Getting your Fire

Although Amazon will only ship the Fire to a US address you are able to use a UK card and billing address when ordering it. I ordered mine on amazon.com and had it delivered to a friend in the US who then shipped it on to me. There are companies which offer a similar service but you will probably pay a premium for this.

Shipping to the UK was $19.45  with USPS First Class Mail International and took 10 working days from door to door. The value of the Fire falls just outside the range where import duty is payable but you will still be liable for VAT at 20% on the total value of the Fire and the shipping costs.

Amazon Appstore

In order to download anything from the Amazon Appstore (even the free apps) you need to enable 1-Click settings on your Amazon account and set a US credit card and billing address. Provided you only want to download free apps you can use any valid US address and a test credit card number.

If you want paid apps you can either get a real US credit card or load your Amazon account with a gift card. Any purchases should then use the gift card balance instead of trying to charge the non-working US credit card.

If you don’t want to use this workaround then GetJar is a good alternative to the Amazon Appstore and can be installed on the Fire without rooting. You can also use Google’s Android Market but you will need to root your Fire first.

Amazon Prime Video

The Kindle Fire comes with a free month of Amazon Prime ($79 per year thereafter). As well as free 2 day shipping (not much use outside the US!) Prime membership also gives you access to a lot of Amazon’s streaming film and TV content for free, as well as one free book per month from the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

As well as requiring a US credit card and billing address as mentioned above, Prime Video has two more hoops you have to jump through; it won’t work on a rooted device and it will only work if you connect from a US based IP address.

If you have a rooted Fire you can download OTA Rootkeeper from the Android Market and use that to temporarily unroot your device when you want to watch Prime videos. After unrooting you may also need to force stop and restart the video service as it checks for root when it starts.

Solving the IP issue is a little trickier as the Fire has no built in support for using a proxy or a VPN. However you should be able to use TUN.ko Installer to enable VPN support and then use a regular VPN client to connect to a US based server.

An alternative to a VPN or proxy are websites like UnblockUs or UnoTelly. These are designed specifically to avoid geo-restrictions on streaming services and cost around $5 a month to use. The advantage these services have over a VPN or proxy is that they work using a custom DNS server which can be configured as part of the regular Fire settings without any additional software or rooting required. They should also be faster as only the traffic necessary to establish your location is routed via their proxy with the rest of your internet traffic being routed normally. This does mean however that you will only see a benefit for the specific sites that the service supports.

The option I use is the World Wide Kindle Fire app. This temporarily unroots your Fire and connects to a proxy service giving you an all-in-one solution for streaming Prime video to your Fire outside the US. I’ve emailed the developer a couple of times and had responses the same day (much faster than I ever reply to emails!) and I think it’s well worth the $0.99 price.

Kindle Books

I encountered a strange situation with my Fire where the Store buttons for Newsstand and Books were redirecting me to the amazon.co.uk website rather than using the Fire specific storefronts. My Fire was registered to my .com account and I could access the amazon app store and videos just fine but I couldn’t get the US book store, even through a US based proxy. It turned out that my Kindle account was associated with my amazon.co.uk account rather than amazon.com and this was causing the country specific redirect.

You can solve this by migrating your Kindle between .co.uk and .com accounts from the “Manage Your Kindle” section of the Amazon website.

UK Release?

Hopefully it won’t be too long before the Fire is released in the UK and I can stop having to use these workarounds to access content.

A lot of the new functionality hasn’t had much testing so if you come across any problems please let me know and I will try to fix them ASAP. Bear in mind that MXP is only partially supported and life is probably too short for me to expand it much beyond what is in place now.

Skinning

There is now an images directory at the same level as the swf which contains png images for each of the buttons and one named ‘skin.png’ which can be used to overlay the entire client to provide a more custom graphical look. Simply replace the button images and skin file with your own graphics. I’ve included some plain buttons and a basic skin.png image you can use as a template. Unfortunately the buttons don’t support different states but this was the only way to do it and have the images loadable at run time.

You can also adjust the spacing of the output and command windows relative to the edge of the container in order to better accommodate your custom skin. This is done using flashvars in the embedding page, see the README for a list of the new parameters.

MSDP Support and External Interface

The client will negotiate MSDP and can accept basic MSDP_VAR and MSDP_VAL data which is then passed to the container in the receive_msdp function. Each line from the server is also passed to the container using the receive_text function:

function receive_msdp (msdp_var:String, msdp_val:String):void
function receive_text (txt:String):void

In addition, FMud implements the following callbacks from the container for sending data back to the server:

function send_msdp (msdp_var:String, msdp_val:String):void
function send_text (txt:String):void

In theory this should allow you to build a GUI in javascript on the embedding page around FMud and communicate back and forth.

This was requested by a couple of people but it’s not something I have much experience with and is basically untested so please let me know if it isn’t working as intended.

