Well, (takes a look at last post), oh right, I got that side project to work, which was an alternative method for the BOL gui, basically getting CEGUI to work with BOL. For people who don't know CEGUI is an open-source gui api kind of thing to save game programmers a lot of work when it comes to creating a gui. So, anyway, I'll need to spend some time to modify the demo around an actual gui system. In the meantime (and hopefully it will be a short meantime) I'd be very appreciative of anyone who would want to use their artistic skillz to create a cool background for the login screen.
About character creation/selection, I'm realizing that I need to reconfigure the database in a much more major way to get it the way we want. Basically, how it is now is that you have a login and a password for a single player, and the adjustment I made to add customization was that there is a numerical value that determines your appearance and color. The problem with this though is that as it's only set up for one player per account I can't think of a good way to set up customization and character selection. Furthermore, since the final product is supposed to allow multiple characters per account, and since I'll eventually need more then a number and switch statements for character customization, I'm going to have to redo the whole database. Usually this wouldn't matter at all to users but I'm unsure of how to set it up so that people can still play without problems while I'm in transition and/or how these new accounts will or won't be able to interact with the old accounts. So, just a warning in case you find yourself unable to log in. So another feedback item then, is whether or not you want both login and character selection at the same time or login first and then character selection.
This is a long post...but it's full of good news so it should be long. Something I constantly forget is that even though I can't play BOL from this computer at the moment, I can still play from the family computer in the next room. So, if anyone wants to play with another person online just email me to see if I'm availible, which I'll try to be as much as possible. Talking about people playing online, Videoguy and myself were the only people online in the past 24 hours, so thanks goes to Videoguy for trying. And talking about being online, this brings me to another topic which I thought of today. Since the MySQL tables keep track of whether or not a player is online, I think I could set up a little info box at the top of the site saying who was currently logged in, as well as the last person to log out, which would be cool. But, I'll wait till after I change the tables around to write that script.
So, quick recap, I would like someone to help me make a cool background for the login page. Secondly, I'd like some opinions about whether to release login and character selection in separate updates or to spend a little more time and do them in the same update. Third, if you can't login it's probably my fault, and please report it. And the fourth bullet; email me if your going to go online and would like someone to play with. Until next time!
-Mark