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Dundjinni Mapmaking Contest Starts Today! |
Posted 11/17/2007 9:57:22 PM by Eru |
| As those of you receiving the Erudite Eruvianite - the official newsletter of Eruvian.com - know, the Dundjinni Mapmaking Contest officially starts today. So, get to work on those maps and make sure they're submitted before December 15th - the best one wins $25 in Dundjinni software including art packs, etc. See the latest issue of the Erudite Eruvianite for details - if you're not signed up to receive it you can do so in your registration settings. Good luck to everyone who takes part! |
Slight Change in Reviewing Functionality |
Posted 9/17/2007 12:03:18 AM by Eru |
| I've made a slight change in the code that impacts the rating and review feature of the site. In the past, you could only review objects that you didn't own. In other words, if multiple people were working on a setting together and one created an object within that setting, their co-owners couldn't review it. I just changed that so that you can review any object that you didn't create, regardless of ownership. This means setting owners can review the creations of others within their setting, which opens up the review possibilities significantly for some. Let me know if you have any questions about this.... Cheers! P.S. The DNS issue that was preventing some of you from visiting the site intermittently over the past 24 to 36 hours appears to have been totally resolved. If anyone runs into it, please drop a line to contact@eruvian.com with a copy and paste of the error message, if any - thanks! |
DNS Issues |
Posted 9/16/2007 4:15:44 PM by Eru |
| As some of you have noticed, the site has been having some DNS issues for the last 24 hours. The result is that some people haven't been able to reach the site, or their ability to do so has been intermittent. The company that hosts Eruvian's domain is currently speaking with the company that hosts the servers themselves in an attempt to permanently resolve the issue. That said, please know that your work is safe and secure - even if we somehow lose the server there are regular, offsite backups - and everything should be back to normal shortly. Oh, and for those of you who haven't been inconvenienced by this.... "Problem? What problem?" ;) |
The Erudite Eruvianite, Issue #1 Goes Out |
Posted 9/15/2007 1:41:18 AM by Eru |
| With the help of a number of fine folk, the inaugural issue of the Eruvian newsletter, The Erudite Eruvianite, went out an hour or so ago. While there will eventually be a newsletter archive page, for now you can click on the previous link to check it out on the site. If any of you didn't get it, make sure you're opted in to receive the Eruvian newsletter in your registration settings and your spam filter didn't do a number on it. ;) This issue has a couple special announcements, one regarding special pricing that has been offered to registered Eruvian users and another a sneak peak at an upcoming contest. It also has a few articles, the artist and map of the month, and some stats taken from the site over the previous month. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated, so much so that I've created a thread just for it. Cheers! |
Eruvian Announces the Launch of its Newest and Largest Setting ~ Urbis: A World of Cities |
Posted 9/13/2007 6:32:00 PM by Eru |
| Newly launched collaborative world-building site Eruvian.com today announced the publication of its newest and largest setting, Jürgen Hubert's Urbis: A World of Cities. A magical industrial world of urban metropolises, Urbis is incredibly detailed, currently comprising over 130,000 words and 432 components (adventures, statted characters, classes, deities, domains, encounters, items, locales, organizations, races, spells, or vehicles within Eruvian's world-building toolset). So far the setting has received an average of 4 out of 5 stars across dozens of user reviews from Eruvian's community rating and review system for its depth, verisimilitude, gameplay, and creativity. All gamers are encouraged to visit and review Urbis, as well as collaboratively take part in its development. Urbis is quite possibly the most detailed homebrewed d20 campaign setting on the 'Net. Any who have created or are aware of a comparably detailed setting can discuss it on Eruvian.com and are encouraged to publish their own homebrewed campaign settings on the site using its free, web-based tools. |
Shining a Spotlight on Reviewers and their Reviews |
Posted 9/7/2007 10:50:47 PM by Eru |
| One of the most important things that Eruvian allows you to do is give feedback on the work of others. No other site (that I'm aware of), has a structured way to rate and review each individual component of a homebrewed setting. Information like this is invaluable to contributors truly seeking to improve their creative output. So, it shouldn't come as any surprise that bringing more visibility to reviewers and their reviews has been a high priority on the tasklist for many months. That's why I'm pleased to announce that Eruvian now shines a spotlight on recent ratings and reviews. If you rate a piece of content on the site, your name will now show up on the Eruvian homepage for a time alongside a synopsis of the rating and a link to the review. Additional steps will include a page that displays all the reviews given by a particular reviewer, as well as a page displaying all the reviews received by a particular creator (and both these pages will have links to them from the reviewer's/creator's Public Profile page). Lastly, the average rating of a given object will become more visible throughout the site, showing up next to that object whenever it is included in a list of links. I hope these steps will further encourage everyone to be free (yet, polite) with their opinions, as well as prompt those that create content to really make it ready for others to offer their feedback. Cheers! |
