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AoCFinland.net – Finnish Age of Conan community

Oct 25th

Back in 2007 I got bored with World of Warcraft and started looking for something new to play. I found out about this nice looking and brutal MMO called Age of Conan made by the Norwegian company Funcom. The game hadn’t come out yet but it was looking very very promising. I decided to quit WoW and commit the spare time that I then had to create a Finnish community around the game.

Yup. That was the logo of the site. I really enjoyed working on it and the site grew everyday with about 10 new users. The community site included news, wiki, forum and later even an e-commerce sections. Forums, of course, where the most lively part of the site.

Hosting and creating the site allowed me to update my HTML, PHP and graphical design skills. I gained so much knowledge about these technologies that I was actually able to get a job at the company that was running the servers for the site. Even while working I continued to also work on the community site. During that time the site went through numerous revisions and improvements.

E-commerce

Veepeli Multimedia e-commerce site

About 6 months before the launch of AoC there were some demands from the community for an bulk order of the game for cheaper price. I asked around for discounts from retailers but they all were pretty hesitant to sell the games any cheaper. Some even gave me offers that didn’t undercut the cheapest pre-order prices at that time. That felt quite ridiculous.

I did some research on the subject and called some companies that import the game to Finland. Their prices were a lot more reasonable but they only sold the games to other companies. I did some more research, ran couple of polls on the site and then decided to start my own company for this purpose.

The company’s name became Veepeli Multimedia. I threw together an e-commerce site to sell the games online (seen on the picture). I think it worked out quite well actually. I still remember the day prior to the launch when my living room was so full of the Collector’s Editions that it made moving around really difficult. Nevertheless, I got the all packed and posted on time. Didn’t even get any complaints

After the success with AoC I tried to sell some other games on the webshop as well. That didn’t work out so well, since I didn’t have a community for those specific games backing me up. Also, AoC as a MMO kinda flopped so there wasn’t much of a market for it’s gamecards.

In 2009 I decided to pull the plug on the site. There wasn’t really any visitors on the site except for the loyal search engine bots It was kinda sad to quit it, but I needed to move onto other projects of mine. Nevertheless I think the project was a great success considering how much experience I gained while working on it.

Summer, Tuska and Sabaton

Jun 30th

Posted by Veli in Music

No comments

*insert random babling about not posting on the blog enough and how sorry I am and how busy I have been with Panzerkampf*

Yeah, but enough about that. I was at Tuska Open Air last saturday and I saw Sabaton again. Great they were, as usual.

Pics or it didnt happen:

Sabaton, Tuska 2009

WordPress Profiles to Unity3D?

May 25th

Posted by Veli in Unity3D

No comments

You read correctly. If you want to have a good community around your game (blogs, forums, etc), you need to find the best tools for that. And for blogging, the best tool is by far WordPress. One of WordPress’ main strengths is the plugin system, which allows you to write your own “hacks” or use plugins made by others without having to edit the core files directly. This ensures a safe and upgradeable framework around which one can build their community.

But enough of that rambling. Here is how I managed to fetch wordpress user profiles into unity.

Unity JS

function Awake() {
	GetCookie (display_name);
	//This is what you are fetching.
	//See http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description#Table:_wp_users
}

function GetCookie (query:String){
	//Path to your PHP file
	var url = "http://domain.com/cookiecheck.php?q=";
	var getCookie = WWW(url+query);
		yield getCookie; // Wait until the download is done

    if(getCookie.error) {
        Debug.Log("There was an error getting cookies: "
				+ getCookie.error);
    } else {
		result = getCookie.data;
    }
}

function OnGui () {
	if (result != null) {
		GUI.Label (Rect (10,50,280,20), result);
	}
	else
		GUI.Label (Rect (10,50,280,20), "Waiting for yummy cookies!");
}

Server side PHP cookiecheck.php

$query=$_GET["q"];

require_once('/path/to/your/wp-config.php');

global $current_user;
      get_currentuserinfo();

if ('' == $user_ID) {
        print("invalid User");
      }
else {
	print($current_user->$query);
}

It is nothing major, but I spent a good amount of trial and error to get it right. Hopefully this article will save someone else from that trouble. Oh, and big thanks once again to the guys (and gals) at #unity3d@irc.freenode.irc.freenode.net