ASP.Net file name

I’m taking a course on ASP.Net right now, and one of the things that we had to do was create a simple page with a form on it that would send the form’s data to itself. In order to do this we were hard-coding the form’s action property, which didn’t feel quite right to me. So I opened up Google and looked for a better solution.

Jeremy Wadsworth seems to have found a better one, as he’s written about in his post Get the file name of the current page in ASP.Net. This is essentially what it all boils down to:

…But I still think that Perl’s $0 is better.

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MySQL 4.1 and dashes

I’m working on a quick, one-off Facebook application right now. And, while setting up the basic PHP stuff, I encountered an issue with MySQL that took a pathetically long time to solve.

Here’s the gist of it: MySQL 4.1(I don’t know about higher versions) doesn’t support dashes inside table names. Underscores are fine, but dashes are not.

Example: notesbook-pages does not work; notesbook_pages does.

This bit me way too hard.

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Layers of Complexity

I’m quitting my day job.

I’ll be jobless come October 14th, with the exception of some contract work that I’m doing(which currently has a cap of about $540/month earned - unlikely I can hit that).

I figured out that I’ve saved up enough money to take three months off from life, and then maybe go back to school in January.

But what am I supposed to do to fill up my time? This will be the first time that I’ve actually given myself time to work on my projects: I’ll be able to work on them in a general 9-5 workday, and then spend the rest of my spare time on another one.

With that being said, I’ve gotten a few ideas. One is that game idea, on which I still can’t figure out something to make playing a merchant fun.

Another is a Flash game community website. Basically, I’ll provide Flash Developers with the infrastructure they need to host and market their game for free, along with the extras they need to set up things like scoreboards. Then users will be able to sign up(or alternately play without signing up), and have all of their stats tracked while they play these games.

It’s definitely a complex idea, though. Probably the most complex that I’ve come this close to implementing.

I’m sussing out a designer to hire for this; I don’t feel confident that I can actually design the website well enough for it to do all that I want to. Plus, the designing will be a lot of work. I’ll need forum templates, main page templates, game page templates, scoreboard page templates, and more. And those are just off the top of my head.

It’ll be fun, though.

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Making Mercantilism Fun

A friend and I are going to be starting a project that’s basically a browsergame with a competition built into it.

Users would gain points for performing specific actions, like turning in 6 severed deer heads, or crafting 9 special cogs.

There are two classes within the game: Merchants and Fighters. Fighters do all of the combat/heavy-work, and collect all of the items. Merchants provide the backbone for the game economy, and run the shops. But what makes playing a merchant fun?

So far we’ve figured out that merchants would be varied from Fighters in terms of starting setup and bonuses. A fighter might gain more item drops from enemies, while a Merchant might have more gold to start off with, and their own shop(which Fighters could only buy later for a lot of gold).

Fighters would be able to go out and kill enemies and explore. But all merchants can do is…sell stuff. Where’s the fun in that? Basically all they do is buy/sell items, in the hopes of making a profit. But what makes their gameplay interesting enough for a player to create a merchant and enjoy it?

Merchant-operated shops, I’m hoping, would be the Fighter’s only way to buy things(and maybe sell them too). So it’s important that we have at least some small population playing the game as merchants. But in order for that to happen, we need something to attract and keep them. But I don’t think just buying/selling items is going to keep them; there needs to be more.

I just can’t figure out what.

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