Introduction

Love is a persistent-world, not-really-massive online FPS with a focus on base-building and exploration. It currently features highly unusual graphics, spherical maps the size of a small planet, terraforming, AI opponents and a decent selection of buildings and devices to decorate your base with. The game is in the Alpha stage of development, so there are still lots of bugs, balance issues and unimplemented features. I’ll touch on some of those later.

Love is pay-to-play – a 30 day voucher costs approximately 3 euros.

Gameplay Overview

Overall, Love has no explicit goals, no story and no win/loss conditions. You simply pick something you want to do and do it. The flip side of this is that there is no tutorial either, so new players will often be at loss about what to do.

The Settlement

The center of the game is the settlement. The first task of a new player is usually to find an existing player settlement by following an in-game compass, or start your own by finding a Monolith token and placing it in a suitable spot on the map.

Getting to an existing settlement can be an adventure of its own, as people tend to build settlements in extremely out-of-the-way places to protect them from AI attacks. The fact that the game world is rich in steep cliffs, deep unescapable pits and seas filled with highly corrosive acid makes this adventure of rather dubious quality. Luckily, once you’ve actually joined the settlement, you can always instantly teleport back to its monolith just by clicking an icon on the toolbar.

Terraforming

The settlement monolith creates an “area of influence” that lets you modify the terrain and deploy tokens. The terraforming is pretty basic – you can raise or lower the ground, change the surface material (grass, pavement, roof, etc) and cut horizontal holes in the terrain to create caves. However, if you’re hoping to build an elaborate underground base a-la Dr. Evil, prepare to be disappointed – the “one cave per terrain tile” constraint makes it pretty much impossible.

Tokens & Buildings

Another way to expand and improve the settlement is by placing various building, either decorative of functional. To do this you need to find tokens – small, wedge-shaped widgets that can be seen floating over altars in the wilderness and AI bases. Naturally, all the best tokens are located in the AI settlements, so getting them can be tricky (or exciting, if you enjoy hit-and-run tactics).

Once you bring a token to the base and deploy it, it will turn into a structure of the appropriate type. The majority of deployed tokens serve as tool dispensers/equipment racks – for example, if you point at a deployed “Hyperblaster token” and press one of the inventory keys, you will get the Hyperblaster weapon in one of your tool slots. Other tokens turn into functional buildings like a power reactor, a force field or health pod manufacturer. Overall, there are currently about two or three dozen available building types, and presumably more to come.

Several placed tokens

More Power!

Love has only one “resource” – power. All terraforming tools and weapons consume power, manufacturing facilities need power to run, and you can heal damage by picking up power pods.

Power deposit

Power comes in two forms – “power beams” emitted by certain structures that can be routed around the map with power reflectors and used to power various buildings, and the player’s personal power reserve that is used for terraforming and firing weapons. The power reserve automatically regenerates when it’s very low. You can also quickly replenish it by picking up power pods dropped by dead enemies or manufactured by the “Manufacture Power” building.

Alternative energy in Love

It may take a while to learn how to use map coordinates and the configuration tool to route the power beams, but overall he resource system is pretty easy to understand.

Artificial Intelligence

This jumble of polygons is an AI character

The horribly unbalanced AI is one of the major gripes I have with Love. It’s not that the AI opponents are overpowered – if you’ve ever played a FPS you will be able to easily deal with a group of two or three AIs all by yourself. The problem is that players and their settlements are defenceless against AI settlements.

When it comes to base defences, a fully developed player settlement will usually have a force field that can stop normal projectiles, a bunch of explosives linked to proximity sensors, and a couple of relatively weak blaster turrets. A big AI settlement will have most of that and one or more rocket turrets that can rain spammy death on your head faster than Grad.

BM-21, AKA Grad

One AI weapon in particular deserves a special mention. Any self-respecting AI base will also include artillery – a veritable superweapon that can hit your settlement from halfway across the planet and pound your entire base into dust in a matter of minutes. The best part is that there’s simply no way to prevent it – even the force field doesn’t stop artillery shells. The only thing you can do when your settlement comes under bombardment (and, invariably, it will) is rush madly to the AI base and hope to destroy or cripple it before their artillery battery finishes off your settlement. And if you do manage to destroy the AI settlement a new one will spawn shortly in a different location.

