He looked down at the slender hand he held in his own, smiled, and gave it a squeeze.  He leaned back on the steel bench, and took in the scene around him.

Corners of ruined buildings thrust their way into the dust-filled sky.  Crumbling walls exposed the remnants of floors that looked as if they may still support the weight of a man, but would more than likely crumble under him.

“That was a shoe store, just over there – next to the greengrocers – and then there was… I think it was a hardware store.  Most of the grocery store is still standing.  We should go check later for tinned food, it’s probably still edible.”

“Five years ago – is it really that long?  I remember my last day at the office, when the news came in.  When they told us about the war.  I ran straight to my car, and went to get you.  The roads were in utter chaos, but somehow I made it home in time.  Remember how you screamed at me for not letting you pack a bag first?  I just dragged you into the car and headed straight for the mountains.  You were crying because I’d made you leave your jewellery behind.”

“Then we hit the freeway.  The traffic just wasn’t moving at all.  Couldn’t even drive around it, everyone else was already trying that.  So we left the car and started running.  I suppose they had us down as a secondary target, because if they’d launched at us at the beginning we’d never have gotten even that far.”

The wind whistled eerily through the broken buildings.  For a moment, there was a glint of sunlight through a crack in the overcast sky, but it disappeared a second later.

“You always told me I should have quit my job.  Taken something in a big corporation instead.  Told me your parents had always warned you about marrying a public servant.  But then we wouldn’t have been on the list, we’d have been left outside with everyone else.  All those rich families living in their big houses, we’d have died along with them.”

“I half-carried, half-dragged you that last mile to the shelter.  Remember how you asked me why it was so far out there?”  He laughed.  “You said ‘why couldn’t they have put it in the middle of town where we could get to it in time’, and I told you it was because of the minerals in the mountains, something in there made a natural radiation shield, and the tunnels were there already.  All they really had to do was build a door on the front, and they had a ready-made shelter.”

He glanced over to a stone plinth surrounded by rubble.  A pair of feet marked all that remained of a statue.  “Poor old General Carlton.  He stood there all through the rain and storms, through snow and sleet, through the protests and the riots.  Then he gets blown up by the very people he fought to liberate all those years ago.”

Scattered debris flew across the ruined town square as the wind picked up again.  A street sign finally fell from its crooked post as the final rivet gave up after holding on for so long.

“We assumed we would be living down there for ten years.  That’s what they told us, at least.  Enough food for the first five years, and everything we would need to start growing crops outside after that, assuming they hadn’t targeted the mountains themselves.  Such perfect planning.”

“Pity it all got ruined by a defective reactor.  Most of them didn’t know what that siren even meant, they just assumed whatever it was they’d be safe in the bunker.  Good job I’d read the safety manual.  I knew we had about ninety seconds to get clear before the blast doors came down.”

“So I grabbed you and ran, just like all those years before.  This time running in the opposite direction!”  He started to laugh again.  “Oh, everyone was looking and staring as I screamed at them to run, but we just didn’t have time to stop and explain it if we were going to get out in time.”

“We reached the entrance just as the door started coming down.  I wasn’t sure we were going to make it, but that last sprint got us clear.  I rolled under with only inches to spare, and pulled you to safety.”

Above, the sky started to creep ever darker.  It was near impossible to tell the time of day with the sun hidden as it was behind the smoke-filled stratosphere.

“I guess we had better get moving, before it gets too dark to see what we’re doing.  Let’s go see if we can find something for dinner, eh?”

He rose from the bench, looking towards the ruined grocery store again, and lifted the severed arm that had lay next to him.

http://runetwister.com is now http://runetwister.warpedcore.net

This was necessary due to wanting to integrate all the Warpedcore sites with Facebook logins – unfortunately Facebook require everything to sit under the same subdomain to be treated as a single app.

On the plus side, this also means once you’re logged in, you’re logged in across all warpedcore sites as they can now share login cookies!

For the time being, runetwister.com will redirect to the new site.  Maybe I’ll find another use for it later

• The Pandaren are IN as a race! As is the Monk class! Along with the oriental-inspired. continent of Pandaria, level cap 90, and ..er.. pet battles!