Dawning Star Collaborative World-Building Fan Site Launched on Eruvian.com |
Posted 9/4/2007 10:27:44 PM by Eru |
| Newly launched collaborative world-building site Eruvian.com and veteran publisher Blue Devil Games today announced an agreement allowing the 5-time ENnie-nominated campaign setting Dawning Star to be made available for fan contributions through Eruvian.com. All Dawning Star fans are encouraged to visit Eruvian.com and contribute their homebrewed content to be published in Eruvian's standardized online format. Gamers can use Eruvian's simple web-based tools to publish material such as items, locales, organizations, psionics, races, and vehicles, as well as encounters and entire adventures that they themselves have created for the critically acclaimed d20 science-fiction setting. "Our fans are immensely important to us and engaging them is our passion. We're excited to partner with Eruvian and encourage our fans to use Eruvian's collaborative world-building toolset to become a part of the creative process that is Dawning Star.", said Justin D. Jacobson, President of Blue Devil Games. "Of course we're absolutely delighted to have 5-time ENnie-nominated Blue Devil Games as our first publishing partner", said Eruvian founder Matthew LeBaron. "Hosting tons of highly usable, quality content across multiple genres is Eruvian's goal, and with as detailed and inspiring a campaign setting as Dawning Star you can't go wrong." Eruvian.com launched in beta three weeks ago and now boasts over 800 pieces of content across multiple genres published by individual gamers using Eruvian's simple, powerful, unique, and free collaborative world-building toolset. Blue Devil Games is the publisher of Dawning Star, the only full-scale science-fiction campaign setting built on d20 Modern and powered by d20 Future. |
Content By Creator |
Posted 9/3/2007 10:32:34 PM by Eru |
| You can now access the content created by a given user by visiting their public profile page - you know, by clicking on their alias wherever you see it on the site. However, be aware that content is purposefully limited based on what each of us has permissions to see. For example, if you go to the User List you'll notice that it says that Jürgen Hubert, user #11, has something like 324 components created. However, if you go to Jürgen Hubert's public profile page, unless you're Jürgen you won't see any of them! Why? Because the MASSIVE campaign setting he's working on isn't yet published (though look for it to be published pretty darn soon...right Jürgen?). Likewise, if you're not signed up as a GM for Pelagos, you won't see any of the GM-only characters, locales, and whatnot that the setting offers to those GMs that want to run a game set within it. Again, this is by design so we only have access to the content we're supposed to see - even me! =) Oh, one more thing...you can also filter by creator, genre, tone, and maturity rating within the various search engines. These latter will be more and more important as content is added to the site in genres like modern, futuristic, and possibly other genres (anyone for a game of Toon?). Cheers! |
Most Recently Published Content Now Visible on Eruvian's Home Page |
Posted 9/1/2007 2:04:44 AM by Eru |
| Now THAT'S a title. I just released code that makes the top 100 most recently published pieces of content visible on the website. This area can be found in the middle of the home page, easily accessible by a link at the top of the page, and should give insight into who is actively publishing what content. I've also decided to show the overall rating of the content in order to encourage users to consider rating new content as it is published - contributors, if you're not ready to have your content rated, it's probably not ready to be published. The code is quite fresh and untested (as usual), so please contact me if you run into any problems. Cheers and good night! |
Public Profiles |
Posted 8/27/2007 11:13:56 PM by Eru |
| It's been a shamefully long time since anything of any substance has been released to the site - at least a couple weeks. Blame a combination of GenCon and Real Life. That said, I just released the code supporting public profiles as well as the user list (see the right-hand side of the home page). This is the first in a series of releases that should come out every few days to address many of the shortcomings of the site and add some key features (yes, there will soon be better visibility into the new content constantly being published as well as the ability to view content by creator). However, first there are a few tweaks left in the current release such as support for portraits, audio files, integration of the signature field into the forums, linking to the public profile from mentions of the user's alias and so on, but I thought I'd put it out there and see what happens. Enjoy! |
