I've never dared to play Cantr II because of it's lack of security.

About a year ago we all got a task in the school to prepare something about computers to talk about in the class. Somebody chose to talk about security and also got to the subject of SQL injections. To show an example he used Cantr and showed all the tables and contents. The passwords were just in plain text, not even encrypted. As a bonus he took a random e-mail and password and opened some stranger's inbox.

Ah! Just remembered an old idea I had that I wanted in a Cantr-like game to speed up gameplay significantly.

Players should be able to set up automated responses and trade options for when they're not playing. So if you know John Pearson will show up and want a key or something from you. You could set it up so he can select that option from an interaction menu.

Let's see:
1) Frequent questions like "Who's the leader here?", "Can I hunt the animals?", "Can I take stuff from the ground?"
2) Exclusive interaction for specific characters.
3) Trade options.

So basically when you're not online people can still interact with your characters as if they were NPC's, with options that the player sets up.

Now we're 4 people at one location. The message log has a scrollbar. So I'm wondering how far back will it load?

Another thing I though of earlier but forgot to mention is the issue of maps.
I tried my hand at making a map over several months, can't recall how many locations I mapped, but it was all on foot and I stopped playing soon after I got my hands on an abandoned dirtbike...

Anyway, I thought it would be nice if mapping happened automatically so you could have a map over the places you've been without having to mess with image editing and all that. Perhaps it should be required you have paper for it before you can get such a map. You select a paper and set it to automap, or something like that.

I wonder that as well. If they're shared, then I need to rethinking my naming scheme, as I too just did a simple spawn location thing.

Now that location went down to two people.

Eventually I'll probably exceed the maximum length for the field so it's only a temporary solution anyway. Seeing a single place in the world for the first time made me draw a blank for what else to call it. And if I didn't know where I was then I couldn't possible know where I was going.

** IDEA **

Oh come on, you already knew it was me!

One of my characters has moved around quite a bit now. I just realized this game should have a route planner that makes it easy to travel between locations that are far apart. Since each stretch of road only takes an in game hour it would be a bit annoying to log in at every location to get from A to E via B, C and D.

Especially if you're planning to introduce vehicles that are faster than walking. If the current speed is the walking speed you're set on.

About vehicles. I wasn't really a fan of the tech level you could reach in Cantr. While lots of people were hunting with bone spears and didn't bother wear clother, it's rather weird to be driving around in sports cars...

I'd rather see animal domestication in this game. So you can ride, or put a cart behind a horse to transport between locations. A bit more structured farming would be nice too. Getting milk by killing cows and eggs by killing birds... that's just wrong.

If there are birds around you might be able to find some eggs, collected like any other resource. But to be more efficient you should build a coop.

You could make the log say "[character] passes through [location]" instead of the two events for arriving and leaving when someone travels like this. If the game supports such travel I don't think people would be offended by players who use it.

Firearms eh, well the best weapon in Cantr was the crossbow. It needed a couple shots to kill someone weak without any protection. There was also the limitation that you could only attack each character once per day. Rather unrealistic but with the game being the way it is you need some way of limiting the violence. Otherwise you could live in a peaceful village one day and when you log in the next day everyone is killed by a single player.

One feature that may be appropriate is automatic defense. So people hit back when someone attacks them without the players having to be logged in. Perhaps adding settings for protecting others too. This would help against hit and run tactics where attackers barricade themselves in a locked building, make a quick attack and go back in. Commonly used in the war between Swedes and Turks.

Except you are always online in the real world Since people are not expected to be in the game 24/7, a way is needed to limit the amount of damager a player can do over a certain time period (ie before people have time to react).

That might work. However, as I said, travelling is probably going to be much much slower once I get to the balancing part, so the automated routing might not even be something I implement. But if I do, then yes, something like that would work I guess.