• The expansion promises new endgame activities - acknowledging that Cataclysm didn't really introduce any new types of content that hadn't been done before.
• Blizzard also want to get people back into the world and not sitting around Stormwind and Orgrimmar - "outdoor raid bosses" (world bosses) were mentioned.
• Progression - there will be ways to progress your character other than raiding - valor points will be available through other means, such as daily quests, although raids will obviously still be the fastest way.
• More interesting character builds - a refined talent system to eliminate cookie-cutter builds, and hopefully preventing customisation from impacting on DPS, etc (no more being told by your raid leader what spec you need to play!)
• The continent of Pandaria.  Five new levelling zones in a unified continent, unlike Cataclysm.  Asian-inspired style.  It will have an AH, Bank, and Central Questing Hub, meaning less need to keep returning to your capital cities.  There will be no flying there until max level, ensuring a more interesting questing experience.
• Pandaria was shrouded by mists since The Sundering, and is rediscovered when Horde and Alliance fleets are washed ashore after a battle.
• The Wandering Isle - the new Pandaren start zone... and it's a giant turtle!  Pandaren characters will make a one-way choice after this zone to join either the Horde or Alliance.
• Races of Pandaria
• Jinyu - fish-like shamanistic creatures.
• Hozu - monkey-like creatures (concept art looked like a Trogg)
• Verming - the new Kobolds - they look like evil bunnies!
• Mantid - Will be featured in raids and dungeons.  An insect race that have lived next to the Pandaren for millennia, seperated by a giant wall, but are now starting to break through in places.  They are intelligent, wear clothing, and are not a hive mind.
• Mogu - were overthrown 12,000 years ago by the Pandaren, and want their home back.
• Sha - The manifestation of negative energy on Pandaria.  Any sort of battle/conflict creates them, so the arrival of the Horde and Alliance will presumably be creating quite a few of them..
• The Jade Forest - starting zone at L85.  The Horde and Alliance will start at opposite sides.  Filled with lush rainforests and stone spires with Pandaren buildings atop them.  The first look at the Hozu and Jinyu, whom the Horde and Alliance try to befriend and then turn against each other... thus causing more Sha to appear.
• Temple of the Jade Serpent - taken over by Sha, caused by the Horde/Alliance so they have to go in and clean up.
• Valley of the Four Winds - second zone.  Pandaren Farmlands (tiered, Japanese-style) to the north, coastal jungle to the south.  Also home to the Stormstout Brewery - a dungeon!  This area is where we first meet the Mantid.
• New Features
• The Pandaren Race. Available classes are Hunter, Mage, Monk, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, and Warrior.  No Death Knights, Druids (a bear that turns into a bear?!?!), Paladins, or Warlocks.
• Racials: 100% increased stat benefits from food, +15 cooking, rested experience lasts twice as long, and... bouncy - 50% less damage from falling!  Also a 3 second racial "pressure-point" stun.
• Monk Class.
• Brewmaster - Tank.
• Mistweaver - Healer (a healer that can melee - the thing Disc priests were meant to be!)
• Windwalker - Melee DPS.
• Starts at L1 - this is not a hero class.
• Every race except Worgen and Goblins can be monks.
• Monks fight mostly unarmed, but use weapons for some finishers (staves and fist weapons were listed as their signature weapons, but will also be able to use one-handed axes, maces, and swords.  Plus healers can use off-hands.)
• Leather armor with agi/int, so basically the same as druids.
• Energy resource is Chi - used for jab and roll attacks.  Jab creates Light and Dark force, which is then used for everything else.
• Monks will have no auto attack.
• New Talent System
• Choose spec at level 10, as now
• Get a spec ability at level 10, as now
• Additional spec abilities come later - "free" as you level up.  These will most likely be existing core abilities everyone takes anyway.  Some abilities will be used by more than one spec.
• Talents will no longer have points/ranks, you either take it or not.  There will be one talent tree per class, not spec.  You earn a talent every 15 levels, and choose one of the three.  The goal is not to have any mandatory talents, and ensure that there are no "must have" talents.  Talents will be changed about as easily as glyphs.
• PvE Scenarios
• A short instance for a few players.  The number of players required may vary.
• Not a tank/heal/dps setup - designed for players in quest specs.
• Will re-use existing world areas, not a contained dungeon.
• Lower-level scenarios designed to scale up and play at higher level too.
• Some may be battleground-style, minus the enemy players.  So thats just like AV? :)
• Potential replacement for group quests.
• Queued for as Dungeon Finder, but with no role requirements!
• Awards valor points.
• Challenge Mode Dungeons
• These will be time-trial versions of dungeons, awarding a Bronze, Silver or Gold medal (presumably depending on the time taken?)
• Gear is scaled down to a fixed point ("normalized") to prevent people beating them by outgearing them.
• Awards valor points, plus unique statless items for transmogrification purposes.
• Will have leaderboards for bragging rights, giving a competitive edge to PvE.
• Pet Battle System
• This is for non-combat (companion) pets.
• Pets can be levelled.
• No minimum level to participate.
• Almost every pet in the game right now will be able to work with it, plus there will be new pets such as the new wild pets - faught with existing pets and added to your collection... wait, where have I heard that before?
• Pets can be customised with abilities and names.
• Most pets will also become tradable via auction house.  Higher-level/rare pets should fetch more money.
• Pets should be account-wide, accessible to all of your characters.
• Queue for battles, matched against similar-level pets.
• Dungeons
• 9 New Dungeons ,6 on Pendaria.
• Scholomance, and a new two-wing Scarlet Monastery, will be updated.
• Raids
• Three new raids, featuring the Mogu and Mantid. Each will have three difficulty levels  (Raid Finder, Normal, and Heroic)
• World Raid Bosses.
• Questing
• There will be more endgame quest content, some of which will give Valor Points.
• There may be incentives (e.g. dungeon/raid buffs) for players who do the endgame quests.  Possibly extra loot to roll on.
• PvP
• New BGs and Arena
• Achievements
• Will be shared across the entire Battle.net account.
• Ranged Weapons
• Hunter minimum range is gone.
• Hunter melee weapon - also gone, as they don't need it any more. (HA, no more hunter weapons)
• Ranged slot gone for everyone else.  As are relics.
• Rogue and Warrior will be able to throw their melee weapon.
• Wand become main hand weapons (daggers/staff/sword still alternatives)
• Warlocks (w00t)
• Each spec will have a unique resource. Affliction will use Soul Shards. Demo will have Demonic Fury (works a bit like fury) - metamorphosis will proc when you max out Demonic Fury. Destro will have Infernal Embers.
• Shaman
• Buff totems are going.  Totems will be for utility, for example the new Earthgrab Totem which roots mobs, the Repulsion Totem, and the Bulwark Totem (absorb shield)
• Druids
• Feral Spec will now be split into Feral (Cat) and Guardian (Bear), giving Druids four specs.
• Everyone
• Spell books will be cleaned up. Rotations are improved. Spells are now learned automatically instead of visiting the trainer