GenCon: Day 4 |
Posted 8/19/2007 8:32:54 PM by Eru |
| GenCon is over. Long live GenCon! It was a lot of fun, though I found manning a booth for 8 hours to be pretty tiring. Thankfully, Paul Grosse from PCGen, who was sharing the booth with me, covered the booth during my midday lunch run. Next time I'm at GenCon, I'm definitely going to try and get more people behind the booth with me. Going forward, we'll see how many of the dozens upon dozens of gamers I spoke with that were excited to find Eruvian do end up coming to the site and registering. Hopefully, it'll be quite a few! |
GenCon: Day 3 |
Posted 8/18/2007 7:12:57 PM by Eru |
| The pens lasted until 2:00 today. That means there are 500 Eruvian.com pens wandering around out there, and I've spoken with the vast majority of their owners. Who knew there were so many people interested in having their content published on the 'Net and possibly eventually in print? Or maybe they were simply willing to feign interest for a few minutes as a gesture of reciprocity for the free pen. ;) Regardless, next year I'm going to bring at least a couple thousand, and maybe significantly more. It all depends on what we're able to do over the next 12 months. After 2:00 I concentrated on giving out PCGen flyers, of which we had quite a few. I started giving away a fair number of business cards so that people would remember the URL, and also printed the URL on a few PCGen flyers that were handed out. Thankfully, things died down in the late afternoon and we finally got a few opportunities to sit down and rest our feet and our throats. Next time I'm also going to bring flyers so people can take them to learn about Eruvian, especially when I'm engaged with someone else. I'll probaby also be looking for others to come with me to GenCon in order to be able to engage more people simultaneously...the concept of collaborative world-building takes a while to explain, and the site a while to demonstrate, but many people are responding very, very well! All that said, I just got back from a night-time run to Staples where I had 500 copies of an Eruvian flyer printed. That is probably too many, as tomorrow we'll likely see lighter traffic as people start heading home, but I've learned my lesson about having too few giveaways. It's a little after 10 o'clock in Indianapolis and I'm beat - we've got one last busy push tomorrow before heading home, so I'm off to bed.... |
GenCon: Day 2 |
Posted 8/17/2007 7:21:29 PM by Eru |
| I shoulda brought more pens. From about 10:05 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening, several hundred people went by the Eruvian/PCGen booth. I gave away somwhere close to 300 pens with the Eruvian logo on them - I have about 150 left - and spoke with at least two hundred people, sharing the vision of collaborative world-building at Eruvian. During that time, we had about a dozen people register right on the spot, and several times that say they'd be joining the site when they got in front of a computer. I have yet to encounter anyone who was overtly negative about the site. Several people were suspicious (you know gamers), asking about how Eruvian was intending to make money, sure there was some hidden fee or something. However, when I explained my hope that the site would cover its expenses within a couple years by selling print copied of the best content (crediting the authors, of course), even the most jaded became quite friendly to the idea. I've also had brief discussions with several potential partners, interested in working with Eruvian in some capacity into order to benefit their own businesses or projects. Some of these are quite exciting and I look forward to being able to share more once the details are worked out. All in all, GenCon has been a blast and the reception has been wonderful. My feet and throat are a bit sore from standing and speaking with people, but I'm still looking forward to tomorrow. I'll probably start the day at Staples printing flyers, 'cause the pens are definitely going to run out! |
GenCon: Day 1 |
Posted 8/16/2007 8:06:49 PM by Eru |
| Well, had quite a trip to GenCon - missed a connection and got stuck in Denver for nearly 24 hours. There were absolutely NO seats available on subsequent flights until the next morning. Too many gamers were making the pilgrimage. Being late cost us our booth and we got moved to another location - we're now at booth 1140, in the back of section "C", near the refreshment stand. However, it may have been a blessing in disguise, as the location seems far more condusive to speaking with visitors, and we've had our fair share. A few minutes after finding the booth, a barren and dirty concrete square behind a skirted table, we met up with Paul Grosse from PCGen. He set up next to us, sharing the booth, and we almost immediately began taking visitors. We're still getting our pitch down, but Paul generally speaks to visitors about PCGen (and hands them a flyer), and I generally speak to them about Eruvian (and hand them a pen with "Eruvian.com" on it - gamers love pens). For the next couple hours, with very few exceptions, it was nonstop with gamer after gamer falling to the sirine song of the offer of a free pen before being sucked into a brief description of PCGen and Eruvian. Overall the response to Eruvian