I came up with a fresh idea that I havent yet found any literature online about, and I term it PHP XSessions.

It is pretty much using PHP as per normal, but using the session to hold information in XML format thus giving an easier method to parse large amounts of player and session state information from the server to the user that can be called with a small line of code and easily manipulated and displayed using javascript.

For those curious about the name, I am not talking about the Green vs Briggs fight that has Australian Boxing in turmoil. Nor am I talking about the Gillard vs Abbot fight that is brewing. The programming, nerd gloves are coming off and I'm getting back into some fairly involved interface programming.

So without further ado... Drumroll please!

I had been working on the best solutions for managing the players, towns and guilds in the game and after a lot of different approaches and designs, I am now focusing on having them all grouped as entities. I want the relationships to be dynamic and each town, guild and player share most of the methods and variables. Ownership of resources, units, buildings can all be held by the different entities. As well as many beaurocracy control actions.

Ok here is the first official update on the progress of Merchants and Militia*

I will post a list of things I am working on, and if applicable the link to further information. Currently I am going to say that there won't be links for this update.

Ok so mostly I work in gaming creative fronts and most recently is the work into the in-house authoring of Merchants and Militia. I just thought I would go into a little bit of detail about the main premise of the game, and the strategy that should hopefully will shape some fun dynamic gameplay.

What I see lacks in a lot of multiplayer strategy games, in particular browser based strategy games (BBSG), is the lack of involvement with allies. Most of my experience with BBSGs, in particular some well advertised ones, is that your allies are pretty much people that you maybe communicate with and go on a sort of self elected campaign against another player or players.

There is no economic trade or strategy that goes into building your self sustained town or entity. So in essence this game gets boring and static incredibly quickly.