All ientry websites seem to be experiencing some unannounced downtime at the moment – mainly RRR, RMVX, and one of j3di’s IRC servers. Sorry to anyone affected by this, it’s gone on for more than 12 hours now so it looks like it could be some time before they’re all fully back. Just in case people start asking what’s going on.

You might want to try out this website: Downforeveryone?

Or, this little internet browser tidbit on the forums, by Angua; they will tell you whether or not a website is down or whether it is just your connection.

Rest assured that HBGames won’t be affected – we host ourselves and aren’t owned by an external corporation.

This is a general gaming news article.

Tonight on Guild Wars sees the return of the Dragon Festival, an annual event for Guild Wars: Factions players only which celebrates the Chinese New Year. Typically it brings new quests, some rare itemssuch as bottlerockets and fireworks, and the elusive CNY minipet.

This year is the year of the Tiger.

The event starts noon tonight (PST), 20:00 (UTC).

For more info: click here for Guild Wars Wiki, or see the Guild Wars topic in Video Games.

Sup.

There’s a new theme for the forums. It’s not really new, in that the template is RMXP.net. But the images and stylesheet are new. ;o

It’s called RPG and is supposed to be er, fantasy-like.

Images from “Dark Fantasy” – http://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo/3.0/?style_id=11

Oh, there’s also a style changer. You’ll find it. ;o

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Originally published in eZine 10

If you’re on this forum, you know what a Game Over is (at least I hope you do) but I’m going to define it anyway because it’ll make me feel smarter (don’t judge me). A Game Over is a screen that pops up under certain conditions that causes the player to lose some progress. Game Overs are most prevalent in RPG’s and Platformers, but even across these two genres they come in vastly different forms, and seeing as this article’s about RPG Mechanics I’m going to limit this to only RPG Game Overs.

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Originally published in eZine 11

A lot of people find strange satisfaction in using Japanese, Latin, and German translators to find strange and exotic names for their towns, villages, provinces and worlds in their games.

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Originally published in eZine 11

If you take one thing out of reading anything I write ever for the rest of my life, let it be this article. If you can’t read this, ask someone to read it to you (hey wait) because this is important stuff right here.

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Hi,
I recently added a fix for Internet Explorer users who were having problems logging in and viewing recent posts.

If you continue to see these errors please let us know via the Feedback forum (don’t worry if your post doesn’t show, it is actually there), though this should hopefully all now be fixed.

Note: If you have viewed hbgames.org prior to this announcement in Internet Explorer, please do the following:

1. click “tools -> clear private data”
2. make sure only “temporary internet files” is ticked
3. click “clear” or “ok” or whatever

Thanks, and sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

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This article was originally published in eZine issue 9.

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This article was originally published in eZine issue 8.

…is it really that bad?

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This article was originally posted in eZine issue 2.

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This article was originally posted in eZine issue 2.

Some of you are probably wondering ‘What is a RMXP Episode?‘ Well, a ‘RMXP Episode’ is not a game. It is a story, much like watching an episode of a TV series, but instead uses the RMXP game engine as a vehicle for its plot. It is similar to a ‘choose your own adventure’ game, only there is no choosing; you simply watch one long cutscene.

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This article was originally posted in eZine issue 1.

When the topic of clichés is brought up in an RPG Making community such as RMXP.net,most people respond with the same old half-enthusiastic agreement. The cliché problem has long since been complained and warned of to death. Ironically, the very act of telling others to avoid the dreaded cliché has itself become clichéd. The very nature which gamers and game makers act by has been so influenced by the common video game cliché, that people rarely bring up a topic that itself is not a cliché nor does it refer to one. So, when does the world of the cliché end the world of actual human thought and life begin?