has been great. PCGen is pretty well known, with probably half of the gamers we met already familiar with it and some very much so. I'd say about a third of the gamers we talked to were politely disinterested, another third were interested, and the last third couldn't stop talking about it. We heard plenty of comments like "what a brilliant idea!", "I'm definitely interested", and "hey, I'll definitely gonna check it out..." This was just a few hours near the end of the day, and we probably gave away around 50 or so pens and the same number of flyers. Tomorrow, we should get a full day of boothing in and I anticipate talking to at least a couple hundred people - we'll just have to see how long the pens and my voice hold out. We also went by Staples after the conference closed down for the day and will be armed tomorrow with banners, table placards, and business cards - it should certainly make things a bit easier and more productive. Cheers, and I'm off to bed...gotta be up in a few hours so we can get properly set up before the doors open to the public! |
I Feel Good (nah-nah, nah-nah, nah-nah, nah) |
Posted 8/5/2007 10:48:15 PM by Eru |
| I knew that I would, now. Eruvian is officially in Beta! The vast majority of basic functionality has been completed, including forums, and the site feels ready to share with the world. It even has a spiffy new "Beta" logo. And with that, tomorrow we will officially begin promoting the site. Now, that's not to say there still isn't plenty to do, especially in regards to the site's look and feel, but the past two months have shown that the site truly does allow inspired and creative individuals to be builders of worlds. Going forward we have lots and lots of plans for future development, no less than 67 items on The List, and I hope the forums will nurture more of these ideas. As it stands you can expect to see support for submitting artwork to existing objects and better crediting artists. You'll also see Campaigns, House Rules, Templates, Feats, Skills, Languages, Cultures, Psionics, Stories, and Audio objects, all of which will be searchable and subject to ratings and reviews. A membership profile page as well as lots of enhancements to the forums to bring them into the 21st century will be coded. A re-envisioning of the navigational structure, making use of an intuitive symbology will make it so that there will be fewer lists of text links to visually scan. There'll even be a ToDos page, so y'all can see all the crazy things that are on the drawing board, vote for the ones you'd like implemented first (or not at all), and submit new ones for the community and developers to consider. The past few months have been a great experience and I'm especially excited to see what will become of our little creation in the months to come. I'd like to offer a huge "Thanks" as well as a "Congratulations" to all those who have helped get us to where we are today, both on the content side and with the coding. Thanks guys, you've been nothing short of incredible. Onward and upward! |
Preview the Forums |
Posted 8/4/2007 11:43:08 PM by Eru |
| For anyone that would care to, feel free to check out the forums. I haven't yet posted "official" links to them from the homepage or anywhere else as I haven't had a chance to thoroughly debug them. I'm thinking I'll be feeling more comfortable with them sometime tomorrow, at which point links into the forums will start showing up all over the place. Once that's done you'll be able to create threads that are tied to locales. These threads will also have various visibility settings (e.g. Visible to All, Visible to GMs and Owners, or Visible to Owners Only). The reason for this is that it will allow GMs to chat about a particular setting/character/adventure/whatever, mentioning stuff they don't want their players hearing, and have other GMs be able to see it and respond. This also allows owners to start threads on how GMs can best contribute to the setting, turning it into a dialogue with their GM community, without players being able to read them. Lastly, the owner-only option will allow owners of settings that are being collaboratively developed to have a...well...forum, for lack of a better word, to discuss ongoing developement. One feature that has yet to be implemented is support for subscribing to threads and having immediate or periodic updates sent via email. That functionality is a definite priority (and is tied to other automated emailing features on the todo list), therefore I hope to have it ready within a week or two. Time flies when you're having fun! |
Forums and Beta Launch are Almost Here |
Posted 8/3/2007 10:49:50 AM by Eru |
| Hey all, I just saw the custom forums code last night and we should have it tied into the site and visible no later than Sunday evening, or my name's not Jeremiah Winkelbach! (Actually it's not Jeremiah Winkelback, just in case the date slips, but I'm pretty sure we'll launch by Sunday. ;) With forums in place I'll finally feel comfortable launching Eruvian in Beta and formally announcing it to the world. We'll just have to see if the world's ready for it.... =) |
Let the Adventure Begin! |
Posted 7/20/2007 9:27:53 PM by Eru |
