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  1. admin
    Today marks the 10 year anniversary of Cyber Nations. I always like to look back on history and it seems appropriate to do so today, so here we go.

    I registered the Cyber Nations domain name in 2003 with the hopes of creating a web based nation simulation game but I was unable to come up with a working model and I quickly abandoned the project. I let the domain name sit idle for a year and decided to let it go in 2004 since I couldn't find a use for it. In 2005 my interest was sparked again and so I re-registered the domain name on May 22, 2005 in the hopes to get a game up and running but once again I was unable to lay down any real code structure. Finally on December 24, 2005, during my Christmas break from work, I sat down and really began developing the game. I spent the majority of my Christmas break glued to the computer in hopes to get a working game rolled out by the first of the year before I lost interest in the project for a third time.

    The game was launched on January 6, 2006 with little fan fare and with very few features. The early game was quite buggy with major issues plaguing the entire economic system that originally did not include tax collection or bill payment systems. Other features like the resource and trade agreement system, foreign aid system, national events, nation rankings, government position, improvements, wonders, technology, aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapons, and cruise missiles were added months after the initial release date as the game continued to be a work in progress. The few players who originally discovered the game did so by way of Google AdWords but word quickly got around to other gaming communities and the system began to become overrun as it was originally had only a Microsoft Access database backend and hosted via a shared hosting provider. At that time the community forums also ran on a Microsoft Access database version of Snitz Forums 2000 and it existed as a subfolder on the same shared hosting server as the game.

    During the first couple of weeks the server began returning “Service Unavailable” errors in which numerous attempts were made to resolve. Such attempts included converting the game database to a MS-SQL database (I had just completed an SQL Server course in college during that same month) and moving the community forums to Invision Free, an offsite forum hosting provider. Still the “Service Unavailable” problems persisted and the game was moved to another shared hosting provider but the problem was not finally resolved until the game was moved to its own dedicated server. The game still has it's traffic bottlenecks, that's unavoidable due to the way the game was designed and played, but throughout the years a myriad of dedicated servers have kept the game alive.

    So much has transpired over the years, so many players have come and gone, so many fascinating geopolitics and world wars, so many friends made. I'm amazed that there are nations still in the game that were created the very same month that the Cyber Nations was born, with their tiny 3 digit nation ID's, they've seen it all. Those ancient alliances that were all created during that same month, Global Alliance And Treaty Organization, Orange Defense Network, New Pacific Order, World Task Force, Green Protection Agency, alive and still strong (some stronger than others). As I said before, I never would have imagined that the game would still be around after all these years (heck I always figured it would sputter out after a few months which was evident at the initial lack of planning and hosting infrastructure) and while the game has seen much larger player base populations in the past (at times it was too large imo) I'm happy to see that the game continues to have such a loyal following after so many years. Thank you to everyone who has been part of the journey.

    I leave you with some old relics of the past. This first one is kind of embarrassing given my horrible handwriting (I generally write much better than this, unless I'm in frantic note taking mode). Here I scratched out some thoughts on 3/15/2003. I still chuckle at the question that I posed at the bottom, as I don't believe that one has yet been answered:


    The first logo for the game:


    This is the very first image of the game as I was coding it in December 2005 on the old Compaq monitor that I was so glued to. I'm glad that High Contrast theme did not survive very long.


  2. admin
    So what's the deal with the logo changes in Cyber Nations? Well I was fiddling around with an image editor this weekend and I liked some of the effects that it was capable of producing. The biggest thing (for me) is that I was able to pretty closely replicate the current logo and save it as a true transparent image. The old CN logo was designed by a player way back in early 2006 but he sent it to me as a jpg image with a white background and so I've always had trouble putting it in front of anything other than a white background. I've tried in the past (and had other people attempt as well) to convert it to an actual transparent image but it always looked pixelated and crummy. I know the new logo will take some getting use to, but it will give me more design options so I'm going to stick with it, unless of course someone else offers up something truly amazing.
    So, without further ado, a brief history of the Cyber Nations logos:

    The very first Cyber Nations logo. I made it in 2005 and we used it for a couple of weeks before the next logo was offered up.

    This was the Cyber Nations logo that everyone is familiar with. It's been with us for over 8 years.

