Config file

[Ron]

I need a sample config_local.php file I have setup my config and being told my path is not found. Also my databse is empty with no tables.

Total noob with BN so help please...

Thanks

[TheMightyDude]

I need a sample config_local.php file I have setup my config and being told my path is not found. Also my databse is empty with no tables.

Total noob with BN so help please...

Thanks

What does setup_info.php say?

Also what is your server stats?

[Ron]

What does setup_info.php say? Also what is your server stats?

I don't see any setup_info.php file. I found the game on an old code site I came across so I'm not sure I have the total package. Is there a download location where I can get the latest version (complete) and try installing to my server with that?

I usually don't have problems installing so I'm wondering if I have the latest version and files..

Thanks//

[TheMightyDude]

What does setup_info.php say? Also what is your server stats?

I don't see any setup_info.php file. I found the game on an old code site I came across so I'm not sure I have the total package. Is there a download location where I can get the latest version (complete) and try installing to my server with that?

I usually don't have problems installing so I'm wondering if I have the latest version and files..

Thanks//

Try http://sourceforge.net/projects/blacknova/

Not too sure if they are stable on the latest version of PHP, MySQL and Apache.
I know I have stopped development on the game due to a health condition, but hopefully once I have beaten off this health issue I may come back and continue development.

[Ron]

Try http://sourceforge.net/projects/blacknova/

Not too sure if they are stable on the latest version of PHP, MySQL and Apache.
I know I have stopped development on the game due to a health condition, but hopefully once I have beaten off this health issue I may come back and continue development.

That fixed it, I didn't have the latest version (or a complete one). Thanks.

Question: Menu link updates and the News area - what files do I edit to add news and change menu links?

The game looks good and seems to run well as a new install. As a former BBS operator (circa 1988) I'm looking for "bbs door" software that can be developed for web and help bring them back and grow them to popularity again. BlackNova ia one of them. Hopefully you can continue to dev it. I'll let you know of any code changes that everyone can use on their copies and share those to give back.

Sorry about your health and hope that it all works out for you to keep BlackNova active..

Thanks again..

[TheMightyDude]

That fixed it, I didn't have the latest version (or a complete one). Thanks.

Please be aware that the Xenobe (AI Players) are broken in the newer code, this is due to changes in the code.

Question: Menu link updates and the News area - what files do I edit to add news and change menu links?

Erm, Menus are hard coded into the game and if you want to add more you will need to look into main.php to see how they are added.
The news, I don't think that you can add news within the game, been a little while since I have looked into the code.
But I have always added the news by adding it directly into the database by hand and the game should automatically pick it up.

So you enter the title of the news in the headline field and the actual news text in newstext, leave user_id as NULL if a global news item or a ShipID (account id) if its about a user, but user_id is normally set to NULL.
Actually, I just looked at the news code and user_id and news_type doesn't get used it seems, maybe they was just future place holders or maybe for admin eyes only

The game looks good and seems to run well as a new install. As a former BBS operator (circa 1988) I'm looking for "bbs door" software that can be developed for web and help bring them back and grow them to popularity again. BlackNova ia one of them. Hopefully you can continue to dev it. I'll let you know of any code changes that everyone can use on their copies and share those to give back.

Oh I remember those days, with the 300/600 dial up modems and huge phone bills LOL.

Just some advice, don't forget to setup crontab to call scheduler.php every X mins which also needs to match turns_per_tick in the config file or else they get out of sync.

Also the config is also stored in the database so you will need to change both config items in the config file as well as in the database.
The game uses the config settings in the database when running, however when you create the universe it drops that table and re-populates it with what's in the config file.
So if you only change what in the database and you then re-create the universe you will loose those config setting you may of changed in the database.

Sorry about your health and hope that it all works out for you to keep BlackNova active..

Well some time mid last year I was diagnosed with Black Toxic Mold on my lungs which leaves me with breathing problems and was told to stay away from anything stress related, and developing, administering all our games as well as the forums and day to day life just took a toll on things.

To be honest I don't really want BNT to just end and wither away like this, I have spent well over a decade working on BNT, way back when we had several other developers working on the game, granted it hasn't gone the way I really wanted it to go, which was mostly down to how the code was done, a few of us did try and rectify this a little why back, but sadly this was just too much work.

This lead me to a complete new design of a game based off how BNT was and should of ended up being, sadly this was when I diagnosed with the above condition, so this new game never started off.

And due to all the free games out there and also due to the lack of new features being added into BNT and also the downtime we have lost most of our user base.
BNT use to have thousands of users playing our BNT games, granted back then a lot was multi accounts, sadly now all we have is a handful of players.
So my thinking would be if I was to recover from being ill, and did manage to write the new version of BNT + extras, there probably wouldn't be enough users left about to even play the game, so it may not be viable to even create a new game.

