Lots of random thoughts of mine here. Some may have already been discussed. Others discarded. Just wanted to point out some of my follies in trying to install BlackNova Traders (BNT) on a home web-server to tinker.
Easiest Always Isn't
When I downloaded Black Nova Traders off of SourceForge (yet again), figured a secondary machine would be ideal to host this. Then figured instead of setting up FTP, would just create a SMB/CIFS share to access. Then learned my usual Security-Enhanced GNU/Linux wouldn't allow browsing that drive. So booted up Knoppix 8.1 and tinkered. SO decided to use Apache... and easiest route is a LAMP stack, right? Downloaded, installed... ran it, unarchived BNT to web docs folder and got gobbly-gook. This was quite a few days ago. Turns out, was using the stack with PHP7.
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_e_sad.gif)
During the Few Days
So had tried to look up a few things about simple PHP games on the web that a person could create. To help test my set-up, that wasn't working until recently. And ran across the "interactive story-telling adventure" type of thing. Which is appealing, but probably doesn't have a lot of playability. Then when booting Knoppix, the colored text reminds of Trade Wars 2002 - which was up and running at one point on a different machine & OS. Who wants to telnet in to play games?
Other MMO Games
Was hooked on one about trains. Pretty cool, you could watch them crawl along the tracks to their destinations. Fixed time length in game play except for end-game. Anyway, point of this is that it is in Flash. Fortunately Adobe resumed support for GNU/Linux with Shockwave Flash, yet only able to get it to work with FIrefox ONLY. And even then, behaved differently on different version of Korora (Fedora-based). And this morning, was unavailable for at least a couple of hours. Who wants to try to log in for 30-90 minutes? On and off, that is. Not constantly trying. Not THAT desperate or addicted. Yet if I were....
Back to Black (Nova that is)
Again, if your web hosting service is up, not many things can go wrong with BNT. But not the easiest set up, especially after a few years of not doing it. Forgot the installation instructions were "hidden" in the Docs sub-folder. And yeah, all of you wise folks are going to want to sk "where else would it be?" How about a README1ST file right alongside the BNT archived folder? And from the player stand-point, maybe ask each before they leave Sector 0, "Are you ABSOLUTELY sure you do not want an esape pod? Because if you don't get it, you'll be very sorry." So maybe an initial blurb screen that points out some really basic things like that before the player gets frustrated. And how to avoid burning up all their turns by real-space moves until they can afford Engine upgrades.
Oh So OCD!
This game is one of those itches. It has to be scratched. It may be a few months or a few years, but dang if I don't have to get a dose of it now and again. And yeah, the shiny will wear off once more. It's basically text-based, so there isn't the usual glamorous graphics to ensnare. Yet it's funny how many people will go back to games like Zork or Dwarven Fortress or TradeWars. Heck, even messed around with old arcade versions of Defender online. Now if I could just get the Saitek flight joy-stick to control it! And a screen big enough to see it. So yeah, we shouldn't put BNT on smartphones and lil tablets. Probably should avoid Shockwave sinse Adobe reportedly will give up on it altogether. After all, HTML5 is safer. Or someone will have to code in C/C++ to create server/client applications (and hopefully not using ActiveX or DirectX) to overcome the obstacle to adding glitzy graphics/animations.
And let's face it, the game is about interacting with other players. Maybe some improved AI opponents one day.