From: Klom Dark
Date: 2/25/99
Time: 3:07:49 PM

Comments
Wow, I've blown this off for too long!

I stupidly blew up the main drive and motherboard on the server and had to rebuild the system before bringing it back online. One good thing out of that is that the web server is now a Pentium 233 instead of the 133 Mhz processor that was on the old motherboard.

I am now getting back into the coding of this game. I had a really difficult time (1) getting myself to sit down and code and (2) coming up with a good method for the combat routines since with HTTP's request/response method, I was not able to continuously update the screen. I am looking into DHTML for a possible solution, what I need is a way to update the screen after it has been drawn, to alert players as quickly as possible to important events such as a monster walking into the room and getting ready to attack. (If anyone's got any suggestions, let me know!)

For now, will have to go with more of a turn-type approach. This will not be time-critical as I would like it to be, but will have to do for now.

I wrote the Room Editor code today, so you will begin to see more than the current five rooms that exist today.

Next will be the object editor, then will follow the custom rooms such as armor and weapons stores, etc. After that I will code the monster and combat routines. Next will come the inter-player coding routines.

Best thing about going to California last month was I found a great book "Active Web Database Programming" which is allowing me to go further than I could with the "Professional Active Server Pages 2.0" book I had before (Which is definitely good in itself for pure ASP coding.) as it focuses more on ASP interaction with ODBC databases.