You might have noticed that I haven't posted for almost half a year already on this blog, or rather the old blog. Yes, I have moved the original Pages from Sages blog to a subdomain and started completely anew. What changed and why this (not so?) sudden change..?

For starters, the reason I started blogging was in my Lineage II playing time and later on other MMOs I played. But after a couple of years of playing online games, I kinda got burned out by a lot! I switched to PlayStation 4 playing (which I'm still doing on a daily basis), and bought Elite Dangrous for the P4 when it became available. Elite Dangerous went for me the way of playing MMOs, which for short, I kinda got burned out and lost interest. Though I gotta say that I did play it quite a lot it's first half year (about 1 month of total playtime).

Secondly, and I think I've mentioned that a couple of times on my old blog, Pages from Sages was not intended as a blogging site, but as a d100 based RPG system I wanted to develop. I started that development quite a while ago (around the turn of the millennium) with great things in mind, but at the time (long before ebooks and how we know the web as distribution and marketing system now). Needless to say, this idea kinda died as well and I had the domain already registered.

And now to the MMORPG announcement....
The title of the blog currently tells d20 project. While d20 is a 'registered' trademark of Wizards of the Coast, they can not legally trademark it because the term has been used for decades to refer to the 20-sided dice. And this is where the MMORPG announcement comes into place...

Half 2015 I wanted to code the d20 RPG system (which is basically Dungeons & Dragons 3.x). Sadly, when reading through the whole legal thing, it appeared that using the d20 RPG system I cannot create a character and (more importantly) I can not make a computer game from it. That was quite a bummer but I kept searching and found the System Reference Document 3.5. This SRD3.5 is published under the Open Gaming License (much like the GNU license) and I can do whatever I want with the SRD3.5, as long as I include the OGL document with it - NOW WE'RE TALKING!

Sadly though, bad stuff happened and the d20 project changed from Fantasy to Modern (a lot less work) and early this year back to Fantasy again.
Around that time I also started (again) on experimenting with server and client connections in Unity3D again (I know, I have not really posted anything about that, only a very few twitter mentions). By now that server-client project is fully functional allowing to logon multiple users (max test was 16 on my PC) all pickinga name and a working in-game chat-server.
Another thing important for a MMORPG is a database connection. This I have also figured out under Unity3D and I am able to use a MySQL database directly from my code without a HTML call. Why mention the HTML call? Well, most people coding with Unity3D will tell you NEVER to use MySQL (or any other database) directly for security reasons. Not sure what they were smoking, but when I code the MySQL calls in the server only I don't see a security issue at all...

There you have it, all ingredients to make a MMORPG. Now all we need is the time to work on the code, build the world and get 'adventures' going. Not to mention, a general idea on how and what with the MMORPG in general.
Oh yes, I mentioned WE. I won't be working this beast alone. I will do most of the coding. My brother will be working on the world using GeoVOX (some discontinued terrain editor/world builder using Unity3D files) as well as work out most of the story (he always was a hell of a GM back in the days). Music will be written by my son, who has already composed several pieces of music.
Aside of that, all 3 of us also have to learn some other skills, like 3D modelling (blender) for buildings and creating characters (makehuman), as well as animation of these characters in Unity3D.

Last but not least, I'm aiming to have a prototype available by the end of the year. With the knowledge/skills I have now I can have the server and client completely running, but environment (buildings etc) and characters might lack a bit. Also worth to note that our MMORPG will be totally Free2Play without any Pay2Win elements (there will be a cash shop though for cosmetics and XP-boost potions).
Last but not leat (again), the MMORPG will most likely NOT get the name Pages from Sages. IF/when we change the name (and with that domain), I will forward from here to the new domain