| Today I released the first pass at supporting Adventures. There still needs to be a few minor tweaks made to the code, such as supporting auto-links within the adventure fields, but that should be all tied up tomorrow. For the moment, check it out and let me know what you think. The basic concept is that the Detail field can hold, well, the details of the adventure with references to encounters (which will become hyperlinks, once the auto-link code is done). I'm working on a simple adventure to demonstrate how I'm thinking it will work (and to see if I've missed anything), and it should be ready in a few days. Oh, and currently the Adventure Types only include "Site-Based" and "Event-Based". I'm thinking about replacing those with something more along the lines of major adventure arch-types, which would allow more refined filtering of adventures in the search engine. Examples of this might be such arch-types as "Solve the Mystery", "Seek and Destroy", "Go Fetch" (a.k.a. "Retrieve the <insert item here>"), and of course "Dungeon Delve". What do ya think? Do GMs want to find individual adventures based on their type? Bad idea? Good idea? Can you think of more/better adventure arch-types? Use the Message Center to drop a note to Eru letting me know what you think...any feedback is appreciated. |
Getting Organized |
Posted 7/18/2007 10:29:00 PM by Eru |
| I'm happy to say that Eruvian now has an Organization object for capturing all the details about your favorite guilds, orders, secret societies, gangs, clubs, and whatnot. The code was just uploaded, so let me know if you run into any problems. I'm also especially interested in what you think of the Organization Types - did I miss any? Are there too many? Are any unclear? Anyway, have at it...cheers! |
Beeeeep...Beeeeep (Is That Yo Momma Backin' Up?) |
Posted 7/16/2007 10:55:51 PM by Eru |
| Okay, so this prob'ly isn't the most exciting bit of news, but it's been a while since I posted anything so I'll share it - Eruvian's data backup processes are now fully automated. Yep, every night a complete backup of all data, files, and whatnot gets sent to an offsite location by an automated process. Why is this important? Well, hopefully it never will be because we'll never need those offsite backups. However, on the off chance that something very bad happens and we lose the drive array, or the Market Post Tower catches fire, falls down, and sinks into the swamp, we can now rest assured that all our hard work won't be lost - just up to the last 24 hours of it, and we'll work on decreasing that vulnerability moreso as time goes on. Now, if The Big One strikes California and it opens up some lovely new beach-front property in Arizona, we may have a problem.... |
Bigger...Better...Faster... |
Posted 7/6/2007 8:38:33 PM by Eru |
| We finally made the move to the new hosting facility. Eruvian is now running on faster hardware with a much faster connection to the Internet. The hope is that this will eliminate the previous times when the site seemed to drag and will also allow it to handle many more users simultaneously. We're going to let it run on the new hardware for a couple of days just to make sure there aren't any hiccups (you never know). Once the new hardware has proven itself, and all known bugs in the code are fixed, we'll begin promoting Eruvian to the gaming community at large...exciting...! Oh, and in other news I just added support for Community Stats to locales. This is an optional set of fields designed primarily for use with communities (though certain fields also make sense with larger locales). You can see it in use in Hydanham, Norland, Barony of Middleton, Middleton, and Naryway. As always, feedback is welcome! |
Encounters are Here...Kinda |
Posted 7/4/2007 12:46:13 AM by Eru |
| You can now create encounters for your locales and can even find a partially built one in Middleton (still needs a map added). That said, the search engine needs to be fleshed out a bit and there are secondary features such as auto-linking, locale component counts, and adding the overall count to the home page that need to be tied up. If anyone has any opinions on how Encounters are structured, now is the time to voice them. Enjoy! |
New Maturity Rating System |
Posted 7/1/2007 10:29:35 PM by Eru |
| A new maturity rating system was put in place today, replacing the existing one that had some trademark issues. The current system is very similar to other rating systems that are currently in place, including those that have been popularized for movies, television, and video games. However, unlike the others, using it doesn't leave Eruvian.com liable to legal action. Special thanks to Queenfange for playing the biggest role in putting it together! With the maturity rating system in place, the only thing preventing the Beta launch and subsequent promotion of the site is now the move to the faster, more stable hosting platform. Unfortunately this has been delayed by a couple of days as the hosting facility wasn't ready for us on Sunday and has tentatively rescheduled for late Monday. That gives us time for making progress on implementing forums, adding more content requests to Pelagos, and finally getting Scenes, Adventures, and Campaigns implemented. |
Ready to Get Moving |
Posted 7/1/2007 12:40:12 AM by Eru |