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Originally posted in eZine issue

Today, I’d like to talk about puzzles. Puzzles are essential in a game, because you don’t want a game in which you just have to beat monsters. Puzzles are there to challenge the player even further. You can have mazes, push the blocks, interaction with the environment, riddles, and many more. Today, I will select a few of them, tell a bit about them, and explain how to use them effectively. The most common, and easy to make puzzle is of course the maze. The objective of a maze is confusing the player, and making him try to find the exit. The most basic variant of this is having a bunch of random corridors and dead ends. You must be careful with dead ends, however. This makes the player backtrack a lot, and it will eventually cause the player quitting your game out of frustration. The dead ends should either have a large treasure (not too much, of course) or you should leave them out. The way you should fool people, is to make them walk in circles. A way to strengthen this effect, is by predicting which path the player will take, and make that go down that way, only to find that he’s seen that part before. Another way is to spread the maze over several rooms. Again, try not to overdo this, because otherwise the player will become bored again, and quit.

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Originally posted in eZine issue 1

Fear of Life, the latest game from the lovely ValentineEnigma,is a grim journey through the bowels of the worst city on
the planet during its darkest hour. In her own words, “Fear of Life is a modern thriller RPG based around a young woman named Morgan
Macaan who finds her life turned upside down when she’s brutally murdered three days before her birthday.” Astonishingly well constructed
(undoubtedly among the best of the RMXP community) and full of “a bit of camp, a bit of kitsch, and full of sarcasm and substance
abuse”, Fear of Life is an anticipated title that encompasses all the elements that make a good RPG.

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The resources system is now back online and should be working fine.

I just had to manually edit every post in the system to the new format -.-

New submissions page is found at a new link, here: http://www.hbgames.org/wordpress/wp-admin/post-resource.php

Please, let me know your opinions or whatever.

Hopefully you should find it a lot easier to upload images now. Browsing should also be improved – I finally worked out a decent way of displaying the info/credits section without hindering browsing.

Also added min-width and max-width to elements so they should display correctly.

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Following feedback I spent the whole day designing and hacking together a much more usable resource submissions page.

This does mean for like the next couple of hours you’ll notice it behaving oddly – just don’t go there for now and I’ll let you know when it’s usable again :p

It’s changed quite a bit so… yeah. But is a lot easier to use and a lot simpler.

Thanks.

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There is now a section on profiles for “user awards”. This is for little cute images whenever you win something essentially. Some things will have awards some won’t.

I’ve added the orgy award badges from 2009, I’m not sure how far back we’ll go with backdating awards though, as obviously we’d have to make award badges for them.

But yeah, they’re there.

I’ll add to the other themes soon, only Aqua and Aqua-based have it for now.

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Apologies, today I found a major security hole in the bbcode system. Or, rather, I saw that a member had found it themselves and was using it in their signature.

While a cool signature, yes, this is a major breach and could have caused a lot of damage, and you really should have told us instead of taking advantage of it

The error was in the [float= ][ /float] bbcode, where one could simply start the line with a semicolon and construct their own style rules for any element. As such it was possible to do anything – cover up site logos, hide images from users, etc. I’m not sure but it might have allowed javascript to be executed which would have been even worse.

It’s now been patched up – you can only use “simpletext” in style rules (so you can only use [float=left ], [float=right ] for example).

Apologies to those using this in their sigs – but it was exploitation and was a major hole that we didn’t know existed

I’ve gone through all the other bbcodes in the system to make sure this is 100% not possible again.

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Perihelion is running biweekly pixel art challenges, starting now. The first challenge can be found here and is running until February 6. If you do pixel art, or even if you don’t, this is a great chance to exercise your skills. Check out the thread for more information!

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I’d just like to congratulate the Rec Room on hitting 50,000 posts. I know it’s faggy to celebrate, but hey, it’s a big occasion! I’m amazed and thankful that it hasn’t just turned into a spam board, it has some good threads in there. For those who don’t know, the Rec Room is a place to chill and relax. It features a newly brought back Forum Games board (which, surprisingly, only makes up 2k of it’s 50) as well as the infamous and ever copied Post What’s on your Mind thread which itself is verging dangerously on the 1000 post line.

The rest of the forums are still booming though, after all, there are… phew, 550,000 posts now.