Other minor crimes by the AI include re-routing power sources without ever touching them, noclipping through terrain, flying, terraforming stuff outside their settlement limits and placing buildings underwater (the corrosive acid kind of water, yes).

Despite all that, I wouldn’t say the Love AI is overpowered. In most games computer opponents need an unfair advantage to pose any challenge at all and be fun to play against. The problem with Love is that the players themselves are underpowered. Give me a force field that can stop artillery bombardment. Give me buildings that don’t die after a single hit. Oh, and some of new shiny guns would be nice, too.

Interface & Inventory

Love’s interface is very straightforward, even minimalistic. All you have you have is a row of tiny icons at the bottom of the screen. Everything from weapons to map coordinates to graphics settings goes onto this toolbar and can be activated either by clicking the icon or pressing the associated hotkey.  The inventory system is also rather simple – you get four tool slots that can contain either weapons or terraforming tools, and four token slots that you can use to carry tokens you’ve found.

Controls

To pick up a tool/weapon, point at a deployed token and press a number key between 1 and 4. Use the same keys to select a slot, then left-click to use the tool or to fire the weapon. Terraforming is performed by clicking and dragging terrain tiles. Tokens are even simpler – walk over one to pick it up, then press F1-F4 to select it in the inventory and left-click a spot on the ground to deploy it.

As for movement controls, Love follows the standard WASD convention, with spacebar for jumps. However, the controls can still take some getting-used-to due to how sharp turns and jumps work in the game. In most other first-person-perspective games your view stays level no matter what crazy acrobatics you engage in, but in Love it will pitch and bank disorientingly whenever you move the mouse sharply during a jump. On the plus side, with some practice you can even perform a backwards somersault.

What pleasantly surprised about Love is that it’s completely free of the ubiquitous Insurmountable Waist High Fence syndrome that afflicts so many other games. In Love, you can easily jump on top of boulders and buildings as tall as you are.

Graphics

After I started Love for the first time, I spent the several minutes expecting my computer to crash. You see, my video card has a faulty fan controller, and what I saw on the screen after starting the game and connecting to the server made me think of the visual glitches you sometimes see before the video card overheats and shuts down.

Love’s graphics are, for lack of a better word, fuzzy. Imagine an old video recording of a dry landscape of some kind, strewn with weathered rock formations. Maybe something from National Geographic. Apply the blur filter 30 times. Then put in some lens flares and blooms, and you’ve got something that’s clear as mud, which is how Love looks.

Some trees, and ... a piece of a bridge?

As you might have guessed, graphics are my second major gripe with this game. They’re so blurry and over-processed that for the first few hours you can barely tell what you’re looking at. The “blurry brushstrokes” shader is known to make some people’s eyes hurt. And no, you can’t turn off the shaders. It’s supposed to be “artistic”, remember?

To be fair, the graphics have gotten a bit more palatable in the latest releases, but  you can still only see clearly for some 30 meters in front of yourself during daytime.

One of the cleaner daytime shots

Sound

There is none. At this stage, Love has no sound effects and no music.

So, Is It Fun?

Kind-of. The core idea is certainly promising, but the current implementation suffers from multiple balance issues and a lack of clear goals. The graphics also seem to betray that sour “eye-candy > playability” feel that indy games sometimes have. Still, building/terraforming settlements on an alien planet and waging wars with the hostile high-tech natives sounds like it could be a fun pastime, if done right.

I recommend waiting until the final version is out.

• Italian (complete; even got two – by Gianni Diurno and by Giacomo Ross. Whoops, my fault.)
• Danish (complete; by Georg S. Adamsen)
• Chinese, Simplified (complete; by HankYang)
• Dutch (complete; by Gideon van Melle)
• German (complete; by Alex Frison)
• French (complete; by Whiler)

If you’d like to create your own localization, please notify me via a comment or an email first so that I can add you to the list above. Otherwise we might get (another) tricky situation with two users sending in two independent translations for the same language.