    The new logo. I embossed the letters a bit more, made the colors match the game interface a little better, and I got rid of the :: and :: before and after the words. Not sure what those :: were all about in the first place. I kind of like the cleaner appearance without them. I hope you like it.
  3. admin

    Where the players are from

    By admin,

    I was cruising Google Analytics this morning and took a peek at the Cyber Nations visitors map and thought I would share. This is broken down by city over the last month.

    To my surprise, a city in the USA is not top on the list. That honor goes to London. Here's the top 5 cities:
    London 7,855
    New York 6,858
    Chicago 4,046
    Melbourne 3,989
    Sydney 3,354
  4. admin
    In an effort to try to increase the player base in Cyber Nations I'm currently testing some new ad campaigns on Google and Facebook and a couple of other sites. Now, I've advertised heavily in the past, but over time I started to see fewer and fewer players actually stick around after clicking on an ad. I feel like the changes that I've made in the game over the past couple of months are exciting and I've even seen some long retired players say that the recent changes are worth them coming back for. So I decided that maybe it's time to revisit those ad campaigns and see what kind of results they produce today.
    While I'm working on advertising I'd also like to see more use of the in-game referral system, and so I have doubled the rewards that are offered there. The total number of referrals in Cyber Nations as of right now is 399. I'm going to check back in a few weeks and see if this number has increased. If you'd like to help spread the word, and get a bonus for your efforts, we'll see if we can pick things up around here.
  5. admin

    Tournament Round 26

    By admin,

    I've been hard at work the past couple of days making some updates for Cyber Nations Tournament Edition Round 26. One of the things that a lot of players have asked for is the ability to create alliance announcements, which has now been implemented. I included the ability for alliance members to post comments on an announcement as well as the ability for managers to lock down who can view an announcement and who can post comments.

    Another thing that was asked for were improvements to Navy. Now if your nation has 250 miles of land OR a harbor then it can be blockaded and the blockade amount has been increased from a random of 1%-5% to 1%-10%. There were additional requests regarding navy, but I want to see how these settings works out for Round 26 before making further enhancements. The purchase cost of Navy has also been reduced.
    Another asked for and implemented item was to include casualties in the tournament round prizes. Some said that since everyone in the top 10 got to upload a custom flag that it resulted in a lack-luster finish of Round 25, so I decided to give the top reward in Round 26 to the two players involved in the most destructive war. This means that the game needs to track the most destructive war, which means that the Awards System in standard edition has now been implemented in tournament edition. Also included in the prizes are most attacking and most defending casualties.

    Update 6/17/2013: The surprise update is finalized. Military Generals have been added to the game. Generals can be recruited and assigned to one of four posts in your military. The positions include generals of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Intelligence. Recruiting generals offers a variety of benefits to your nation including increases to battle strength calculations, unit purchase and upkeep cost reductions, and due to the enormous prestige that generals carry some may offer increases to your population happiness, citizen income, and even boosts to your population itself. As you conduct battles and special operations in the field against other nations you will gain experience points (XP) that will enable you to recruit higher ranking generals who will in turn provide greater benefits to your nation. For each ground battle, aircraft attack, naval attack, etc... you will gain +1 experience point in that field (nuclear attacks gain +5 experience points for Air Force). There are a multitude of NPC (non-playable character) generals available for you to choose from and upon recruiting a general you may change their name, assign them a custom title, and if you don't like the avatar image provided for them then simply click on the image to cycle through a different avatar.

    Tournament Round 26 will begin shortly.
  6. admin
    As you know, I decided to go all out on the updates for tournament round 26. This round features the largest amount of updates that I've made for a new tournament round, and a few of the updates were minor and were not announcement, but were updates none the less. One of the big updates was the alliance announcement system, a feature that had been requested initially when the TE alliance system was first introduced and it continued to prevail as a common request throughout the tournament rounds. Having decided to go forward with another tournament round I knew that I wanted to code in some updates to liven things up, as well as to use as a test bed for updates to come for standard edition. So, I set out to create the much requested TE alliance announcement system. As I thought about how I wanted to structure the feature, I realized that much of it already existed on one of the other games that I run, Cyber Citizens. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I went over and grabbed the pieces of code that I needed and the update ended up being fairly easy to implement.
    Screenshot of alliance announcement system in TE:

    Screenshot of political party announcement system in CC:

