A quick introduction of a new game I am working on called Tharnakra. This is a huge, graphical, world-exploration and combat game. Currently the framework code is being developed. You can log in and walk around the small area that has been developed, but there is not much to interact with at this point.

The world is huge, played on a world which is 1000 by 1000 cells/tiles/whatever. This gives a grid with a million locations. I have designed the framework code to have support for multiple worlds as well. May be used for space travel, or time travel, or who knows what.

To give you an actual example of just how big a 1000 x 1000 grid is, I have created a 6000x6000 pixel GIF containing a 1000x1000 grid layout (Just like a monstrous piece of graph paper!) at 16 squares per inch. If printed out, it would be 62.5 inches by 65.2 inches! (A little over 5 feet square) Click to view the grid (Newer browsers will try to shrink the graphic to show the whole thing on one page, so you'll have to expand the graphic to see it full size. With Firefox, just click on the image to expand it. However, just noticed that Internet Explorer chokes on it, so you'll have to download it and open it with something else. Paint Shop Pro opens it, Microsoft Photo Editor will not. I have MS Paint attempting to open it right now, but it's been hanging for several minutes so I'll post back here later with the results.)

I've got the whole (mostly blank) world designed and implemented on my SQL server. The code is written in ASP.NET with C# as the scripting language. So far it's working very well and the database access and page display is surprisingly snappy! I need to tune up the page generation with CSS and then it will be even quicker, but even untuned, page display is less than a half-second here on the local network. Granted it will be slower across the internet, but that's where the CSS tuning will really speed things up.

Like I already said, there's not a whole lot to see yet, but the world is semi-functional.