Original Post
Browser Based MMORPG makes more instant sense, but I believe MUD is more dictatively correct. Anyhow, I'm a self-taught Java programmer with some helpless highschool courses of computer science (Java exclusive) under my belt. Knowing Java, other languages are easy to grasp. I've been in and out of browser based games for a while in my spare time because I've picked up an interest in creating one. Although most in awe of Ferion, I came across PhantasyRPG and realized that, as a hobby, I'd like to create a game of such sort. To run down said game, user creates character. With some money from creation, he can visit the town shops and equip himself with various weapons and armor. From there, he can enter the Sewers from a link from the city navigation and click on tiles where he wants to move, and a sprite actually appears at tiles he chooses to move to. Random tiles give you the option to enter combat. When in combat, you can choose your attacks, use items, or run away. As the player progresses in level, allocating skill points to basic attributes like STR, he can then enter more formidable dungeons and such and fulfill quests. Yeah. It's nothing we haven't seen a thousand times. Oh wait, that's all a game needs for us to label it a RPG. But aside the point. Anyhow, I concluded that such a game likely is built with AJAX on top of obvious PHP and MySQL structure. Today I spent all day at Barnes and Noble looking at some AJAX books and also some PHP databasing foundations. Easy to pick up. My problem is just starting out. Since this is a hobby of mine, I want to start out with simplicity running on my Apache localhost. Maybe a program that keeps track of logging in/out with associated characters, editing and storing character stats, and maybe some simple character quests, like fetching an item from across a tiled map. Where do I begin? Writing AJAX, PHP and MySQL? Easy. But constructing from scratch? Not so inviting. I've been looking around for a few days (as I just started getting interested in this the other day) but found little help from other forums and such. Anyone have such experience? Once again I have background programming and I understand how databasing and PHP and AJAX scripting works, but I really don't know how to begin implementing it in unison to pursue my hobby.
