The Community

At the beginning George and I said that we would focus on our different parts, one being the community(nick) and the other being the ai(George). For the community we have decide on changing out layout of our website. Instead of going the scifi way:

we decide to do more of a nature route:

The reason behind this is, with the topic of ai, the ai always betrays it "master" or humanity. We dont want people coming into this community/ colony thinking these thought. With nature such as crops, you need to take care of it inorder to expect anything in return, just like our colony, you need to take care of it inorder to insure it safety to itself and all its people. As an added bonus we decided, depending on the mood of Gaia the background image of the website will become more cloudy and dead if Gaia is not being taken care of, and more life like if Gaia is being taken care of.

A new feature we have added is the "steal" function. In which the user and event ai can steal from the main pot of the community. You can upgrade ur thief skill but it will not go more then 50%. Every time you try and steal from the pot, your krama will go down and there is no granteet that you will get the money. With this element the users are more exposed to go against the colony, which is what we want, we want to give the users all these options and see what they will do within the community.

You are able to message any user you want in the colony, but the amount of user you can message a day depends on your broadcast level (which can be upgraded). The users have to pick certain words from drop down boxes as there message (we are not allowing them to say what ever they want). some items will be "try and steal", "help me out", "please donate", and so on.

A colony upgrade page has now been added as well, that way the users can upgrade the colony health / health regn, donate to the colony and so on.
cron jobs are working, now your health and credits will update everyday and events will be created every day as well.

A lot has been added to the community side of the project, and many things has changed since the presentation date. Events now have meaning to them that deal with the users. such as, your crop are in trouble, please donate a certain amount of money to fix the damage. Or weather forecast has stated that there is a level 5 lightning storm heading to the colony,  we (as the community) should prepare for this, please donate to the colony pot. A total of 1000 credits is need to prepare. With a little more meaning in the events the users will give more freed back and stay with the community.
Instead of adding a donate button, we allow the user to either donate all the money need for the cause (say the colony needs 1000 credits, the user can donate 1000 credits) or they can donate a certain amount of credits towards the cause. This is helpful because now the user can donate as many times as they want.
It also was brought to our attention that we should have at the starting page, what our project is about. This will be done.
We bought a domain name and we are located at "http://theconolyproject.com/" but it is not up and running yet, i will post when it is up.

I will keep post our progress on when our objectives are done.

The Setup

For the first progress assignment, we showed our website to the class.

http://thecolonyproject.com.previewdns.com/index.php

This progress assignment was more focused on the front end of our website. We created the login page (and if you didn't have a login you can make your own account in which it will register you in the database with the starting status),  User Bio page , Users page, User Upgrade page and the logout page.

Bio Page- The Bio page shows all the information about the user. (sex, bio, credits, allowance, total health, health level, health regeneration,  Social Title, Social Ranking, Social Status, Social Broadcasting). You can personalize this page with a hit of the edit button, and change your sex or you bio.

Users Page- Displays all the other users in the community. This page was created to get the members of this community more closer together. To get them to understand one another through there bio. Also you can see how high each person is on the social ranking and check out who has upgraded what status, which can be used towards strategy purposes. Most importantly you can see which users are helping the community more, rather then themselves.

User Upgrade - The users can upgrade there status at this page. Each upgrade( such as total health, health regeneration, social broadcasting etc) has its own worth. and when you upgrade it, the price of the next upgrade will cost even more. If you dont have enough credits to upgrade the page will not allow you to click on the link.(also known as the images that are pictures of the upgrades)

In order to keep track of all these values (such as user passwords, health, credits, etc) we used mySQL, which is an online database. In this database we have tables that store each user information. When ever we want to update a certain value we use a mySQL command in php ( such as "UPDATE users SET credits = '{$total_credits}' WHERE username='{$username}' ") This updates the credits in the user, where the  $total_credits (in code not mentioned here) equals to the credits plus the allowance.

I will now explain a little bit of the different values that I have talked about in this blog. The health is the amount of health that the user has at the moment in time. Every so offend the user health will regenerate, this is known as the user regeneration level. The user social broadcasting level is the amount of people you can talk to in the community. If the user has to low of a level then they only can talk to 5 people in the community. Which this comes into play when they need help from another person in the community. The user credits are the user money in this community, they get a certain amount of credits every so offend which is known as allowance.
I am not going to go a lot into detail about all the different types of values and methods that were used during the making of the front/ back end of the web page. This is because there was a lot that was used, but I hope I have given a little bit of an understanding of what George and I did in order to create this online community.

We have learned alot from this first progress assignment, the first of many is the fact that we didnt know anything about mySQL and php going into this project. But now I can safety say that we know the language  at an intermediate level. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done with the front end (such as css, colony page, colony upgrade page for donations etc) The back end (mySQL) is done for the users part, but we need to expand on the A.I part of this project, which will be worked on for the next progress assignment.
The only thing that I would alter about the front end of the project, is trying to stay away from a sci fi theme. Also the fact that we cant use mySQL to update the database, we need to use cron jobs.
This is all for now, next progress assignment we will work on the A.I and add a little more detail to the front end of the page.