On the other hand, having a website with different themes all over and users having to sign up twice is worse.

I tried to find an integrated forum solution for WordPress.  I really did.  Problem is, I’m used to something that works like phpBB, and none of the solutions I could find were similar enough.

bbPress isn’t mature enough.  On the integration side it’s perfect, but it just doesn’t do enough.  I don’t want to have to rely on a dozen plugins just to get basic things like security and user rights.

Simple:Press is just too darned ugly. Sorry, but it just looks like a forum crammed inside a wordpress page.

So looks like I was stuck with having to integrate an existing standalone forum into WordPress.  I’d done some work in the past integrating MediaWiki so it didn’t look like an impossible task.  Mostly its a case of editing the forum theme to strip out extraneous formatting and then wrapping the WordPress header and footer around it.

The next issue was phpBB itself.  Every modification requires hacking the core files – there’s no plugin/hook system.  So instead I looked around for a forum that actually had a plugin system.  MyBB stood out as one of the more progressive ones, with a plugin/hook system much like WordPress’s own.

So, I had my forum, and just had to make a plugin to make it work inside WordPress.  Right?

Wrong.

Had MyBB not used the exact same function names as WordPress in a few places, I could have pulled it off relatively easily.  Unfortunately, not the case.

(note to anyone reading this, if you ever write anything in PHP and want people to actually use it, for gods sake use Namespaces)

In the interests of making no real code changes, I thought perhaps it would be enough to throw a namespace declaration at the beginning of each MyBB file.  Not that simple – MyBB references objects by name internally, and if you start namespacing them it expects the references to use the namespace too.  Way too much core hacking involved, and required far too much messing around working out how MyBB actually works to figure out what to change and where.

I was still resisting making any changes to MyBB core files, but really needed to rename those duplicate functions.  I thought about abandoning my stance on core hacking and just hoping Subversion could help me merge future releases with my changes, but wanted one last shot with a wild idea.

What if it were possible to make on-the-fly edits to PHP files as they were read by the server? This would leave them unchanged on disc, and just rename the functions in memory before executing them.  Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?  Pity I didn’t have a clue how to start.

I began by trying to use an Apache filter, but it got far too complicated.  And besides, I wasn’t sure it was even the right approach.  Then I managed to stray across this post.

Yes, you’re reading that post right (you did click the link, didn’t you? If not go click it now, I promise you if you’re a PHP coder it’ll rip apart your whole idea of how things work, and start making your creativity do loop-the-loops coming up with new and interesting things to do with the idea) – thats a PHP script that intercepts file access and makes on-the-fly changes as they are read (and could make them as they are written, if you wanted it to).  It’s called a Stream Wrapper, and is quite possibly the coolest thing you can possibly do in PHP.