| Today I configured the new hardware that the site will be running on. The database will be moved to a server with 4 times the RAM, 5 times the disk IO, and probably 8 times the processing power. The box also has more redundancies, so it should be more resistant to crashing (not that we've had that problem, but we most likely will someday). All this is in preparation for the move to our new hosting facility, which MAY be happening tomorrow...if the space is ready. In other news, I'm amazed to see that we passed the 400 mark in terms of the number of pieces of content on the site! Wow...I was originally planning on drawing attention to it when we hit 100, but we blew by that so quickly I didn't have a chance! And we haven't even begun reaching out to the gaming world yet...onward to 1000...! Finally, I took a break from hardware and coding to create a new map of the Barony of Middleton. It provides significantly more detail than the old map, zooming into the region to show smaller communities and sites that weren't worthy of the larger-scale map. Hopefully this helps lay out the vision for what all of Norland, and eventually all of Hydanham, will be like. It also presents a TON of new opportunities for creating content requests, as it represents a fairly comprehensive framework of the lands surrounding Middleton. Let me know what you think.... |
Searchable Content Requests |
Posted 6/29/2007 11:08:18 PM by Eru |
| Eruvian now allows users who are signed up as GMs in at least one setting to search through the content requests for that setting. In addition, those creating content requests can now associate a particular type with to it, such as "character", "map", and so on, which can then be searched on. While testing out the code I made a few more requests for Middleton and intend to build several dozen more throughout Norland over the next couple days, time permitting, to prepare for the "Wanted: 100 GMs" promotion that is being planned. |
Addressing Performance & Scalability |
Posted 6/28/2007 11:52:35 PM by Eru |
| The site should now be considerably more responsive in most areas, due to some performance enhancements to the code. However, these improvements required considerable modifications so please let me know if anything seems out of whack - especially regarding object permissions (e.g. characters or items that are showing up where they shouldn't or vice versa). The impact of optimizing backend processes isn't nearly as obvious as when a new feature is released, but these tweaks will be critical once significant numbers of people begin visiting the site. That said, I'll be spending more time over the next couple days attempting to identify and improve any slowness within the site (and if you know of a particularly slow-loading page, let me know). I am also planning on moving the site to newer, faster hardware and a MUCH faster Internet connection on Sunday or Monday. Once done, the site should cruise along at a fair clip and slowness should be a thing of the past...unless we get overwhelmed with traffic.... |
Master of Your Domain |
Posted 6/26/2007 10:34:00 PM by Eru |
| Are you the master of your domain? Well, now you can be. Domains are complete. Done. Finito. One has been entered into the Repository as a test and example, so feel free to create your own. At this point I've decided to hold off on supporting Feats and Skills for the moment simply because they don't appear to be that important to the gaming community at large (I've been running polls on various gaming forums) and they're currently not important to the Pelagos setting (selfish, I know). All in all, I'm planning on developing the following components, but not until after the Beta launch: Templates, Feats, Skills, Organizations, Cultures, Languages, and Psionics (in roughly that order). Send me a message if you'd like to see a change in priorities or an addition to that list. The stuff that I plan on getting developed in the next few days, before the Beta launch, includes the following: Scenes, Adventures, Campaigns, and House Rules. This is going to be a challenge, as these components are going to be significantly different from the ones developed so far. However, my reasoning for pushing hard on them now is that these are what are important in order to make the content really usable by gaming groups out there. Also, giving the site the ability to integrate adventures and campaigns into the settings should really help visitors understand the potential and vision for the site, especially if we have one or two examples put together. If 100 GMs each contribute a single really good map and a single really well-though-out character to a shared setting, we have a pretty impressive world. If just one in ten takes the time to put together and contribute a single really good adventure, we have the beginnings of a full-blown campaign and months of great gaming material for us all. With a little luck we could be there by October 1st.... |
Class is Done |
Posted 6/25/2007 10:41:59 PM by Eru |
| The class object is now complete. It took a bit longer than expected due to some of the complexities around creating spell lists for PCGen. However, they are now supported and, indeed, Hydanham's Mystic Guardian demonstrates them. Now, when you get the PCGen LST files for Hydanham you'll see the Mystic Guardian prestige class as an option (though it's not the easiest prestige class to qualify for). In other news, I've added three new fields to the Character object: GM Overview, GM Encounter Info, and GM Battle Tactics. These are in addition to the fields available in PCGen itself and should help further define characters, guiding contributors to create the most useful and well-thought-out characters for GMs to use. |