Here are some useful resources related to plugin translation :

• List of translation tools at WordPress Codex
• Translating WordPress Plugins & Themes
• PO file format
• PO file header format

Feature Highlights

• Automatically cloak links in any part of your site. This means you can also cloak links in the sidebar, footer, etc.
• Comes with multiple cloaking techniques, like the ability to display the cloaked link in a frame or hide the HTTP referer info.
• Improved click statistics + optional Google Analytics integration.
• Gives you more control over which links get cloaked – e.g. you can cloak a bunch of links based on their domain name.
• Backwards compatible with the free version – the settings will be imported automatically and any links you’ve cloaked using the <!–cloak–> tag or the “Cloak All” mode will continue to be cloaked with no additional effort on your part. The old “static” cloaked links can be imported with a few clicks.
• A new cool name – Eclipse Link Cloaker

You can find a more complete list of features (along with screenshots and tutorials) on the plugins website.

Wait, “Premium”?

Yes, that curious adjective means the plugin also comes with a price-tag. Not to worry though – during the initial release period you can grab the new plugin for a meagre sum of $25 and apply it’s awesome cloaking power to any number of sites. There’s even a 100% money-back guarantee, so you wouldn’t really be risking anything.

Miscellaneous Notes

Phew. I hope that didn’t sound too much like sales talk. Anyway, there are a few more minor points I’d like to mention :

• There will be an affiliate program with 50%-70% commissions. It’s already functional now (so if you have any special ideas, let me know), I just haven’t set up the public-facing affiliate how-to and such.
• The plugin will have free, automatic updates and can be updated using the same interface that is used to update plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
• Obviously, there’s a little bit of DRM involved.
• mod_rewrite/pretty permalinks are no longer required. The plugin automatically detects what kind permalink structure the user has and alters it’s cloaked URLs appropriately.

If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to leave a comment.

Clik the image to go to the nomination screen with WordPress pre-selected

Hat tip to Ozh for the info.

Commercial plugins are a rare sight in the WordPress community, so I want to discuss the general idea of for-pay WP plugins in more detail and provide my take on the relevant issues that are often raised in this regard.

Licensing Woes

The first point of contention seems to be whether plugins have to be GPL-compatible. Since WordPress is GPL all “derivative work” must also use a compatible license, which would allow the user to freely modify and redistribute (or even resell) the source code – something that is certainly not conducive to plugin authors making a profit. This question basically boils down to deciding whether plugins qualify as “derivative work”. The short answer to that is “Yes, except for very complex plugins”. Otto explains it well in this comment (excerpt) :

Your simpler plugins are generally heavily derivative. They tend to be just a few functions, hooked directly into WordPress in specific places. The functions themselves derive their calling methods from the necessity of how WordPress expects them to hook in, and so they are derivatives of it.

Complex plugins, on the other hand, tend to be more independent. They have several files, their own mechanisms for operation, and sometimes there’s just one “plugin” file that hooks the WordPress bits up with the plugin’s bits. These have a better case for being separate works.

Otto also mentions Bad Behaviour as an example of a complex plugin that is largely independent of the WordPress core and even has versions for other blogging systems. The caching plugin PHP Speedy WP might qualify as another mostly independent plugin.

Still, the majority of plugins are deeply integrated with WP and thus need to be GPL-licensed. So I’m also going to release my commercial plugin with a GPL-compatible license.

The next question is whether you can legally sell GPL software. This is an easy one to answer. Here’s what the official GPL FAQ says about it :

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

The Very Model of a Businessman

Of course, just slapping a “GPL” label on a for-pay plugin is hardly the solution – as I mentioned before, the first person who buys it could just turn around and start giving it away for free! So if you want to make money by creating GPL software you need concoct a business model that takes the peculiarities of this licensing scheme into account.

There are two possible business models that I can think of :

• Paid support. Make the plugin itself free, but only charge for answering users’ questions. Alternatively, sell the plugin and include “unlimited” support in the price.
• Service-based. This mostly applies only to plugins that act as wrappers for an online service/API. The plugin can be fully GPL-compliant and but access to the remote service needn’t be. For example, you can limit the number of API requests non-paying users can make, or offer access to additional API features for a modest subscription fee. This is the business model of plugins like Akismet and After The Deadline.

I intend to use a combination of the two for my plugin.

But Wait, Is There a Market?

