News: First week with PHP

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

I seem to be getting more used to php now. I'm far from an ace at it, but I'm able to get it to do what I want a lot easier now. I need to start focusing more on cleaning up my style with it and making it all more professional looking, as I've learned that if I don't do that soon while I'm learning I'll become to accustomed to doing it lazily while planning to clean it up later. My C++ is such a mess most of the time. Apparently, while I don't believe it, even when I spend a lot of time specifically to clean up my code like I did for pickpocketing for the EQClassic project, since others will see it and probably need to work with it at times, it still warrants being completely discarded. Who knows how many hours I spent on that code. I was proud of the work I did on it, as the EQClassic project is one I really believe in, and I was happy to have finally contributed something to the server project. With my work on that gone to waste, I can safely say I won't be offering to work on the server code in the future like I was about ready to. I may even keep the launchpad code permanently private now. I know I'm not the best coder/scripter, as I'm self taught all of it with no formal background in any language, but I don't need my work or efforts insulted just because someones more talented. Anyway, I'm getting off track on a rant so moving on...

This past week I have worked more, off and on, on the Z-Band server scripts. I've gotten them a lot more polished then in my last update. The Leaderboard is functioning more like a Leaderboard now, and sorting in descending order based on wins. Both the registration and score updating scripts have been fully written, and rewritten (compy crash with unsaved data ftl). For most of my developing and testing of the scripts they just supported Super Mario Kart. I thought adding support for other games was going to be a bit more trouble, but I did all that today without much issue. As they all stand now, their completely functional. I still have to tie them into a phpbb database to use account info. As such, I don't have proper password support implemented. Other then that, I have to add a few checks to make sure nothing is tried to be done that isn't expected. Like sending an update for a game your not registered as playing, a score mismatch between players, etc. I'll probably iron that stuff out over the next week. Then maybe consider recoding a new version of the dll to support these, or implementing what I can of a recoded dll into a version of the stand alone client.

Other then that, this week I worked on my blog layout a bit. Polishing up some of the template code to suit how I want it. And adding/changing some images and colors. I brushed up on Photoshoping (formerly just PaintShopPro for me) and made the current background and logo. I made several other backgrounds as well, all pretty nice. This one was just closer to what I wanted. I'm not totally happy with the logo. I couldn't summon up much inspiration for it, and it seems very plain.

I also re-registered the old #Z-Net channel on gamesurge. The IRC link for it is on the side menu there. It's been a real ghost town since the projects homepages randomly went down (shakes fist at izfree.com) as finding a download link for Z-Net has been hard for anyone to stumble upon anywhere else. Even if there's no Z-Net 2.0 activity there still, I'll still use it as a chat channel for discussing my projects or whatever else unrelated. At this point my blog has only been up about 2 weeks, so it only gets like 4-10 hits a day. So I don't expect to see much traffic, but if anyone feels like it, drop by. =)