Friday, April 13, 2012

Today I messed around with the forums and Z-Band LeaderBoard and UserLog pages, in a attempt to merge them, learn some more php, and lay some ground work for integrating the phpBB3 account system into Z-Band.

After a lot of what seemed like tossing aside the php knowledge I already had, I finally got enough of a understanding of some better php coding and phpBB3s style.

The pages are almost exactly the same as there were before, content and feature wise. Just now they look much nicer inside the phpBB3 skin I choose for the forum.

New LeaderBoard
New UserLog

The UserLog still looks off because I tried to keep it simple. The user log really is just a normal text log file. In fact, here's a link to that as well.

Text Log

All that the UserLog page does is read that text file and displays it inside of a html wrapper that's easier on the eyes. If I felt like putting more work into it, I could probably have the page read the different variables of the text log, and display them using html columns. That would look better, but it isn't really worth the effort right now.

If I work on this stuff more soon, it will likely be with registration and score updating stuff, that will then require a users account to be logged in before either can be done. Though I suppose I'm not really sure how I'm going to handle that. Requiring a user to actually visit the forums and log in before they can properly use Z-Band, sounds clunky. Ideally the login details would be best supplied in the program itself, and sent before anything else is tried.

In other news, I signed up for the Annual Pass for Wow, technically a few days after it came out, though blizzard lost that signup and forced me to have to sign up again 1 month later. I've been waiting for the MoP beta invite, but due to that 1 month later signup and them adding users based on their signup dates, I sadly won't likely get invited to soon. Lol, there's been like 6-8 waves of invites now too...

To my shock yesterday night, when checking my email I saw a beta invite from blizzard! it took me a min to realize though, that it wasn't a MoP beta invite. It was a DIII beta invite! lol

Sad I only get it under 1 month from its release date, but oh well. Thanks to my annual pass I will also have DIII. And whens that's out I'll be giving that a decent try seeing as I know several people who will be playing.

I never played D1. And I only recently played D2 just a little. When D2 was out, I was preoccupied with EQ. The 3d, depth of gameplay and whatnot were far better in EQ and I just didn't have the time for both, so despite knowing a few people who played D2, then mainly because EQ cost a fee every month and D2 didn't, I never gave D2 a serious try. Now for gaming I just have the old easy mode WoW, which takes up FAR less of my time. So I can afford to play both if I end up liking D3.

I won't be going into it expecting that I'm going to like it all that much. Being that it's another Blizzard game, like WoW I'll likely just mostly enjoy the playing with friends, and feel that while not great, it's the best thing available, and it kills time, so meh.

As I understand, the beta is short. So probably just over the next week or so I might get less done on my projects. Just a heads up.

EDIT:

I feel it's worth drawing some attention to. The poll has now hit the halfway mark and there's still just a little over half of the month left. It wasn't looking good before, but it now has a decent shot. Things seemed to have picked up in the past few days, for whatever reason.

Keep those votes coming!