Finally, a perfectly legal business plan will be of no use if no-one wants to buy your software. I’ll readily admit that this problem isn’t limited to WP plugins, but it I must say it’s still especially pronounced in the WordPress community – people have grown used to getting free stuff. Premium themes are still a source of much contention and commercial plugins are extremely rare and, at least for the time being, confined to a few small niches.

The best solution I’ve seen suggested so far is creating an online store similar to the iPhone App Store. The main objection to this idea is that often users install a plugin just to see if it does what they want, and it would be wrong to force them to pay in advance for a product of unknown quality. However, this is a solvable problem. For example, you could just give the user a free 10-day trial and ask them to buy the plugin if they still want to use it afterwards. Make it so that unregistered users don’t get automatic updates, etc. This wouldn’t even be that hard to implement and enforce if done at the core level – the WordPress.org plugin repository already tracks what plugins you use.

Either way, it will probably be a while before we see anything like that implemented. Luckily my own commercial plugin falls under one of the few niches where paid plugins are relatively common and expected – Internet marketing. So I think I have a sufficiently good shot at selling a few copies and making an obscenely large sum of money

Comments and opinions are welcome.

Props to anyone who gets all the references.

To illustrate, here’s a time-lapse video of a castle I built today :

As you can see in the video, the graphics are rather basic. However, if you’re into this kind of games you will probably find that the blocky environment doesn’t really detract from the the gameplay experience. After all, a distant cousin of Minecraft – the relatively popular Dwarf Fortress – gets away with using ASCII-based graphics that look like they came from the 80s.

The current release is pretty low on features (there are only 9 building materials and one gametype), but that’s forgivable for an alpha release. It is still under active development and the author has stated the full version will include more variety and several different gamemodes, like “Survival” where you face hostile creatures, building takes time and resources, and you must grow/gather food to replenish your health.

The downside is that the full version will cost money. Personally, I’m still on the fence as to whether Minecraft is worth my hard-earned eurobucks – building giant towers and secret underground bunkers can be fun and even addictive, but that doesn’t quite qualify as a complete game. However, if the upcoming gametypes are at least 1/5th as flexible and deep as, say, the aforementioned Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft could certainly make me part with my €20.

And now for some useless stats.

I know, I know – it’s a stupid question. You can’t really download the Internet. It’s so ridiculously huge and messy that even Google hasn’t indexed all of it. But what if a clueless fool eccentric multibillionaire came by and asked you to do it, stating that “money is no object”? Could we do it, and how long would it take?

How big is the Internet?

The first thing we need to determine is how much data we’d need to download. We can calculate this by examining some historical data points and estimating liberally :

• In 2005 Google estimated that the Internet contains about 5 million TB of data.
• Also in 2005, VeriSign released a news report saying that there are about 77 million unique domains registered.
• Currently there are about 110 million active domains.

Assuming the amount of data on the Web grows in linear proportion to the number of domains, the Internet now holds about 7 million terabytes of data. Divide the difference between now and then by the number of years that have passed and we get the rate of increase – 500 000 TB per year.

How fast can we download it?

Depending on which source you trust, the fastest Internet connection that is available commercially is either 160 Mbps or 1 Gbps. Lets be generous and use the latter number. Given that and the above assumptions, it would take approximately 1817 years to download the entire Internet (as it is now) using currently available technology. Of course, your personal copy of “The Complete Internet Of 2009″ will probably feel slightly dated in the year 3826.

Addendum

Connection speeds of 1 Tbps and more will probably be available in the next decade. Throw in femtosecond lasers for incredibly fast data storage, and downloading a significant portion of the Internet (in a reasonable timeframe) may actually be a plausible idea one day.

What I found especially interesting is how AtD can detect misused words. For example, most spell checkers would blindly assume that the sentence “I don’t know if it’s wrong or rite” is correct because the word “rite” is in their dictionary. “After the Deadline” on the other hand uses contextual spell check and will flag “rite” as a mistake, suggesting you use “right” instead. Well, at least that’s the theory. I managed to get that particular example to work after a few tries, but apparently this feature still needs some work.

The plugin itself is actually a wrapper for the AfterTheDeadline.com API service. This means that like with Akismet, you will need to sign up for an account and get an API key before you can use the WP plugin. The service is free for casual users but large sites and prolific writers are encouraged to upgrade to a subscription-based service plan.