Show a Little Class |
Posted 6/25/2007 12:20:41 AM by Eru |
| After slaving over a hot laptop for a few hours, classes are pretty much there. I still need to do a few tweaks, as always - maybe add a couple fields, implement auto-linking on class names, support PCGen LST file generation, and add classes to the component counts within locales. If this sounds familiar it is because it is the same stuff that was left to do yesterday for races, though that has all been done. Hey, at least I'm consistent. In other news, I am aware that the site's performance has been a drag for some of you. I have been speaking with colo facilities all week and think I've found one that will work. Depending on how they answer a few final questions, I'm hopeful we'll reach an accord and I'll be able to move the site over there sometime next week - possibly early the week after - and also have it running on some faster hardware. With some tuning of the database, we will hopefully be blazing by the time we begin promoting the site. Lastly, I'm looking at possibly implementing some improvements to the UI sooner rather than later. Specifically, creating an icon for each of the objects - one for locales, one for characters, one for items, etc. These would go along the top of locale pages and replace the existing Table of Contents that is far from elegant. If a given locale doesn't have a particular object, the icon would be greyed out and inactive. Otherwise, clicking it would take you to the appropriate area of the page. It isn't much, but at least it's a start at making the site easier to use. If anyone has any suggestions, or would like to volunteer to create the icons, let me know. Thanks! |
Racing to the Finish Line |
Posted 6/23/2007 11:50:32 PM by Eru |
| You should now be able to create, edit, delete, and search through the races on the site. That is, you'd be able to search through them if there were any published. Hopefully SOME enterprising world builder will decide that races are kinda important to their setting and create one or two in the next day. During that time I'll be putting the finishing touches on the code by improving the search engine, maybe adding a few fields (not sure if races should have culture...humans don't have a single culture...maybe that should just be the domain of locales), indexing race names so they automatically become links within text, adding races to the component counts found in locales, and finally including any race LST data in the generated files. Whew! You didn't realize there was so much to it, did ya? ;) Well, these should be done tomorrow and the Race object should officially be ready for the Beta launch. |
1024 by 768 |
Posted 6/22/2007 11:24:13 PM by Eru |
| In preparation for the coming Beta launch and related promotional period, the site now supports resolutions as low as 1024 by 768. Anyone browsing in 800 by 600 resolution will still see horizontal scroll bars, but even that resolution may be supported in future. If you'd like to offer an opinion on supporting 800 by 600 or if you find a place where the site doesn't look right in a higher resolution, please drop me a line. |
Tradesails, Warsails, and Waverunners |
Posted 6/19/2007 11:42:14 PM by Eru |
| The basic set of Hydanhamian waterborne vehicles has been created, though there are plenty more to come. If you check 'em out you'll see that each has its own layout map and accompanying CC2 file for hot swashbuckling action. The uber-observant (or those that are reading this) might also notice that vehicles with PCGen LST data will now show up in equip.lst if you click "Generate PCGen LST Files" while within the Pelagos setting. This means that characters can now buy these vehicles and use them as containers within PCGen (you know, just in case you're creating a Hydanhamian character that needs some serious storage space and has a few grand to blow...). =) Next up: Races, followed by Classes, Feats, Skills, and Domains in no particular order. Actually, it will probably be that particular order. If you'd like to see something bumped up in priority let me know. Otherwise, I'll only have my own counsel to guide me and lord knows where that will lead.... ;) Oh, one more thing...we're looking into moving the site to a hosting facility with more bandwidth. The site definitely has some slowness and right now the primary bottleneck is upload bandwidth. So, hopefully this will be greatly improved in the next 10 days, before the promotion of the site really begins (though no promises at this point). Over and out. |
Vehicles |
Posted 6/18/2007 7:14:00 PM by Eru |
| Alright, vehicles are now supported and you can see a couple examples in Hydanham. More will be added in the coming days...and now back to coding.... |
Squashing Bugs |
Posted 6/16/2007 12:21:27 AM by Eru |
| I spent much of the day away from the computer, but when I was coding it was primarily squashing bugs (in the search engines) and making small tweaks. I also did some clean up of the code to make it easier to extend in preparation for Vehicles, which should be added tomorrow. Well, that's all...g'night! |
By the Powers that Be... |
Posted 6/14/2007 11:37:19 PM by Eru |