    A big update that I've been mulling over lately was the ability to assign leaders or generals to a nation's military in order to help further customize nations. I had the basic system for how I wanted everything to work in my head, but I wanted to include something like an avatar to give the generals some personality. I actually thought on ways to do this quite a bit and debated over creating images that represented a general's rank but that still didn't seem personal enough. Then I realized that I had already built a similar system in Tour of Generals years ago. When I was developing that game I used a program to model 3D faces, and while some of the face images admittedly look a little cheesy, I thought as long as I let the players change the character's image to suit their preference, then it should work fine.
    Screenshot of general page in TE:

    Screenshot of unit page in ToG:

    I guess the lesson for me here was don't reinvent the wheel. lol. It has been a while since I've had time outside of real life to commit the hours that it takes to push out updates like this, but the time that I spent working on them over the weekend was enjoyable to me. If all goes well with the Military Generals update then I'd like to implement the feature in standard edition. I've also been thinking about how to get the (now superior) TE alliance system over in SE...
  7. admin

    I wonder if he regrets it?

    By admin,

    With the new war details screen and the ability to see damage infliced by each side in a war, I came across this. Granted, stats for wars began on the 26th and there's still a few days remaning in this war, but I wonder if Momonishiki regrets declaring war on CubaQuerida at this point?

  8. admin

    War Stories

    By admin,

    The game has been collecting war destruction stats for about 3 weeks now and already some players have put up some massive damage totals.

    Cyber Nations as a whole has destroyed/lost 63,806,849 nation strength in just the past few weeks.

    What are some of your biggest losses in war going back before the war destruction stats were gathered?
  9. admin
    This morning I received a report from a player that they had sent me an email some time ago but I never received it. So I started sending test emails to myself and I never received those emails either. I logged into my hosting providers site just now and found 242 rather important emails from just the last month that I had never received. Apparently the hosting provider for my primary site email address changed their spam filter settings on me. Looks like I have quite a bit of catching up to do. Apologies to anyone who messaged me but never received a reply.
  10. admin
    I was looking at the game stats and as noted here Cyber Nations recently surpassed the highest global radiation level ever recorded in the game. The previous record on GRL, attained during the Karma War, was 47.47. Today the GRL is sitting at 55.93 and will rise again after update tonight. From the CN information index:
    I was wondering if this is really the most destructive war in CN history or if the smaller nation count in the game now, as compared to the nation count during the Karma war, has anything to do with the GRL reaching record highs. So I crunched the numbers and here's what I came up with:
    Karma - 30,500 In-game nations, GRL 47.47 = 4,826 Nations nuked during a 30 day period
    Current - 26,200 In-game nations, GRL 55.93 = 4,885 Nations nuked during a 30 day period
    The current count of nuked nations within the past 30 days, at the time of this writing, is 4,994 nations nuked so we're well beyond the previous records in both total nations nuked for the past 30 days as well as the ratio of nuked nations to overall nation population.
    This war also sets the record for the most days of peak activity that the game has ever seen. The Karma war had about 12 days of peak activity as noted in the bandwidth chart here:

    The current war is sitting at 18 days of peak activity, with a slight dip in traffic when NpO and \m/ declared white peace, and then traffic shot back up when everyone else got involved:

    The red lines in the charts above indicate the 95th percentile, which is something that data centers use for billing, and it's interesting to note that the Karma war had a higher 95th percentile than the current war. This is due in part because of the fewer in-game nations currently at play in the game (about 15% fewer) as compared to during the Karma war.
    So is this the biggest, most destructive war in CN history? That is debatable as well as yet to be fully determined since the war isn't even over yet. We certainly have more nations nuked this time around, and this war has lasted longer, as far as peak traffic goes, than any other war before it - and it's still raging on. I have seen others name this war "The Great Reset" and anytime you see titles like that offered up you know it's big.
    I appreciate everyone's patience during update time when the site gets flooded with traffic. I've been at this for 4 years now and I've done everything in my power to ease the load during update time but when you're dealing with a major war like this there's only so much traffic that the host and the game server can handle. I have been up every night since this whole thing started, until the wee hours of the morning, monitoring the server and making sure that everything is running as smoothly as possible. I haven't seen too many complaints about the update time slow down this time around so I'm guessing everyone understands that by now. If there is frustration out there it appears that it is being taken out on your war partners in the form of nukes rather than griping to me about it.
  11. admin

    Do you Like it?

