know a lot of these projects aren’t 100% complete, but they are getting there. My skills are improving all the time, allowing me to attempt larger and more complex tasks and functionality. You all have a lot to look forward to! See you soon!