News: What I'm working on

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

With informational updates for most of my more major projects now posted to preserve their history, I'll now start posting news about what I'm working on and any progress with my projects.

Out of boredom with nothing to work on, I recently started learning php. My past web development experience was mainly just with html, and I wasn't all that great at that. I've been told php was easy if you know C++ and had been meaning to give it a try for a few years now. It seems that it is in fact easy. Its like a good blend of C++ and mIRC scripting styles when it comes to familiarity for me. I'm still just at my beginnings with it, but I can probably see myself getting more used to it fairly easily. Really its more pointed out how lacking and outdated my html skills are, as dealing with html and CSS seems to be much more confusing and messy.

As a learning project, I choose to create a much needed page for editing the header EQCLP uses located on the server. This header is downloaded every time a user runs EQCLP as its first act, and tells it certain basic info. Mostly just what files are available to be downloaded by it, and the CRC's of those files so it knows if it has the most up-to-date ones locally. There are a few other options as well. Having a web based editor for this header is much nicer then having to edit the file manually, as editing it manually could cause serve issues if done by someone who doesn't know what their doing, or someone makes a slight mistake.

There is probably a little more I can do with the editor, but I basically finished quickly. Still wanting a project to help me learn more, I talked with Yeahlight of EQClassic some about possibly making some scripts for that. But nothing could be worked out due to either my lack of interest, lack of php skill (I don't want to take on a project TO involving), or lack of need at this point.

Oddly enough, I found a good learning project buried in a failure of one of my older projects. Z-Band never saw the light of day in part because of my lack of interest or inability to write a server for it. Without a server, something like Z-Band is pointless and only serves to be something "neat". I've been working on that on and off for the past few days now. I have it set it up to access a MySQL database for any match/scoring info. A basic scoreboard was the first thing I made. I then started working on 2 other aspects of it, being a match registration script so the server knows a match is going on and between who, and a score update handler to receive players scores as they earn them. I'm not near finished with either yet, and am still running into my share of bugs due to my inexperience. But their coming along, and since it relates to my favorite project, its fun and interesting.

Of course this still doesn't mean I will try to revive Z-Net, or that I have any plans of releasing Z-Band in some form. Like the stand alone Z-Net client last year, this project isn't meant to be publicly used in anyway, and is just for my personal enjoyment. Whether I'll work on any client side Z-Band stuff at some point to work with this, is unknown. But it would be neat to see it all working like I once envisioned! =/

In other news. I got some of some older links to my past sites changed/redirected to here. Mostly just the http://z-net.ne1.net url, and some links from websites. Hopefully I'll get a little more traffic here, and maybe some visits from some old friends.