MXP Support

FMud now supports SEND, A, GAUGE, COLOR and IMAGE tags, as well as SUPPORTS and VERSION. Context menus using send are also supported. Querying of specific tags using SUPPORT is not available, instead the client will send the full list of supported tags regardless.

Only temp secure mode (4) is supported so you need to send ESC[4z before each MXP tag. There is no negotiation.

Simple !ELEMENT definitions are also supported with a single attribute only, for example you could define the element ‘x’:

<!el x '<send href="&text;|l &text;" hint="move &dir;|look &dir;">' att='dir'>

You could then send the following shorthand tag:

<x 'over the hill'>hill</x>

Which would be parsed as:

<send href="hill|l hill" hint="move over the hill|look over the hill">hill</send>

When clicked this link would open a context menu with two options, “move over the hill” and “look over the hill” which would send the commands “hill” and “l hill” respectively.

Support for up to four gauges is built in using the names gauge1, gauge2, gauge3 and gauge4. You need to specify caption and color attributes for each gauge and then send the data using the entities curr# and max#, for example:

<GAUGE gauge1 caption='Hit Points' color='red'>
<GAUGE gauge2 caption='Mana' color='blue'>
<GAUGE gauge3 caption='Move' color='yellow'>
<!ENTITY max1 100>
<!ENTITY max2 100>
<!ENTITY max3 100>
<!ENTITY curr1 56>
<!ENTITY curr2 78>
<!ENTITY curr3 24>

The gauges are shown above the input bar so you’ll need to adjust the position of the output window accordingly.

Tags are not case sensitive and !ELEMENT and !ENTITY tags can be shortened to !El and !En. You can use Hex or standard HTML color names with the COLOR tag. Embedding multiple tags within !ELEMENT definitions probably won’t work and embedding tags within tags probably won’t either.

Unicode Support

This is another feature that has been requested a few times now and I’ve implemented what I think is the correct algorithm to decode UTF-8 but I’ve had difficulty finding a live mud to test it on so if anyone uses this on their server please let me know how it works.

You can get the new version from the downloads page. Make sure you check the README for updated flashvars information as well as some more explanation on policy files as this seems to be what trips people up the most.

I think this type of gameplay will work better with server populations scaled in the hundreds rather than the thousands so I’m deliberately aiming for a small scale world. Besides, a traditional MMO with heavy PvE based gameplay and a massive world is just not feasible for a small team, nevermind a solo developer, so I’m not even going to attempt to go there.

I’m producing the game under the umbrella of Bantam Cricket Games as I think it looks a bit more professional and makes it easier to bring in other people further down the line if necessary. For now though it’s mostly just me with a couple of friends I’ve roped in to help out with a few things. Yes the name is a bit odd, but trivia fans should note it’s what the “bc” in bc-dev has always stood for.

I’m using BigWorld MMO middleware which should take care of a lot of the backend requirements for the game. It was a toss up between BW and Hero Engine, and while a lot of people seem to be moving over to Hero for me BW was the best option (a topic for another post maybe!)

It’s very early days still but I’ve got my BW server and development environment all set up and have worked through some of the tutorial documentation. BigWorld ships with a fantasy demo that includes some basic functionality, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make any kind of game. The system is a little daunting at first but when you consider what it’s actually doing behind the scenes it’s amazing how (relatively!) simple it is.

I’ll post more information about the game and my progress as I go.

These were quite different projects with Avalon wanting something similar to the client I did for Maiden Desmodus whereas The Two Towers had an existing javascript based web client they just wanted recreated in Flash for use on game portal sites.

Although the T2T client appears to be just a simple reskin, it was probably the more challenging project as I had to implement MXP !ELEMENT tag parsing which is something I’ve always avoided in the past when working with MXP.

You can see the T2T client up on Newgrounds (among other Flash game sites) and the Avalon client (named Lumiere) is now live on their site, although it’s not quite finished yet.

Arthur James Adcock was born on 16th July at 8.08pm and weighed in at 8lbs 8oz.

With all those 8′s it’s a shame he’s not Chinese.

It was another section but at least Suzy knew what to expect this time and fortunately in the UK there’s no requirement to eat wallpaper paste for two days afterwards.

Yes he is ginger strawberry blonde, and yes his hair does match my beard!

So now we have one of each and I think we’ll probably quit while we’re ahead.

The plugin stores bulletin board posts in an sqlite database so you can search for a particular word or phrase or find all posts from or to a character.

The plugin has two commands:

bbsections

Brings up a list of available sections to search from. Click on a section to select it. Click on ALL to search posts from every section.

bbsearch <[from|to|subject|msg|date]> <term>

Search the database for posts where the specified field contains the term, eg. bbsearch from genesis.

The plugin will automatically create the database file avalon.sqlite in your main MUSHclient directory and capture posts to the database as you browse the  bulletin board in game.

