Batch file MMORPG

[jahwi]

Hello guys,
I am working on a batch file MMORPG. It's still in it's infance (it works though). I made I open source because
I need a lot more hands on deck
https://sourceforge.net/projects/batch-mmorpg

[ShadowThief]

...how honest do you want me to be?

[jahwi]

very. i know it isn't cool right now (I've written a chat bot in batch (https://sourceforge.net/projects/meri/) so I'm not a mediocre scripter) but I didn't add too many features so everyone in the community could help, and feel like we all started this together.

[ShadowThief]

very.

My "very honest" is just short of brutal, and your overall lack of content here, on SourceForge, and on StackOverflow suggests to me that you're still fairly new at this, so I'll make an effort to be constructive.

I know it isn't cool right now

Actually, I'm going to give you props for at least being unique; most people who decide to make an RPG in batch for fun go the single-player route. I disagree with your plan for how you are going to implement multiplayer on a practically fundamental level, but at least I've never seen it before.

I've written a chat bot in batch (https://sourceforge.net/projects/meri/)

Your chat bot breaks after one sentence for me. It flat-out doesn't respond to my second entry, regardless of what it is.
EDIT: I left it open on another monitor for a while and it eventually responded. Looks like it's not broken, just painfully slow.

so I'm not a mediocre scripter

Your code isn't commented (except for TODOs). It's not even indented. You did zero testing of the output of your text and it breaks in the middle of words. You should really open with a MODE CON COLS line so that you know exactly how much space you have to work with.

but I didn't add too many features so everyone in the community could help, and feel like we all started this together.

You seem to be under the impression that people are going to be super excited to work on this or something. You need to work on your recruiting; you aren't even asking if we're interested, you're just asking us to look at your code and edit it.

It doesn't look like you have any sort of plan for what direction the game is going to head in, outside of "hey go fight that army over there. Good job. Hey, go fight that army over there. Good job. etc." Do you have any design documentation? Is there any endgame? What sort of features do you have planned? How much time are you going to spend working on this per week?

Your plan to store the data in text files on an FTP server is seriously lacking any sort of detail. How do you plan to handle server-side processing? How do you plan to handle multiple simultaneous requests? (The next time you and five friends are in a computer lab, try to all edit the same Wikipedia page at the same time and see how well that turns out.)

Your username validation only checks for spaces, when your instructions ask that you not use spaces or symbols.

You've got usernames and passwords for the local FTP server hard-coded into the script, without checking that the username/password combinations are actually valid for the local FTP server. This is breaking things for reasons that should be obvious.

You got a couple instances of PUSHD %CD%, which is a totally meaningless command; pushd makes a note of your current directory and then moves to to the directory that you specify. %cd% is your current directory.

Your variable names are pretty meaningless, which is arguably a petty complaint, but if you want multiple people to be able to work on the same project, it would be a good idea if everyone knew what the variables were supposed to be.

You've got a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. Again, this is pretty petty, but you want to make a good impression on people and writing this sloppy makes it look like you didn't put any effort into your work.

I understand that you're using the %appdata% folder to try and hide backend stuff, but that's really not a good place for that. At the very least, you should have a folder inside the %appdata% folder; %appdata% is cluttered enough as it is.

[jahwi]

Thanks for your very constructive feedback. I'll do my best.

[Orion]

I agree with the first reply.

I've taken the single player route on my game. And I've been spending about 5 hours a day coding now for a few weeks and I'm maybe 1% done.

Screw opensource. People have lives and until I can furnish a complete rpg that runs well looks good and has good feedback it's unrealistic of me to expect everybody to just jump on the bandwagon when the majority of people will pick a ps4 or Xbox game over a batch game any day.

Yes batch has an old school gaming following, but it's small at best.

Don't expect too much even after the game is finished. Just being realistic.

[Skwinky]

It's a very cool idea! But I think it would be better if it was a 2D game, I am working on a rogue-like in batch and it's coming along very well so far. I don't see how you can make it MMO, but I do know how to make it Multiplayer using IP addresses!