    By admin,

    On April 21st Facebook released its widely publicized "Like" button feature for websites allowing developers to place like buttons on their content. I had heard about this a few days before they released it and I thought it would make for a good advertising tool so as soon as they made it available I went to work putting a couple of Like buttons around my sites. For a few days afterward I watched the little numbers beside the Like buttons, which indicates how many people have clicked on it, and to my disappointment the numbers remained quite low. Cyber Nations was registering 44 likes, Cyber Citizens was registering 13 likes, and CN:TE was registering just 2 likes. I was so embarrassed by CN:TE's Like button counter performance that I was considering removing it all together. Even worst, the like buttons on the individual alliance stats pages were registering 0 likes, for EVERY alliance in the game. Then today I noticed that one of my friends on Facebook had a status that said, "xxx likes Independent Republic of Orange Nations" but the Like button in CN for the alliance Independent Republic of Orange Nations was still showing 0 likes. Something was off with Facebooks Like counter. Now this afternoon I log in and see that Cyber Nations has 732 likes, Cyber Citizens has 41, CN:TE has 47, and the alliance counters are showing correct stats as well. That's more Like it!! (pun intended) I know that some of you may have found the new Like and Share buttons annoying at first, hopefully most of you are getting use to them by now. The purpose of the buttons is to be as unobtrusive as possible while still serving as a method to attract some new players to the games. I'm also interested in seeing which alliance gets the most Like button clicks. So far New Polar Order is winning hands down with 21 Likes with New Pacific Order in a distant second with 10 Likes.
  12. admin
    What better way to spend your summer than by playing an online nation simulation game with the chance to win some great prizes? I've decided to give away some cool items from the Cyber Nations Merchandise Store to the top 3 players at the end of tournament round 12 which started today. Prizes (for 1st place) include a Tournament Edition branded Sigg 1.0L Water Bottle, a Gym Bag, and a Ringer T-Shirt. Players will also have the option to pick any other item in the Cyber Nations Merchandise Store as long as the total falls at or under their winning prize value. Good luck to all the participants in this tournament round.
  13. admin

    Witty Wars

    By admin,

    I've been entertained while this big war is happening with all the witty war reasons that people use. I scanned over the past 24 hours of war declarations and here are some of the ones that made me lol. Why use the generic 'A General Dispute' war reason when you can start with a bang like these guys did:
    "You sure got a purdy mouth!" - Reddragoon
    "your a TOOL" - Reoga to a nation in the alliance The Order Of Light
    "Declare war, I must" - NearX
    "Improved Foreign Relations" - bioakky
    "1 2 3 4 I declare thumb war" - Aithne
    "IRON? more like Rust, amirite?" - Darknovasoul
    "Dont know, Dont Care. WARRR!" - Jimoslimos
    "Yippie Kai Yay!" - Yawning Angel
    "your spelling is atrocious" - W Squirellbottom
    "Wanna see a magic trick?" - puckpilot27
    "27/M/UK looking for fun times" - Consul of Monkeys
    "I too want your love!" - jerdge
    "I think you are cute." - WildKat
    "You are not that cute." - WildKat
    "No SDI? How awesome." - Alter Leader Nabla
    "Wanna spoon?" - magicalbricks
    "I got beer, u got pretzels?" - Andy Rooney
    "Crazy? You betchya!" - FinsterBaby
    "BAAAH!! WAR 2 UR FACES!!" - Zzniperr
    "All outta bubblegum" - Lavics
    "war! apparently..." - tehmulletman
    "Nobody puts Baby in the corner" - RedHand
    "HEY. You look kinda cute." - Vend3tta
    "just a smalltown girl...." - KenDeSolei
    "Super Big Wang Time" - PakAttack
    "When Pandas Attack..." - prettypanda
    "stab stab stab" - omnifarius
    "IS THIS THE FOREIGN AID SCREEN" - X-NV-X
    "IM JACKS SMIRKING REVENGE" - Alvis
    "My Milkshake" - Screwedupmonkey
    That's a lot of great witty war reasons in just the last 24 hours. If I had to pick my favorite I'd go with tehmulletman with his "war! apparently..." reason because I think that pretty much sums up this whole war mess for a lot of people; nobody really knows what's going on, except that there is war!
  14. admin
    I took a stroll through the Cyber Nations information index recently to see if I could clean it up a little bit. I was looking to see if I could make it more like the Cyber Citizens about screen where you click on individual links to pull up an article rather than have the whole confusing thing listed out all at once. But when I stopped and really looked over the CN index I realized that there is really a lot of stuff in there. Lots of numbers, percentages, dollar figures, and oh the dreaded math equations. Everything is necessary but my goodness there just a lot of stuff in there and it would really be a lot of work to change all that. So I have given up on the makeover of the CN information index. Not gonna happen. Instead I am contemplating simply renaming it to, "The Dreaded Pit of Information". Like?
  15. admin