Also some of the reasons why our user base may of reduced on our games was:

1. Lack of new features, doing the same thing day after day gets boring.
2. Players always find a way to cheat, granted our code got very buggy at one point and stayed that way for a long time, I did add in some checks that worked to a level and caught a lot of cheaters but some still got through, this resulted in players giving up and going else where.
3. Sad to say this, but there are better games out there that are free to play and this may have also took loads of our user base.
4. The game is open source and available to everyone that wants to run their own game, if a massive game say World of Warcraft become Free 2 Play and also Open Source, do you think they wouldn't see their user base drop down a huge amount, having loads and loads of BNT Servers may or may not of caused the reduction of users playing on our games.

All this I think contributed in loosing our players.

Thanks again..

No probs

[Ron]

Erm, Menus are hard coded into the game and if you want to add more you will need to look into main.php to see how they are added.

The "Email Us" link is a mailto. I have php code to add to the menu link which will allow for a php email form to be used instead. Once placed into the game as a folder it simply needs an email address added to send. It also has captcha so robots can't use it send mails.

The news, I don't think that you can add news within the game, been a little while since I have looked into the code.
But I have always added the news by adding it directly into the database by hand and the game should automatically pick it up.

I'll look into that. Maybe a simple wysiwyg editor added for the admin to spin a news story or two ...

Please be aware that the Xenobe (AI Players) are broken in the newer code, this is due to changes in the code.

What broke on it? That is, what should it do that it doesn't? I took a quick look at the code and am wondering if it's a dbase thing. Anyway, want to tackle that and fix (unless someone else has already)...

300 baud days

Yeah, I started at 1200 baud and took it down at 2400 baud. Emails send via FidoNet. That was fun times. We had tons of "doors" and miss everyone who was registered on the site. That was just when the Internet was starting up.

I don't think out of the vast Internet universe we are the only ones who enjoy classic games. With a little tuning Black Nova can become popular again. Just some SEO and a little marketing and folks will begin playing again. Any updates need to be in keeping with the original designs and compliment the game not change it.

Updates:

We must remove the mailto and replace it with code since it's not the best way to send mail.

We can add a newsletter mailing script for those who wish to join a list.
Social media needs to be added (start a Facebook page)
Xenobe (AI Players) need to be fixed

I'll see what I can do on the list - sit back and maybe just answer some questions every now and them (if you don't mind)

Really simple stuff I think to get it back in public eye for everyone. How about Ron? Is he still interested in his code?

Thanks for all the info so far..

BTW, anyone else on the forum that wants to re-start a dev team? Together we can get Black Nova fixed and have game servers running again...

[TheMightyDude]

The "Email Us" link is a mailto. I have php code to add to the menu link which will allow for a php email form to be used instead. Once placed into the game as a folder it simply needs an email address added to send. It also has captcha so robots can't use it send mails.

We use mailto so that the user can their own default email application, also you would be shocked on how good robots are at getting past captcha.
We use to use captcha on the signups on these forums and that stopped nothing.
I ended up writing my own script that uses SFS (Stop Forum Spam) that works great, granted the odd one does get through, but a simple remove of the account and submitting the info in their database stops it for another several months.

I'll look into that. Maybe a simple wysiwyg editor added for the admin to spin a news story or two ...

Yeah, I did have plans to add a news section on the admin section, but cleaning up the code was more important.

What broke on it? That is, what should it do that it doesn't? I took a quick look at the code and am wondering if it's a dbase thing. Anyway, want to tackle that and fix (unless someone else has already)...

I think it breaks when you either create the universe or when you add AI Players, most probably the latter, also I think the Scheduler also breaks when you have Xenobe AI.
I was in the middle of creating new ones that is written as a BNT Plugin but got put on hold due to the new code broke my Plugin code that needed to be rewritten.

Yeah, I started at 1200 baud and took it down at 2400 baud. Emails send via FidoNet. That was fun times. We had tons of "doors" and miss everyone who was registered on the site. That was just when the Internet was starting up.

Yeah, I remember those days, all we had to play to-do with multiplayer games was a text base MUD (multi user dungeon) that we had running on Linux.

Yep, also remember FidoNet Echomail etc my younger brother use to run a BBS on his Amiga here which was rather popular and I think was one of the main Fido nodes for London, until some hardware issues happened like his HDD dying.
Oh those was the days

I don't think out of the vast Internet universe we are the only ones who enjoy classic games. With a little tuning Black Nova can become popular again. Just some SEO and a little marketing and folks will begin playing again. Any updates need to be in keeping with the original designs and compliment the game not change it.

