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    • CommentAuthorShabadage
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2009
     
    Now before everyone gets up in arms about "PEEK can only do text" hear me out on this one and possibly answer some of my questions.

    I know tmel is waiting for someone to make an online rpg compatible with the peek, so I have some ideas we can throw around (and questions as I'm not a Peek owner yet).

    For the first part, I've got to ask a few questions if this is to work.

    1. Does the Peek support .png pictures. I know it supports JPG's, but for something like I have in mind that would lead to a lot of wasted bandwidth/even slower play (Which, to be honest is going to be pretty damned slow anyway)

    2. Does the Peek support "mailto:email@email.org?subject=Subject" type links (Does the Peek even support links in email?)

    Those are the basic questions that should tell if this style of game is possible.

    The setup would be a combination of RPG (Stats, fight, etc) and old adventure games in the vein of Shadowgate
    (http://www.consoleclassix.com/info_img/Shadowgate_NES_ScreenShot4.gif).

    Basically, upon a room changing or moving to a new room; an new PNG image would be emailed to you. This email would contain a collection of links detailing various actions you could take. (eg. Hit Wall with Sword / mailtoemail@email.org?subject=User%Pass%Hit%Wall). Your email back from the server would just be a note if it failed, or a new/changed location (new picture). Going through the single player game like this would net you equipment/levels to be used in the Arena, which would be a simple play by email battle against another player.

    Just an idea. An idea that I think could probably be pulled off with some php trickery. Comments/questions welcomed, as that will help flesh out the design and ascertain it's possibility.
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      CommentAuthortmel
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2009
     
    1. We support all image file types, except for animated .gif files. However, our server will reformat them into a .jpg

    2. Nope! We don't support any HTML/Links. The Peek is all plain-text, any HTML we find....we strip out and format it into plain-text best we can.
    • CommentAuthorShabadage
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2009
     
    I don't suppose that preserving mailto: links in email is something that's going to happen anytime soon.

    Either way, you've given me the information I needed; thank you. I shall go further into mulling about possible solutions.
    • CommentAuthorShabadage
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2009
     
    Quick little mockup. On the server side, the email is parsed for sender and subject. Subject Parsed for commands (A Chest for example). It awards the player whatever (All done on server side). If there is no existing image for what happened, the server generates a new image using layers (Chest is on an upper layer for example, that layer is replaced with a broken chest). This way new content could be added in an editor, (possibly on the fly, depending on the server config).

    Makes the new image, sends it off to the player. Each image should be about 12kb in PNG format.

    There is a problem with the mockup below. Regenerating the image each time for stats is very wasteful. Likely there will be no stats present on the image you will recieve, but they would be listed in the email itself. I had finished the mockup before I realized what a stupid mistake it was. Perhaps for PvP battles. Would probably make PvP battles seem more exciting.

    http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/7449/prontod.png

    Yes, horrible graphics, only have paint on the old workstation; should get the idea across though.
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      CommentAuthortmel
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2009
     
    Lookin cool!

    I'd really like to see an email application that sends you a .jpg of a chess board. You can email commands such as Pawn to C6, and it'll email you and your opponent back an updated jpg with your pawn on C6. :-)
    • CommentAuthorShabadage
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2009
     
    The trick to this whole process is going to be building the right server software. Start it off simple and work up from there. The image generation is the easy part of this (built a similar system for quickly animating of 2d characters). The design of the database behind it is going to be a challenge.

    I'll keep looking into this further.
    • CommentAuthorgabe
    • CommentTimeOct 18th 2009
     
    Wow what a cool idea. I wonder if we should maybe try something super simple like blackjack. Just emails with attachments of the cards in your hands and what the dealer is showing. The server maintains the state of the hand, and any other users that are playing. Could be kind of an easy proof of concept.

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