    CN Facebook Group

    By admin,

    After it was reported to me that our old Cyber Nations Myspace group had been deleted (I think the owner of the group had his profile deleted or something) I decided to look into migrating over to Facebook because, really, that's were all the cool kids hang out these days. I looked at several of the existing CN related groups and managed to find someone to give me admin control over one of the groups (haha, sucker) so now we have an official Cyber Nations Facebook Group. There's currently 262 members. Hope to see you there.
  16. admin

    The Moderator's Blog

    By admin,

    I've opened this blog up to allow the senior game moderators full editor access to create and edit blog entries within this blog. With more editors this blog should stay more current with exciting news and information straight from the front lines of all things moderation.
  17. admin

    April Fools

    By admin,

    This morning around server update time there was a major security issue which mistakenly gave everyone access to the moderator's control panel in the game. There was a total of 3,129 moderator actions that took place throughout the night with most coming from the users Blacky performing 393 mod actions and TrotskysRevenge who performed 10 mod actions. We have patched up the security breaches and are preparing to file litigation against those responsible for the moderator actions and resulting damages. To everyone who messaged me throughout the night (33 emails, 42 in game private messages, 24 forum private messages, and pages and pages of bug reports) all of your reports are appreciated and your messages will be used as evidence in court. We would also like to point out that it's April Fools Day. For those who missed it here's a screenshot:



    It seems like this prank backfired on the moderation staff because all of our inboxes are freaking swamped right now. Though it is good to know that there are some really honest people out there on the Internets. (excluding Blacky and TrotskysRevenge of course) The mod control panel was completely fake but the spy worm is totally real and we use it to spy on the player base all the time. You should see what Sword of Estel looks and sounds like when she eats popcorn in front of her computer. (Ok, I'm kidding again. We're not secretly listening in on your every move.)
    We also had a little fun with one of our moderators Philothoes who decided that this year he and some of the other mods were going to play a little prank on me. He started this big argument with some of our other moderators several days ago and the plan was for him and the others on the mod team to resign on April 1st which was totally suppose to give me a brain aneurysm or something I guess. Problem was I saw right through their shenanigans from the start thanks to Evenstar who folded under just the slightest amount of questioning and so together we preempted their plans yesterday by firing Philothoes and warning the mod team that such in-fighting will not be tolerated. Many frantic text messages among the mod staff and an 800 word count email from Philothoes resulted as he tried explain the situation and pry his way back on the team. LOL. That's what they get for trying to fool ole admin.
  18. admin

    Upcoming Wonders?

    By admin,

    In addition to the updates that I mentioned on 2/12 I'm also working on a couple of new wonders for the game for Missions/Mines/Colonies to the Moon and Mars. I'm still working out all of the details and I have started a suggestion box topic so that you can give your input. Below is a teaser image although keep in mind that the specifics may be very different from what you see below when everything finished.

  19. admin

    What's on admin's mind

    By admin,

    Since this is going to be a game development blog I'm going to try to frequent this as much as possible to let everyone know what I'm working on and what's to come for the game. This isn't to be taken as a place where I will make important announcements about the game, but rather just a friendly chat so don't hold me to what I post here.
    - I'm currently reviewing options for a change to the war declaration range. I agree with just about everyone else that the war range needs to be narrowed down. The 50K+ rule is also outdated and I'm tired of having to review that setting every few months so I'm looking into options that will address that problem as well.
    - Today I added some backend code that will start storing the global radiation level each day to later put into a chart. Not only will it be interesting to look at the daily changes in GRL but it will also help players to gauge trends for back tax collections. This idea was originally suggested by Hegemom Rob here.
    - I'm thinking about changing the "Active in Last 60 Minutes" to an actual "User Online" indicator. The "Active in Last 60 Minutes" just shows when a person last collected and that isn't really helpful if you want to know if someone is actually online or not. My only reservation about this is that it might make players think that the 20 day inactivity rule for tax collections has changed which I AM NOT CHANGING. If I move forward with this I'm going to have to be sure to communicate clearly that the 20 day inactivity rule for tax collections is still in effect.
  20. admin