The only drawback is that AtD only supports English and the author isn’t planning to add other languages anytime soon. Nevertheless, the plugin will certainly be useful to the myriad English bloggers, and also to people who aren’t native English speakers yet still choose to write in the de-facto lingua franca.

Around 20 people downloaded the beta version. I haven’t received any death threats related to that release, so I’m just going to go ahead and presume there are no critical bugs in the new code. But if you do find anything that looks like a glitch feel free to report it in the comment section or via my contact page.

What’s New

• Check links in bookmarks (AKA the blogroll).
• Check links in custom fields (optional). You need to list the custom fields you want to be checked in Settings -> Link Checker. At the moment the plugin is only able to parse fields that contain a complete URL and nothing more. Note that when you add a new field to the configuration, it will take a while before the plugin re-parses your posts and detects the field values.
• Manage all links from one page. You can view, edit or remove broken links, redirects and any other link in any post, custom field or the blogroll, from one page.
• An all-new dashboard widget that displays status info about broken links. To save dashboard space you can close the widget and configure it to automatically pop open if problematic links are detected (this is actually on by default).
• Improved database efficiency. For example, information about URLs and places where they are used is now stored separately. This is more elegant and enables some neat features.
• Check each URL only once per the user-configured period (except broken links that are still double-checked). Previously, the plugin would check links that are used in X different posts X times in a row.
• Link modifications are applied to all posts automatically. You can edit or delete a link via the plugin’s tab and all the posts, custom fields and bookmarks will be automatically updated to reflect the change.
• Posts are only re-parsed when they change. Previously the plugin would periodically re-check each post for new links which was wasteful and hurt performance.
• All received HTTP headers are now included in the detailed log (previously only the last one was shown).
• Generally more informative logs.
• You can quickly add URLs to the exclusion list by clicking the “Exclude” button.
• Added paging support to the link list.
• Everything runs on jQuery instead of Prototype now.
• Everything is way more object-oriented now.
• Everything uses AJAX the “proper” way now by calling admin-ajax.php instead of a separate plugin file.
• Significantly improved database performance. Some queries are still slow since it’s not practical to put an index on a DATETIME column, but overall the plugin uses the WordPress DB much more efficiently.
• Sorting features are gone, for now. I’ll probably add a number of sorting options in a later version.
• Improved UI that’s more in line with WP 2.7 style. For example, most action links in the “Broken Links” tab only show up when you hover over the corresponding row.
• Links in custom fields or the blogroll get an appropriate icon in the broken link list.
• The URL editing feature is more elegant and there’s finally a “Cancel” button.
• More intuitive AJAX behaviour. For example, when an AJAX call completes it will flash the appropriate row green or do something else to indicate that it was successful.
• No more hidden debug output in HTML comments. I’ve switched to the excellent FirePHP + FireBug debugging combo and it works great.
• Only one instance of the link checker can be active at one time. Previously it would just plough on, blissfully unaware of race conditions and other related nastiness. This behaviour was probably what caused the mysterious slowdowns and inexplicable bugs that a few users encoutered. Now the worker function uses file locking and will abort if there’s already another worker running.
• The minimum required WordPress version is now 2.7. If you’re using something older, upgrade or get an older version of the plugin from the wordpress.org archives. Progress marches on, humans.

To-Do

These are the features that will probably be implemented in the relatively near future (i.e. before the winter ).

• Result sorting on the “Broken Links” page.
• Cron support.
• Some kind of pop-up tooltips for broken links in posts.
• More optimization, e.g. don’t load the entire plugin when it’s not required.
• An option to only check internal and/or external links.
• Localization support.
• Checking links in comments. Maybe. I’m still not convinced that would be all that useful.

1.0 ?

In conclusion, I’m quite pleased with how the update has turned out. I was really tempted to break away from the fractional versioning scheme I’ve used for this plugin since the beginning and label this the true and complete “1.0″ release, but the thought that there will almost certainly be a load of new bugs due to all the major changes made me reconsider. Maybe after all the to-do items are implemented…

By the time it gets to 1.0 this will probably the most powerful and robust plugin I’ve ever created. And then the robot uprising will happen.