Kyt's Other Things

[Kyttias]

I still frequently lurk here, but I've just recently made my cross-country road trip so I've been way too zonked to actually do much work. Even so, I did want to show off this (and its still a work in progress):



Mostly I'm just taking this side project of mine as good humored practice - the software its based on is nearly ten years old and 99% is built off a discontinued framework (PHPBB2, now surpassed by v3) and abandoned modifications (with no equivalent upgrades for v3, such as nulavatar and adr + many addons for adr).

So what exactly is this, then? Or maybe it's better asked - what were these things that I'm using on this project? Why were they abandoned?

Well - let's start at the simplest piece - PHPBB2 is forum software, a lot like vBulletin or MyBB, and PHPBB3 is still quite active. It was eventually discontinued, support cut off, and replaced with it's third version due to massive structure overhauls for security's sake that make porting even the smallest of modifications from older versions quite a nightmare. By itself, it sure ain't pretty - but with enough css and a kind touch, it can be made as visually appealing as any modern board, and that's my intention.

However - it's because of these security flaws that this project will never get off the ground past just fun roleplay time with friends or a small community of no more than a couple hundred, if that. I can patch up the holes as best I can, mask what exactly I'm working with and such, but the older version of PHP itself is inherently insecure.

As for the modifications that I'm attached to -

NulAvatar was a mod meant for dressable avatars. If you're thinking Gaia Online, you're 100% on track - this script can be considered the earliest beta version, as it was distributed freely to them, and then heavily modified. Several other sites, such as Menewsha, Zantarni, just about any similar site - started with this same script and made their own custom adjustments to it - all circa 2004 to 2007. Even by 2007, this script was getting hard to find - the original creator seemingly vanished off the face of the internet and is presumably working on much greater things somewhere.

ADR is another mod - short for Advanced Dungeons and Rabbits. As you can imagine, this is D&D in a nice forum-ized nutshell. It's glued to PHPBB2 at the hip to keep track of user data, but it's actually a fully fledged system - shops, equippable items, foraging for items, forging new items, quests, zones, weather, factions and, yes, even a battle system that is completely customizeable - enemy stats, what they drop, how often they appear, etc. Like NulAvatar, the original creator, and the successor, and the guy who wanted to port it to PHPBB3 - all seemingly disappeared off the face of the internet. Their last excuses always seemed to be 'back to college, see you next break' and then never, ever returning. Here's hoping the many people who worked on this one did something successful with their lives.

Before or since, I've yet to see anything quite like these scripts. It's sad to see them collecting dust. It's even sadder to know they're glued to an outdated system. To even find tech support for this stuff, I've had to use the Wayback Machine more than just a handful of times. But let it be known that ten years is a long time in terms of the internet: these scripts are dinosaurs written in older versions of PHP. It's not that they're not salvageable, it's just that their concepts are best re-written from scratch entirely!

Perhaps I showed up here today to tell you guy all this just to be nostalgic, or, perhaps to be inspirational:

I'd love to Mysidia grow, rather than slowly trickle down to nothing. I've seen it happen, and it's sad. There's so much potential here!

But really I just wanted to show off 'that thing I do in my spare time sometimes'. I'd actually really love to integrate the dinosaur above with Mysidia.

On the other hand, it's also an excuse to practice my spriting, which I'm still not the best at. -o-

[Abronsyth]

Very cool project! And it would be especially interesting to combine it with Mysidia, in fact you could probably get to the point where it could be considered a true virtual pet site!

I miss a lot of the older scripts that have disappeared, some of them were just fantastic, but so many simply faded away.

I'd love to see more of your project, though :)

[MikiHeart]

UGH! I FEEL YOUR PAIN! I still have all my old phpbb2 mods saved on my external hard drive. I have Eric's shop mod which is my most favourite one ever!!!!

I don't want to let them go, but I know that I can never use them and it makes me very sad.

The avatar mod you're talking about for phpbb3 is CrtAvatar. I use to have a copy but I lost and I haven't found one ever since (I've looked high and low..)

There is a new one, but the progress is so slow it's as if it isn't happening. It's also not visually attractive.

I would love to build a human avatar system for mysidia. But my brain just goes dead when I've tried in the past. Hopefully, when the next version is released, we can pull together as a community and make some really good mods.

I'm also afraid of Mysidia dying out.. I panicked when I couldn't connect to the website last week..

[Kesstryl]

Is there not a way to fix the old php code to make it more secure? I recently did this with an old php 4 script, and updated everything to php 5.6 with a lot of security modifications. It's not impossible, just takes a lot of research and knowing the code really well, and knowing the best security practices. Code doesn't have to be OOP or MVC to be rock solid secure.

[Kyttias]

Aha, this old thing?

While that's definitely true, it was using a framework as big as Mysidia that I didn't know the ins and outs of. Scouting down security holes would take forever.

Conceptually, I still know what I want, and it's just faster to code it from scratch than fix up someone else's old code! ...I just really hope Mysidia doesn't suffer the same fate. I let my stuff here stagnate too long waiting for Mysidia to update, so, I might have to go it alone now.