    Twitter

    By admin,

    So I found Twitter. Actually I've had the account there since September 2008 but at that time I was only going to use it for personal tweets but apparently my personal life isn't relevant enough to get anyone to follow me. It's either that or my tweets were just totally uninteresting that no one really cared to follow me. Actually it was probably a combination of both.
    Then on February 26th I was watching Rick Sanchez from CNN use Twitter live on-air and I realized two things 1) using such a simple web application would be a neat way to provide developer updates on the games that I administer over and 2) why didn't I ever think of creating Twitter myself? I do that a lot actually. Every time I hear about a neat little startup website that's gaining massive popularity I snap my fingers and think, "Darn, I should have thought of that." But Twitter started around March of 2006 which was the same time that Cyber Nations was getting started so I guess it worked out that I focused on browser based games rather than micro-blogging.
    What I found astounding is that even though Twitter is like 1,000x more popular that Cyber Nations they currently have absolutley no business model. According to the Twitter wiki, "As of January 2009, the service sold no advertising and produced no revenue." That's totally mind boggling given that, according to wiki, "$57 million of Twitter is owned by venture capitalists".
    I guess the idea, like Facebook and other similar sites, is to ignore the fact that the site isn't generating any money and just grow, grow away. Then when the site gets big enough and the developers wake up and think, "Holy crap, we're freaking $57 million in the hole and like, haven't made a dime in the 3+ years that we've been running this thing" sell away all their user's private information and slap a bunch of 'in-your face' banner ads across the site. I'm not talking about ads like you see on Cyber Nations either. I'm talking about the kind of obnoxious ads that cover the entire background of the site or even worse the kind of ads that popup on your screen or even worst than that in the middle of a video that you are watching or even worse yet in the middle of a forum thread that you are reading.
    Anyways, you should all follow me on Twitter now because I've totally read the Top 10 Tips to be a good Twitterer and so I'm going to use it to provide quick tweets on what I'm doing/thinking/working/watching/eating/ and whatever else I can think of from now through eternity. (well, at least until the good people at Twitter realize that their website isn't making ANY MONEY and shut the whole thing down.)
  21. admin

    Server Spring Break

    By admin,

    CN was down for a couple of hours early this morning. I woke up and tried to load the CN home page in my web browser and the only I got was a network error. No connectivity to the server, I couldn't even ping it, nothing. Uh oh. I quickly contacted the host and requested a reboot and a few minutes later the server came back up and the site was working again. Hmm, hardware malfunction I thought. There should be something in the server logs to show what happened and when, except there were no error logs. Weird. Maybe Justy is right with her analysis of the situation. After further investigation it turns out that one of the server backup routines failed in the middle of the night which seemed to cause all the connectivity problems. The funny thing is that the server was up and running and chugging away the whole time. It appears that it just decided to go on strike for a few hours and not perform any actual work. I guess Planet Bob wanted to have a little Spring Break of its own. Anyways, everything is back to normal now and I've made some changes to the backup routine to hopefully prevent a similar issue like this in the future.
  22. admin

    Programming Woes

    By admin,

    I spent much of the afternoon today working on a small addition for the navigation menu in Tour of Generals. It seemed like it was going to be a fairly simple addition at first. I made the necessary modifications and loaded it up to test in FireFox - looked great, loaded it up in Google Chrome - looked great, loaded it up in Internet Explorer - FAIL. I'm not one to bash any web browser as they each have their own benefits as well as drawbacks but this recent episode really made me agree with this chart:



    Some of the problems that I came across just tonight with IE were:

    IE renders PNG images different than FireFox. Images with dark backgrounds appear even darker in IE than they should thus making them look like crap. To get the image to look right across all browsers it had to be saved in JPG format.
    IE does not support the CSS inline-block attribute. I ended up having to hack my code like this [style=display:inline-block;zoom: 1;*display: inline] just to make it cross browser compatible.
    The Flash based maps on the site had to be modified because the new navigation menu would drop down below the flash movie. I got this problem all fixed up and then realized that Google Maps has the same problem. I had to do some goofy stuff with the CSS z-index attribute to all make that work.
    I don't normally have this many frustrations like this. I've been doing web programming in one form or another for over 10 years and during those 10 years web standards for browsers have gotten better but we still have a long way to go (aahem..IE...hem).
    After I was all finished my daughter Emily who is almost 2 years old ran up and sat down beside me and we have this little game where I look up an image of an animal on the computer and she tells me what it is, much like flash cards but with Google Images. She lets me know that she wants to play because she flops down beside me, and with (usually sticky) fingers pointing at the computer screen she says, "Horse? Horse? Horse?" So we got to look at horses, monkeys, and ducks to wrap up the evening and with that all was right in the world again.
  23. admin