| Wow - two posts in one day. Truly, the powers that be must've cast their glance of favor upon us - we were able to complete the code required to support deities on the site. There are only a couple residing in Hydanham at the moment, but more will be coming. The code hasn't even had time to dry, so if anyone runs into problems please play a role in quickly correcting by dropping me a line. Thanks, and happy pantheon building...! |
Ya Down with OGC? (Yeah, you know me....) |
Posted 6/14/2007 1:26:01 PM by Eru |
| OGC...how can I 'splain it? I'll have to frame-by-frame it.... Well, Open Game Content (OGC) is content released under the Open Game License (OGL), and Eruvian now supports it. This means you can upload OGC to the site and indicate it is OGC by checking the Is OGC box. This causes the content page to display a notification that the content is OGC, which is required by the OGL. Additionally, if you want to publish content of your own creation under the OGL, simply check the box and it is free for all to use (with the stipulations contained in the OGL). |
Down with the Heat Wave |
Posted 6/14/2007 12:12:37 AM by Eru |
| Today we had our first prolonged bit of downtime since the Alpha launch, with the site being unreachable for about 2 1/2 hours. Turns out one of our web servers lost a fan and we just happened to have a heat wave in sunny Monterey, CA, which conspired to cause pain. However, the fan was quickly replaced thanks to Brent and some spare parts (thanks Brent!). We promise it won't happen again (at least, until next time ;). In other news, I spent much of the day preparing our promotional campaign for GenCon. That's right, Eruvian's going to be in Indianapolis to invite 30,000 avid gamers to become builders of worlds. More on that as we get closer to August.... |
This Spells No Trouble at All |
Posted 6/12/2007 10:34:58 PM by Eru |
| Spells should now be up and running. As with most of the site, they aren't the prettiest things in the world, but I believe they'll do the job for the time being. I've put a few of the Hydanham spells in place - more will follow along with items leveraging those spells. Everything seems to be showing up in the PCGen LST files fine, but let me know if you run into anything weird. |
I Cast Magic Missile at the Darkness! |
Posted 6/11/2007 by Eru |
| Well, I just finished coding the locale search engine and adding support for audio to locales, characters, and items. For the time being those using IE will have the displeasure of hearing a piece of background audio whenever they go to Pelagos, visit Krale (a.k.a. Galstaff), or draw their bronze short sword. I'll eventually either remove the automated play feature (if it proves too obnoxious) or put in a flag where users can disable it. I've also decided to start posting regularly here so those watching the development of the site can see that I actually am adding new features, functionality, and content every single day (well, pretty much). I think next on my list is to add support for Spells, which should be fully functional within a day or two. Once that's done I'll put up a small stack of spells within Hydanham and some items that are dependent on them. For now, time to hit the hay...cheers! Eru |
Hello World! |
Posted 6/1/2007 by Eru |
| Hello world! Eruvian.com officially opens today. After months of hard work the dev team is finally ready for our work to be seen. This is an Alpha release - there are still plenty of bugs to be found and fixed, new features to be added, and tons of fine tuning to be done - so please be patient with us as we work out the bugs and make this site more useful to you. In many ways Eruvian is a social experiment. To me that's the most exciting part of it - I have no clue how it will turn out. Will gamers value the searchable character archive and in turn share the characters they have created by uploading them with the tools provided? Dunno. Will some gamers take the next step and use the world-creation tools to build their own campaign settings to share with the world? Not sure. Will a few gamers make the bold leap and take part in a true collaborative creative process, choosing to own a relatively small piece of a massive world containing incredible detail? Man, I sure hope so. I like to imagine as a GM being able to run a game in a world that is more than a base sketch, with thousands of NPCs fully detailed - their motives, their relationships, their portraits, and, of course, their stats at my fingertips. That would be sweet. If just a thousand out of the millions of gamers out there joined together and each submitted a single high-quality map, a single detailed NPC, a single well-considered spell, imagine the world it would create. The tools are now there to make this happen. True, they are still quite primitive, the technology more last century than last year, but the vision is clear. If the gaming talent of the world chooses to work together on creating the highest-quality, most in-depth content the world has ever seen, and the rest of us help guide them by reviewing, rating, and using their work, then all of us will benefit. If you've got suggestions for improvements to the site don't hesitate to contact me and share them. Please consider Eruvian.com to be your site and that email address your means of contacting your development team to make it better. You can trust that every email will be read. Thanks for visiting...! Eru |