I haven’t included any existing post data so you will have to capture it yourself in order to make use of the plugin. The easiest way to do this is to enter the bulletin board and select the section you want to log. Enter read 1 to put yourself at the start and then set a timer to send next every half a second or so while you go off and do something else. The public section has over 25k posts so it can take a while but it should all be automatic.

You can get the plugin from the downloads page.

This certainly seems to be the prevailing view over at TMC, but I believe commercial MUDs are far more viable than many people might think.

It would be unprofessional of me to quote detailed figures for Maiden Desmodus given that I’m no longer involved with the game, however the company accounts are a matter of public record so there’s no harm in discussing overall numbers.

The accounts for the first year of trading (to June 2010) showed a turnover of just under £7000 and given that the running costs for a MUD are minimal, this was almost all profit. This may be a far cry from the likes of Simutronics or IRE but I bet it’s more than many people would have imagined and not bad for a part time business in its first year.

It’s also worth noting that this revenue was achieved with very modest player numbers and a charging model that was considerably less aggressive than some competitors.

Maiden Desmodus used a pay for perks (p4p) charging system with the most popular perks being faster skill increases and private housing.

There are commercially successful subscription MUDs (eg. Simutronics, Avalon, Skotos) but you can achieve an ARPPU far in excess of a typical monthly subscription with the right p4p model. If Maiden Desmodus had been a subscription game at $5 per month for example, we’d have needed to maintain almost 200 subscribers to bring in the same revenue.

I’ll take an IRE game as an example as theirs are probably the best known games using this system, though it’s not my intention to single them out for any particular criticism.

I just had a quick look at Lusternia and by my calculations to maximise the skills on a single character would cost around $1,000 if you buy credits in bulk.

In addition, all the IRE games have powerful magical items called artifacts which are only available for credits. Again I had a quick total up and if you bought one of each type you’d be looking at spending around $10,000 to do so. These are just the magical item artifacts; there is also housing, shops, pets and customisations which you can spend thousands of dollars on too.

And this is just on one character. If you want to play another character you can spend it all again, or in the case of an existing character changing profession or trade you need more credits to learn your new skills.

The system is designed in such a way that however much you can spend, the game has something for you to spend it on.

You might argue that there are ways to obtain credits without paying for them and that in practice few players will actually spend $1,000 to fully develop a character, much less own every single artifact, but that’s not really the point.

Whether players choose to spend to the max or not, this kind of system is designed to allow them to do so and it’s the big spenders where you really make your money.

Is it ethical to combine this kind of payment system with a game design featuring reinforcement, the Hero’s Journey, community ties and all that crazy compelling good stuff that hardcore immersive virtual worlds are notorious for?

I know that we’re just providing an entertainment product and my experience has been that players who pay are generally happy with their purchase, however part of me still feels a little uneasy about the whole thing.

I wonder if you can make an analogy with any other industries or products? I have a $2,000 watch for example, but it doesn’t tell the time any better than a $10 one, nor does it contain any precious metals or jewels to justify the high price. The price tag is solely because of the brand.

Can we say that my watch is worth $2,000 to me in the same way that that a virtual character in a virtual world may be worth $2,000 to someone else? I suppose some people enjoy owning $2,000 wrist watches, just like some people enjoy playing characters in text games that have lots of expensive virtual toys.

I’ve added an email notification checkbox to the comments form which if checked will send you an email anytime someone else leaves a comment on that post.

I’ve also been tinkering with the layout and you may notice that post meta box has gone and date, category and total comments are now displayed up below the post title. I’ve also added support for gravatars in the comments, so get yours now!

If you notice anything not working as it should or have any suggestions for new features or improvements on the blog, please let me know.

I’ve removed the H, M and P labels as they seemed superfluous and I’ve added some more functionality with the plugin now containing two lines of information.

From left to right on the top we have: health gauge with current, percentage and last change values ; mana guage with current, percentage and last change values; current afflictions, colour coded.

On the bottom line there are five coloured boxes representing different balances, from left: arm balance; equilibrium; potion sipping; allheale; healing herbs. These are followed by the regular prompt letters and then a list of exits from your current location. The exit names are clickable to move in the given direction and colour coded with regular exits in white, open doors in green and closed doors in red. The final item is the name of your current location with the area and terrain type.

The affliction tracker requires you trigger the messages for both the affliction and the cure. The plugin isn’t supposed to be a complete system so I’ve only included a couple of examples for despair and vomitting but it should be easy to extend. There is an alias “clearaffs” which will clear the tracker manually.

I’ve also made a couple of changes to how packets are parsed which should stop intentional double linebreaks being omitted, while still suppressing most additional blank lines. If you prefer an empty line whenever the mud usually sends a prompt there are details in the plugin source of which line to change.

I also fixed a bug with the room name parsing that wasn’t handling names with commas and hyphens in them. Hopefully this should now work with every location.

You can download version 2 from the downloads page.