So I used that as a base, and wrote a similar one.  Mine performs search/replace on those duplicate function names in MyBB (mostly just prefixing them with “mybb_”) so it can coexist with WordPress.  Then I do some magic with injecting my own functions into certain places to check the logged-on WordPress user and log them into MyBB, creating a user with the same name where necessary.

Its mostly working now, in testing on the new Warpedcore Community site, and I’ll upload it here when I’ve finished testing it out.  It’s got a few things specific to this site in it, but it should be helpful for anyone else trying to integrate WordPress and MyBB.

You know, what the hell, lets do one for phpBB too.

The Positives

• "Gold selling" happens anyway, this just puts the profit in the hands of the developers instead of some shady little account-stealing operation.
• Blizzard making extra cash this way means less need to raise subscription fees, and possibly even a route to go F2P over time if they expand the idea with more items.
• People that do not have the cash have a way to get a new premium pet with ingame currency.
• People that do not have time to grind gold (although at the speed it rolls in nowadays I honestly can't see how) have a means to make some.
• No new gold is magically produced, it still has to come from someone doing something in-game to earn it in the first place. Therefore the overall economy is maintained, and currency is not devalued.

The Negatives

• People with real-life money have a means of getting gold without putting in the effort in-game.
• A move to pets being single-use instead of BoA.

Final Analysis

Once upon a time, there was a really really nifty little niche hobby called role-playing games, or RPGs.

Then the companies that made them wanted mass appeal, and as with so many other things that have done that the focus was lost and something new was born, something that bore the same old name but in reality was a completely different animal.

These games used to be written by hobbyists for hobbyists, with the profit being something nice to get out of it.  As the big corporations took over, the focus became making the game appeal to as many people as possible to rake in the cash.

Looking back, the first signs are evident in the history of Games Workshop, as they turned from a few guys making games for a mail-order business into a mass-producer of miniatures.  Just looking at the various editions of their rulebooks over the years, you can see how they turned from interesting little fantasy battles into a sales pitch for their miniatures business.  They’re also quite possibly the party most responsible for turning our related wargaming hobby from a way to fight out an imaginary battle into a competition where the rulebook is king. and are a big proponent of RAW.

Competition. Balance.  I hate those terms as much as Rules As Written.  They have no place in this hobby.  Our roots are in fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings, and Gandalf sure as hell was not balanced with Bilbo.

Over the years, the evil that is RAW has spread to the mainstream roleplaying products.  Once upon a time, the first page of any rulebook told the DM/GM/Judge that this was their game, to ignore any rules that didn’t fit with their group, to make up any others they needed to cover unforseen situations, and that having fun was paramount.  This was our beloved hobby, one where the rules existed primarily to help define the physics of a fantasy world in which we were creating a collaborative story.  When we wanted RAW, we brought out Chess and Monopoly boards.  When we wanted to dive into a world of our own creation, we brought out the RPG rulebooks.

Pick up the latest edition of the more mainstream RPG products, and you’ll probably not recognise them as RPG rulebooks at all.  They read more like instructions for playing a board game, a CCG, or as the system behind a computer game.  Everything is clearly defined.  Some assume you’ll be playing on a grid with miniatures or counters, and don’t even mention not using them.  Some even discourage players from performing actions that aren’t in the rulebook…

It was all done, of course, to make RPGs appeal to the mass market.  Initially that seemed like a good thing – it brought more players into the hobby, and more money.  The problem was, it also changed the hobby from the thing we actually wanted to play.  It’s happening everywhere – just ask fans of Science Fiction what happened to the Sci-Fi channel.  Niche markets just aren’t profitable enough¹, so they’re being pushed aside.

So what about those of us who actually liked the niche market?

¹ – That is to say, the company owner/board/shareholders can see more profit if they drop what they’re doing and do something different instead.  Maybe that’s what business is all about, but if all the toilet paper factories thought they could make more money making stationery we’d all be in trouble, wouldn’t we?

Threw myself back into WoW with a passion.  Probably not the best solution, but it keeps me occupied and gives me a reason to get up in the mornings at the moment.  Am currently solo-achievement-whoring my way through the list.

Can’t really face anything more community-orientated than that at the moment.  Sorry to everyone I’ve let down yet again… I just need a bit of time.  Deep down I know retreating isn’t the answer, but it’s difficult to do anything else.

“Under Construction”.

Unfortunately they apply here.  Content needs to be imported from the old site over the next few days, so for now there’s not really anything to see here.

You may wish to check out warpedcore.net though.

Pretty much everything from the old site is now uploaded once more.