    What's on admin's mind II

    By admin,

    I thought I'd take a moment write a quick blog update. As you may have noticed CN has received a bit of an influx of new players lately. I’ve been testing out some new methods for promoting CN and also trying to get those new users who join the game up to speed and involved by putting up the CN Demo video and things like that. Of course keeping the game fresh with new updates helps a lot too but I’ve been in and out lately because of a recent loss that my family and I are coping with right now.
    I have been planning and working behind the scenes though and a few user interface changes will be coming soon for things like receiving a message if trade partner is sanctioned, team seniority records, some updates for alliance chart, etc… I also have plans for some gameplay changes like scaled cash loot in battle for larger nations, adding some new (positive) events, preventing duplicate events, making military deployment cost money, etc… I don’t have a time frame on these changes just yet but I’m hoping to get some of these updates rolled out over the next couple of weeks.
    Tournament Edition Round 3 is nearing an end and things are starting to get exciting over there. It seems that there’s been an increase in the number of wars recently as players are starting to fight for their way to the top spot. Remember the winner of round 3 gets to submit a custom flag design of their choice to be added to CN Standard and Tournament Editions. I still have not received a custom design from SammyKhalifa who was the winner of CN:TE Round 2. If anyone has seen him tell him I’m still waiting on his flag submission. Tournament Round 4 will begin on 2/26/2008 and I’m planning to reduce the cost of spies and spy missions to make spying have a bigger part in future rounds. I'm also considering shortening the tournament rounds to 2 months instead of 3 but I'm not so sure on that idea just yet. I've also added a CN:TE specific suggestion box so if you have any ideas that you think would be good for CN:TE then head over there.
    What do you think of the updated Cyber Nations forum layout? It’s taking some getting use to but I think the new forum structure is much better. I miss The Water Cooler being near the top of the forums because that’s always been a good one-stop shop for getting my daily dose of RL news when I don’t have time to check out the new sites like CNN but I’ll get use to the new location. Thanks to the moderation team for collaborating on the restructuring and getting it done.
  24. admin
    Today Cyber Nations is 3 years old. My where has the time gone? From it's humble beginnings as a very basic game that didn't include most of the bells and whistles that you see today (including trades, foreign aid, improvements, wonders, aircraft, navy, etc...) to where it is today it's all been a great ride and I hope it only gets better from here. Thanks to everyone who played the game during these 3 years especially all of those who've stuck around and played the entire time. A special thanks to all the mods who help keep things orderly and fun around here. And now I leave you old timers with an image that might bring back some memories, way back when everything was simple, the very first Cyber Nations logo.

  25. admin

    Tour of Generals

    By admin,

    For the past few months I’ve been working on a little side website project. The website is a browser based tactical war strategy game called Tour of Generals. The game is a Risk like strategy game that uses Google Maps and it involves creating, moving, and fighting armies and capturing territories on the map. The game has a wide variety of real world maps to play on including the United States, Europe, Asia, Germany, France, and lots more and many options to customize each game including the ability to set the turn frequency rate from anywhere to 1 minute turns to 24 hour turns. Players can play in multiple games at the same time so that while you’re waiting for a turn update in one game you can be active in another.
    I had the idea for Tour of Generals and have been going over various concepts since around June 2007 but only recently started coding on the site in September 2008. A few moderators Cyber Nations and friends began alpha testing the game in early December 2008 and have really had a blast tearing each other apart, although I’m usually the one doing most of the tearing. I'll be managing CN:Standard, CN:TE, and Tour of Generals but we decided to keep the CN forums separate from the ToG forums.
    Today, with the arrival of the new year I’ve rolled the game out of alpha testing and into public beta so if you’d like to play I welcome to you check out the site and sign up for free. Tell your friends and see who has the best tactical war strategies among you. To help you get started please read over the About Tour of Generals section and watch the demonstration video. Since the game is so new if you have any problems please report them in the Report A Bug section of the forums.
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