RNDDB, ConfEdit and CE scripting (from Moving Colour Column)

[Tomi]

Well, I was AFK (actually, to be more precise, not Away From Keyboard, but something like AFI - "Away From Internet") for a week, but now I can reply. There is a lot of things I should reply to, so prepare yourself for a long post.

About Lua / Pascal Script / Python:
Lua is the most powerful language I've ever seen. If you've read its Wikipedia article and had a look at table of contents of the Programming In Lua book, you know what do I mean. However, most of the features aren't needed in a CE scripting tool - almost any scripting language would do (though I'd be, of course, very happy if you'd use Lua).
Python is nice. I don't use it, but once I've been learning it (I like to "collect" languages, I once learned - and mostly forgotten - about 20 and actively use about 7). However, I think Lua is better, so if I were choosing between Python and Lua, I'd choose Lua.
I don't know Pascal Script, but I don't like Pascal very much. However, if it will serve its purpose well, and can be used easily, well, why not? But please use some already-created scripting language, and don't try to make your own one - it will save you time and will probably be easier to learn.

About ConfEdit:
I don't use it for two reasons: 1. I don't need it in most levelsets, 2. it's for Windows, and I play RnD (and store all my levels) in Linux.

About making new demos:
I like making CE examples for the sake of it: it's a challenge for me, and I think I won't mind if nobody in the world would use them.

About making new tools:
Actually, I'm making a "RnD Levelsets Manager" at the moment, and I'm sure that if I'll finish it (what is arguable), *someone* will use it. Namely, me. As my primary (and, for the matter, even secondary) audience isn't the public, releasing it isn't actually so... - I'm not sure what word should I use, but "needed" seems to be best. Don't take me wrong - it's my intention to release it, but I'd consider the program successful even if nobody but me liked it.
For your information, it's programmed in Bash. :-P (No kidding. Bash is cool.)
I don't know what to think about RNDDB. I surely do want CE scripting, but RNDDB is for Windows, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to use it. (I think I once heard about some Linux port of Delphi, but I'm not sure about any details, including the name. Try Google.)

About making new levels:
I haven't released any levelsets yet, but I worked on quite a few. Most of them were unfinished, but what they had in common was that they weren't resembling basic RnD concepts much. They heavily used CEs in extraordinary ways - for example, imagine a nested "game inside" as one of levels from "game inside".
I'm in doubt: I'm currently working on my most ambitious project so far, but will it ever be played? I'd like very much to know how much are levelsets from www.artsoft.org and www.bd-fans.com downloaded. Thinking about it, www.bd-fans.com is AFAIK very popular site (when I googled for tomi belan it came first in the results), and it will surely spread the word about RnD (and its levelsets) further. So I'm coming to conclusion that I won't cease making levelsets.

More about tools:
What I'd like the best would be some ConfEdit+RNDDB(+RLM) mutant, maintained by multiple people (many projects died because the maintainer didn't have time to work on it anymore). Problems would arise, though, and I'm not sure if someone would use it anyway.

[Martijn]

Thinking about it, www.bd-fans.com is AFAIK very popular site (when I googled for tomi belan it came first in the results), and it will surely spread the word about RnD (and its levelsets) further. So I'm coming to conclusion that I won't cease making levelsets.

Well, not very popular yet, but it's becoming better and better known among Boulderdash fans. Yes, and I hope that it will 'spread the word about RnD', as that was my first objective: to attract more people to Boulderdash! And another important goal of my site is to save many clones and levels from being lost forever! Already many people have sent me missing files that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet... and that's what I wanted! My site already has many things that can't be downloaded anywhere else and I would like to expand this much more. I still have many surprising rare files on my PC to upload.

But first I will try to complete my classic Boulder Dash page, with all the original Boulderdash games (levelsets), tools, etc. And this list also contains games (levelsets) that are very hard to get! I want to have this list very complete and therefore it has already taken some months to create it! Now the list is so huge (and they are all downloadable of course...), it already contains at least thousand games, but maybe even more. And currently I also have 25 original tools to download, of which some I had never heard before!

When this page is ready, it will probably attract more visitors, as there are so many game titles (and notorious names like The Blockheads, Prof. Knibble, Marek Roth, No One and the legendarious Scserbin Zoltán...) that Google will bring more visitors to my site! And that will mean more RnD players as well!

After the classic Boulder Dash page I will create a similar page for Emerald Mine (and after that for Supaplex) with all the EMC levels to download. This will also help Holger, I think, because I will also mention all the missing ones. And I will make some advertisement on which the visitors of the Emerald Mine page can click. Once I've earned enough money with it, we can buy the missing sets! I'm looking forward to it!

Well, enough about my site. But now everyone whom I've told that I'm busy with my site, and therefore don't upload everything they send me at once, knows what I'm busy with!

Now I'm gonna sleep...

[Holger]

> My site already has many things that can't be downloaded anywhere else
> and I would like to expand this much more. I still have many surprising
> rare files on my PC to upload.

Great work! Congratulations! :-)

> And I will make some advertisement on which the visitors of the Emerald
> Mine page can click. Once I've earned enough money with it, we can buy
> the missing sets! I'm looking forward to it!

Maybe think about this again, for two reasons: I think we should not buy that incredibly expensive CD-ROM (and we have most of these EMC disks now anyway). Then, offering "historic" software combined with paid advertisements is sometimes misunderstood by the copyright owners as (indirectly) making money off of their intellectual property, maybe motivating them to act against your site (which they maybe not do without it). Maybe I'm wrong and paranoid here, just something to think about...

[Tomi]

There's a thing called SEO (Search Engine Optimalization). Search engines like sites with good SEO. An online SEO analyzer gave 65 out of 100 points to www.bd-fans.com , so it could be better, and making it better means putting www.bd-fans.com closer to top in Google results. I know how much work do you have with your site, so it can wait, but good SEO is a useful thing to have.

But maybe Google doesn't care about SEO anyway...

[Martijn]

Thanks, Tomi! That would indeed be a good idea.
Indeed, I still have a lot to do but some things can wait. I want to do the SEO work after I've done some basic work (such as the classic Boulder Dash page and some other things). Thanks!

[Martijn]

Huh? My Google PageRank has increased from 2/10 to 5/10? How is that possible? Look here, you can see it:
http://www.checkpagerank.com/

How do they check this? What could have increased this so much?

[Zomis]

Huh? My Google PageRank has increased from 2/10 to 5/10? How is that possible? Look here, you can see it:
http://www.checkpagerank.com/

How do they check this? What could have increased this so much?

I think it's related to the amount of visitors a page has... I think it's about how many hits it gets on google.

http://www.zomis.net has 4/10 while
http://www.zomis.net/rnd has got 5/10 (which makes sence since I think there's more people visiting the /rnd part than the / part)