Steampunk Road Dispatch

Unfortunately, I was the only one stressed during our live stress test of the Theatre Chat system in Steampunk Road. Perhaps we picked a bad time? We will give it another go sometime in the future. In the meantime, feel free to try out the chat stress-free.

You may have noticed the foreign languages at the bottom of the home screen of Steampunk Road: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese. If you select one of these languages, you will see most of the menus in that language.

We write “most” because far from all of Steampunk Road has been translated. Our translation method consists of putting words and phrases into Google Translate and then working back and forth between English and the other language until we appear to have a stable translation. We are still not certain about “Russian”, a surprisingly difficult word to translate into Russian. And ask us sometime about the joys of trying to write Cyrillic in PHP.

We would like to add Chinese to the list, but we decided to stick to languages that 1) we could actually see their words’ connection to their English counterparts, and that 2) read from left to right. We don’t want to end up like all of those people with tattoos on the Internet who have no idea what they really say.

In short, translation is a very time-consuming task. We can not afford to purchase help from a translation service. So our choices are: English-only, the time-consuming Google Translate and a limited number of languages, or volunteers. If you have a passion for translation and want to help out in the language of your choice, drop us a line at translate@steampunkroad.com. Thanks!

I have added the ability for you to view avatar images and guild crests in more detail whenever you list them (“List Traders” and “List Guilds”). To do so, simply click on the image of interest. The image will then appear in front of the list, on a black background, scaled up as large as possible to still fit in the window and preserve its aspect ratio (but not exceeding 100% of its native size). Click on the “X (Close)” button to return to the list. Check out some of the amazing avatars (and hopefully soon, guild crests) with this feature that enables you to appreciate them in all of their glory.

When you register (or as of now, if you have previously registered), you automatically become a CoG – “Chief of Guild” – of your very own guild with a membership of one: you. You can then name your guild, craft a motto, develop a description, and design your very own guild crest. (Or at any time really. Just click on “Guilds” over in the menu.)  In the future you will be able to recruit others to your guild and challenge other CoGs for members.

Steampunk Road is, by design, a non-competitive game. There is a mystery to be solved, but the rewards for being first are minimal and do not preclude others from successfully completing the game. We understand however that some people thrive on competition, and we wanted to offer something for them without taking away from the experience for the non-competitive. Enter the Guild Wars.

The Guild Wars is a game within the game, pitting CoG against CoG in a struggle to gain the most members and control the largest guild. Those who do not wish to compete do not need to do so. They can join with another guild or simply acquiesce to a takeover, thereby renouncing their CoGness and becoming just a regular guild member.

CoGs gain members for their guild through either recruiting (by perhaps offering something in trade, for example) or by challenging other CoGs for members through dueling. (We will cover dueling in a future missive.) Lose all of your members and you lose your guild.

Take some time this weekend to build your guild’s identity through the “Guilds” menu. We hope to start the Guild Wars early next week, but don’t worry. Although you may lose your guild in the Guild Wars, your original guild’s identity will be preserved and restored to you whenever the game resets.

We are working on a subsystem that includes a graphic element that you, the good people of Steampunk Road, create. It is always difficult to figure out how to handle user-generated graphics because of the difficulties of size and proportion. While researching the issue, we came across the fact that avatar images on Steampunk Road were being displayed with an odd ratio of width to height. Portraits are usually 2:3 for 35 mm film, 3:4 for older point-and-shoot digital cameras, 4:5 for some portraits (“8 x 10 glossy”), and 9:16 for widescreen digital cameras. After much debate, it has been decided to display avatar images at the 3:4 ratio. We recommend using an image that is at least 120 pixels by 160 pixels. We have also increased the limit on file size by a factor of ten: from 1 MB before to 10 MB now. In the near future, you will be able to click on an image to see it at a higher resolution, so that extra storage will come in handy. If you have not created an avatar image yet, or if you just want to touch it up, consider this your invitation to do so.

You may wonder about the speed at which we travel the Steampunk Road. North, South, East, or West, over land or sea, the speed is 120 kilometers per hour. This is both an easy number to work with (two kilometers per minute, ten every five minutes) and also the top speed of a Zeppelin (our favorite mode of travel). How a llama can travel that speed over water or a steamship over land, we do not know, but they do.

Vessels follow a great circle from port to port, so they may not look like they are headed straight there, but they are making the trip in a minimal amount of time. Positions are not updated continuously on the map, but rather every five minutes. You can see the difference if you set the map to maximum zoom over a vessel.

We originally toyed with the idea that all travel would be restricted to established trade routes on approved vessels at realistic speeds. Weigh in here on whether this change in transportation is an essential feature, something nice to have after everything else is done, inconsequential, or if you prefer the way travel works now.

<Click Here For Survey>

These surveys will be a regular weekly feature of the blog. If you are curious about last week’s survey on mobile, the consensus is that mobile would be a nice feature to have after everything else is finished.

Thanks to Google for pointing out that today is Erwin Schrödinger’s birthday. Schrödinger is the physicist who originated the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat, which featured prominently in Steampunk Road’s first puzzle. (We will be moving that particular puzzle to later in the game, due to its difficulty.)

If you have sailed anywhere, you may have wondered about some of the place names in Steampunk Road: Han’guk, Misr, Sverige, and Zhongguo for example. You might know them better as South Korea, Egypt, Sweden, and China. Like these nation states, you will find all destinations on the Steampunk Road listed in their local short form, as found in The World Factbook. This has been done to imbue your travels with an exotic air of adventure, despite the fact that one of the temporal curiosities of Steampunk Road is that these are all neoteric names.

It is our hope that the forums of Steampunk Road become a vital and thriving part of the game; a place where your persona and creativity can really come to the fore and shape this world. Here are some guidelines to help make it so.

The forums are divided into three categories. There is one category reserved for official communications and help for the game. The other two categories are for in-character interaction and real-world interaction.

It is natural to wonder what your fellow captains plying the road have to say about the latest events in the real world, but only posts firmly rooted in the game world and delivered in your avatar’s persona should be placed in the in-character interaction category. All other posts should go into the real-world category.

Also, please consider Steampunk Road to be the equivalent of a PG-13 rated environment. (Note: Steampunk Road has not been rated by any outside agency or ratings service.) There are filters in place to discourage the use of potentially offensive words. Please do not try to circumvent the filters with creative spelling, spacing, hyphenation, etc. Posts using such devices should be reported and will be deleted. Please respect the intent of the filters.

Although crude language is discouraged, we are big fans of creative cursing and innuendo. Make it inventive and humorous. As a good general rule of the Steampunk Road: Be Creative!

We are using the royal “we” here, because Steampunk Road is a project of Mark A. Durham (aka “Red Quark” in-game). I have had lots of inspiration, encouragement, support, and even assistance from others (see the About page), but ultimately everything about Steampunk Road is my responsibility. I should note though that all of the graphical assets (other than avatars, which are uploaded by the people playing the game) are derived from public domain and share-with-attribution images (see Assets), due to my limited funds, time, and graphical abilities.

A little bit more about me: I have been programming computers since the original Apple ][, have programmed all types of devices from the TI-55 to mainframes to robots to iPads and everything in between. I have also programmed in more computer languages than I care to count.

When I am not programming, I teach math and physics. I also write music, ranging from symphonic orchestral pieces to pop music songs. I have also written quite a bit over the years for newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and web sites. In many ways, I am a “Renaissance man” (or perhaps just a Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of Science).

As exciting as all of that is, I am not truly happy unless I am creating something, or learning something, or preferably doing both. That is why I set out to make Steampunk Road. I hope ultimately that you will enjoy playing in it as much as I have creating it.