Frequently Asked Questions:

1. How did you come up with the idea for CB?
2. How did you write CB?
3. How long did it take?
4. What hardware does CB run on?
5. What will you be adding next?

1. Q: How did you come up with the idea for CB?

   A: It seems to me that the real reason people play MMORPG games like Everquest is to make friends and chat. The game just gives them to do something to do while chatting. So the original idea from which CB sprung was a (really really low-budget) chat-centric MMORPG. The strategy came later.

   
   

2. Q: How did you write CB?

   A: Short answer:

   The game code is written in TCL (with user management and other functions from the OpenACS toolkit), and runs under the AOLServer web server, which despite the name is quite a good piece of software. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database.

   The chat applet, of course, is written in Java.

   If you're interested in writing a game of your own, here are some thoughts: (updated Aug 2005)

   • Use an app framework that handles user management, discussion boards, etc. out of the box. That leaves you free to spend your time writing something original.
   • Here is an old but still good introduction to web/database programming no matter what app framework you use.
   • The two toolkits I would recommend looking at are Spyce, in Python, and OpenACS, in TCL. Python is a more modern and powerful language, but for the majority of web applications, TCL will be adequate. OpenACS gives you much more out-of-the-box; the learning curve is correspondingly (much) steeper. To my mind, current versions of OpenACS (5.x) suffer from second-system syndrome, but depending on your requirements it may be worth a look anyway because of the sheer amount of code that's there (and debugged) already. (CB is based on the 3.2.5 version, but nobody really does new development in that anymore. I wouldn't.)
   • All the php app frameworks suck. In fact, PHP sucks in general. Don't waste your time.
   • I also wouldn't suggest any of the j2ee stuff unless you're getting well paid; life's too short to code web pages in java.
   • It's worth pointing out that it's easy to find hosting capable of running Spyce on a $10/m plan (or less) with apache and postgresql -- pghoster.com, for instance -- or mysql which I personally wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. OpenACS requires aolserver, which isn't standard on most hosting plans so you're looking at plans that give you a "virtual server" with root access. These plans start around $15/m.
   • If you want to run openacs on unix/linux the standard docs are fine. If you're developing on windows though it's a bit more complicated.
     • this page has install instructions for postgresql on win32. A native port will be out soon; in the meantime, you have to use cygwin as described here.
     • this page has an aolserver installer for win32.
   • That's about it. Any questions about software mentioned here are best addressed on their respective web sites, rather than the CB forums.

   
   

3. Q: How long did it take?

   A: Over a year of spare time to get to the point where it was complete enough to go live. The changelog discussion forum has a record of what's happened since.

   
   

4. Q: What hardware does CB run on?

   A: CB has run on several machines.

   Early development: Sparcstation 10, dual 50MHz processors, 128MB of memory, RH Linux 6.2. (This was a $15,000 machine circa 1993.) Still lives in Jonathan's basement, mostly retired.

   First production machine, circa October 2001: Duron 800, 512 MB RAM, Mandrake Linux 8.0. 2 IDE drives; one for the OS and database, one for the database transaction log. Built by Ellis. Pretty much everything but the motherboard + cpu was cannibalized for the next one...

   Second production machine, April 2002: dual 1GHz P3, 1 GB of memory (later upgraded to 1.5 GB), Mandrake Linux 8.0 with many packages semi-manually upgraded to 8.2. Motley collection of IDE drives to spread the disk load around. Built by Jonathan. Still lives in his basement as the "dev box."

   Third (and current) production machine began life in May 2004 with dual 2.4 GHz P4 Xeon, 2.25 GB ecc memory, Mandrake Linux 10.0 official, and 2x15krpm SCSI disks. Built by Dell because their price for the base system was less than I could get just a motherboard + cpu for (yes, even AMD); non-base components added by Jonathan to avoid ridiculous Dell prices. Added 1GB of ram and a 3rd disk in Dec 2004; maxed out to 4 GB ram in May 2005.

   
   

5. Q: What will you be adding next?

   A: You'll find out when I'm done adding them. The perceptive player may notice clues in some of the polls we run, but remember CB is not a democracy. Don't bother asking for more info because I will just ignore you.

   Changes impacting game balance are made every three months. e.g. Sep'06 ongoing.