I've been thinking about automatic attack responses myself, but while playing around with the idea, I quickly figured that it's going to be a lot more complicated than you'd think at first sight. In cantrII, a lot of sparring was going on all the time (one of my characters was part of a group where daily sparring was pretty much expected), maybe more than actual fighting even; so the automatic response would have to somehow figure out whether someone was just sparring or really meant to attack you. Then there's the situation where people hit you by accident (mis-click, selected the wrong weapon, or whatever), and when you have a powerful weapon on you, this might lead to a cascade of unwanted violence. Further, you'd have to make sure that the counter-violence isn't countered back ( ) by another automated response, leading to an automatic fight to death. Next problem is that you don't always want to fight back: If a super-bully with thirty years of battle training and an uber-weapon takes a swing at you, you don't want to hit them back using your bare hands, you want to run as fast and as far as you can - I don't see how I'd automate this, let alone offer a sane user interface for that. So, long story short, I don't think I'll provide automatic violence response, and instead limit violence much like cantrII did (except that I'm leaning more towards a complete violence lock after each attack, that is, after you've hit someone, you'd have to wait some time before you could hit anyone else, or the same person, again, and the wait period would depend on the type of weapon used).

Oh, and just to be clear about this: If I implement firearms, they won't necessarily be the most powerful weapons in all situations. Firearms, and even more so the kind used around 1800, have a few interesting disadvantages over things like swords and clubs: You need ammunition, you need time to reload, they can malfunction, they can even hurt you instead of your target (especially when you're a bad shot), they don't work well when wet, etc. If these things have enough effect, a good sword could very well be superior to a gun in many situations in the game - e.g., in larger battles, the need to reload and the depletion of ammunition could mean that you don't get a chance to kill more than one or two of your enemies, while they keep slashing away at you with their ever-functioning swords.

E-mail functionality is definitely in the pipeline. A few things I might want to do:

• Daily digest mail, listing all events of the day for all your characters

• Password reset by e-mail (the ubiquitous "forgot password" dialog)

• Confirmation of account activation, suspension, deletion, etc.

• An invite system (send an invite to someone else by automatic e-mail, pretty much like gmail had when they started out)

• Maybe something like you describe, but this would only make sense if your characters don't see much action. In CantrII, my experience was that there were new events for at least some characters at least once a day.

• At some point, I might need automated tools to find rule violations and other misbehaviour, and such tools might include functions for sending standard e-mails, e.g. "You have been seen doing XYZ, which is wrong because blah blah, don't do it again kthxbye"

But first, more gameplay features.

RSS with session state is sort of clumsy - most RSS clients support sending cookies, but not receiving them or displaying a login form. So what you'd have to do is log in to the regular site, then copy the login cookie to your RSS client, and it would work so long as your login cookie remains valid. To my knowledge, the RSS protocol itself does not contain an authentication mechanism.

First real feature, yes. The rest was bugfixes I think. There's also a tiny wiki/cms now, but currently the only user with editor privileges is me (mainly because there's no history and no change logging ). Still useful though, if only to quickly make and change the news page.

I also have projects in the making, but so far, there's only the data model, no interface and only partial logic yet. It's the most complicated piece so far, because each project type has a list or requirements, but requirements may have alternatives - for example, to build a "wooded crucifix", you'd need:
- 2 wooden planks
- 4 iron nails OR 4 steel nails
- wooden hammer OR steel hammer OR stone hammer

Yes, this is far from ideal. I leave it as it is for now, but ultimately, this has to be streamlined. The original idea for the overview was some sort of digest version of all the other tabs, so that you could get a quick run-down of the situation. At one point, I even had the map in the top center panel, but that screen real estate is too valuable IMO, and in a lot of situations, you don't need the map (say, you're working inside, or just not planning on travelling any time soon), and the color scheme already suggest the kind of location you're in.

I'll see where things go for now, either the overview becomes more functional, or I'll ditch it and add its functionality to the other tabs. A thought that just appeared to me is that the various counts (number of roads, people, etc.) could be added to the tab headers. I'll have to play around with that idea a bit more.