Don't get me wrong, I agree there are loads of players that love the old classic games, as for search engine optimization we was listed Google, like if you search for Blacknova Traders this site is in the first slot then our project page on sourceforge is the next.

Well the game was unbalanced due to how the game was written and wasn't intended to be like that, and to resolve that would need to change how the game runs etc.
Loads of players got fed up each month of having to restart from scratch due to the game being reset, and the reset is needed with default code from 1 month to 3 months depending on how many players are playing and how its being played.
There is no way around it, the game needs resetting every two to three months due to the nature of the code, this is the same for MMO's they get regular restarts on a weekly basis like World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online and Star Wars The Old Republic, this is to reset/resync all indexes of objects and clean up any fragmented memory etc.

I was leaning to move BNT to a more MMO style of game with a XP levelling System, Questing, Crafting, Battle Zones and more, this was go give every type of players something that they would like to do.

We must remove the mailto and replace it with code since it's not the best way to send mail.

I think we did move away from using mailto a while back, but ended up with loads of injected emails, its best to leave it using mailto and use the users own email application, that way it makes it easier to know who sent what.

We can add a newsletter mailing script for those who wish to join a list.
Social media needs to be added (start a Facebook page)
Xenobe (AI Players) need to be fixed

All the above ideas was/are still on our to-do list but have been put on hold.

A mailing list for players might be an issue, it is very easy to get your mail server blacklisted, when Blacknova was run by the main owner of BNT (Ron Harwood) we was getting blacklisted all over the place result in players not receiving their emails, since it was moved over to me to run stuff on our dedicated server located in a data centre based in Germany it has gotten better, but a few times we have got blacklisted but has since then been fixed and should never happen again, but as a safe measure I like to keep sending emails as little as possible.

Facebook implementation, well many years ago, I did start to rewrite BNT to become a facebook app, but facebook kept changing their API which pissed off a load of us trying to develop stuff, so I just gave up.

Now, Xenobe, Like I said I did have plans to do a new version as one of our plugins, I got about half way through and then got struck with ill health where everything got put on hold.
I haven't long re-installed Windows so I haven't got everything installed yet, so the code is here some place.

As for Ron (Owner of BNT) and another admin/developer without saying too much, have been talking about some new development, but that was like mid July, so not too sure what's happening atm.

[Ron]

Cool...great points on the mailto. Got the Cron job running so looks like sync may be working.

The Amiga wow that was a great console..

I'm looking into the news thing, if only for my game. I'm setup on a test dev server until the move to a regular server for it.

Link the forum button back to here?

good evening..

[thekabal]

BTW, anyone else on the forum that wants to re-start a dev team? Together we can get Black Nova fixed and have game servers running again...

I love the enthusiasm!

https://github.com/thekabal/tki/ is the latest repo work from me, and Xgermz has one at https://github.com/xgermz/xenoberage .

My focus has been on code correctness, so for example, I'm working on switching the code away from using the very poorly maintained and bug-ridden ADODB DB library.

I did quite a bit of work a few years back to dramatically change the game (variable star sizes, planets with independent defense levels, another great coder contributed a "spies" system, etc), but over time, I had a very tough time with keeping hard-core long-term players happy. Essentially, there are a handful of very vocal players that absolutely do not want to see *any* change in the basic structure/numbers/etc of the game. At all. And that drained a lot of energy and enthusiasm from other players, and especially from development.

I still work on the code in my spare time. I haven't spent a lot of time on it recently (8 months or so) though.

The AI players in the code base as it exists have many, many problems, the least of which is that the database calls fail. But beyond that, they also don't "play" fairly or reasonably. They would need a substantial rethink to be useful, in my opinion.

TMD also mentioned that the economy in the game isn't sustainable, and he is right. World of Warcraft is a very good example to point to. They have had "gold sinks" for over a decade, and they have grown over time. In BNT, there is no real check on inflation. Everything grows exponentially, and there is no real "cost", because every planet and your ship share the same levels. That was part of why I went the direction in TKI of having the planet levels be distinct.

I also tried to adjust the economy, a little bit at a time, but it was so vocally opposed, that I basically gave up.

The economy needs a full re-think from the ground up. I love TMD's ideas of adding XP and I've seen forks with "Quests" and the like. Those would be great directions to take the game, in my opinion.

I think at its heart, the core bits that shouldn't change, is trading, battling with other players, and turns-as-commodity that is earned over time. I think the rest is very fluid, and could be made much better than it is, but development time is scarce.

I'm interested in helping out if I can, feel free to browse through my github, I welcome feedback. If you just want "Hey, why did this get setup like this", I'm happy to answer those to the best of my memory. It has been over a decade, so some things may be hazy, while others may be laser-sharp.

Glad to have interest in the game - anything I can do to help, please don't hesitate to reach out.