Hogwarts Live Blog

Ok, by now I'm sure a lot of you are wondering why I've pretty much spent the last 24 hours straight coding for HogwartsLive. I felt that in honor of the DVD Release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this week, I felt it was time to put some grunt work in on HogwartsLive for some game enhancements. I was going to wait till I was done with all I had planned before posting this MoTD, but it's been slowing me down answering the same questions over..and over..and over..and over..and over.

Ok, here's what I've done so far.

I started by introducing new areas to the game:

The first new area I introduced to the game was the Ministry of Magic. the Ministry is available to all people who have reached at least the Witch/Wizard Level. The Bluerock Chapel (where you get married) has been relocated here. This means that you cannot get married until you have at least a Witch or Wizard.

Next I introduced Mount Olympus. A place for all those who have reached God/Goddess status. So far nothing special is there, but there will be special items located there in the near future.

Third I introduced Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley. A lot of the shops have been relocated to one of these 2 places. These are accessible from the beginning of the game, and Diagon Alley is now the starting point up until Witch/Wizard.

Third years and above are allowed to visit Hogsmeade Village and the shops there. Maddam Puddlefoots (where you go to flirt) has been moved where it belongs here. If you would like to Flirt in this game you will have to get up to 3rd year status before you can start. The Farm, Mill and Textile Mill are now located here as well, so if you have a job this is where you go.

I've also introduced Spinner's End, a place where only people of Witch/Wizard or higher who are of the Evil alignment can go, and Number 12 Grimmauld Place, a place where only people of Witch/Wizard or higher who are of the Good alignment can go.

Then I made modifications to the Race System. You may only go to the common room of the hogwarts house you are sorted in. This means if you are a Ravenclaw you can only go to Ravenclaw, no travelling to Gryffindor or Slytherin. All shops that were in the common rooms have been moved to other areas, I encourage you to look around as it would take far too long for me to tell you where each and every shop is, but just FYI (the evil shops are either in Spinner's End or in Knockturn Alley).

All shops that were in one of the hogwarts houses have been moved as follows. If you had a house in Gryffindor or Hufflepuff, you can find your house in Hogsmeade. If you had a house in Slytherin you can find your house in Knockturn Alley. If you had a house in Ravenclaw, you can find it in Diagon Alley. For the moment, the houses that were in the Great Hall are located in Hogwarts.

Also on the race system, on First Year when you are asked to choose which house you would like to be on, this choice is now lasting, no longer will you be switching houses each VE. You will not be asked what house you want to be in again until you reach Witch/Wizard. Once you reach Witch/Wizard there will be new loyalties you can select. The only one that is working right now is "Death Eater." Becoming a Death Eater will make you Evil (even if you are really really really good).

Other new loyalties to come include "Auror in Training (you will have to be an AIT for 3 consecutive VE's before the option for Auror will be given to you)", "Unspeakable in Training (you will have to be a UIT for 15 consecutive VEs before the option for Unspeakable will be given to you)", "Gringotts Spell-Breaker", and other new races that we haven't completely ironed out the details for yet. Each will have it's own advantages and disadvantages.

In the forest you can now find a special called a Phoenix. In order to get a Phoenix you will have to be of Good alignment, and in order to keep the Phoenix you will have to keep getting more good points, 15 additional good points per VE.

I am working on some new specials for Evil people to counterballance the Phoenix. One I am working on is the possibility of creating a horcrux when you kill someone in the PvP areas. The Horcrux could be used to stop you from going to the underworld, but you will get something like 200 evil points for creating one.

This isn't quite ALL the enhancements I've made, but as you can tell this has already made our longest MOTD entry pretty much ever, and I have a lot more enhancements to make, but one more thing.

There was a glitch this morning unrelated to what I was working on that caused everyone who had a pet from the pet shop to not be able to do anything on the site (it was quite annoying), the only way I could fix it was to purge all pets. There were over 800 people with Falcons in the game before the purge so please... stop sending in petitions asking for your Falcons back, they aren't coming back. You can buy a Snowy Owl, which has the same stat effects as the Falcon, from Diagon Alley.

The new server is now operational, welcome to the new and improved server. It should be a considerable speed increase, although perhaps not quite as good as is yet to come. Keep your eyes peeled, the best is yet to come!

The new server will be brought online this evening. It is considerably more powerful then the current server and will be a dramatic increase in how much load HL can have at any given point in time.

Unfortunately, although the transfer will only take a few minutes tonight, the DNS Change may cause the site to appear offline to you for several hours once we make the switch. This is something that is out of our control.

The Internet works with a system called DNS (Domain Name Service) which associates names with numbers. In this case the name is www.hogwartslive.com and the number is 64.34.176.216. With a new server comes a new number. While the change of this number in the DNS system will be instantaneous... every ISP (Internet Service Provider) has it's own DNS server, and very commonly these ISP DNS Servers cache the data for several hours. The reason they do this is so that they won't have to look up the ip address for each and every time you click on a link on the site (which on HogwartsLive is a LOT of links) therefore speeding up how long it takes to access a site. Also, your computer will cache this DNS data for a while as well, so that you don't have to ask your ISP's DNS server every page load.

In any case, I'm sorry to be technical but I want to make sure you know WHY the site may appear to be down for a few hours tonight. While the server will be up and ready to accept new connections, your computer and/or your ISP may not notice the change until a few hours after the change has taken place, and therefore the site will appear down for you.

I apologize for any inconvenience, however when the new server is online and running fast, I hope you will all appreciate the improvements.

I've decided to reset the hitpoints and reward you all two gems in exchange for each hitpoint. This decision is based on a majority consensus on the poll and in the forums. Thank you for understanding.

I realize the site has been running a bit slow these past two days and I would like everyone to know that I have purchased a server more than twice as fast as the current one and Edmund will probably have the data transfer completed soon enough. Thanks for your patience.

PS: You can try:
http://harrypotter.wizards.pro
http://encyclopedia.wizards.pro

while you wait.

I just spent about four hours modifying and looking through files (153 to be exact) so that they would work with the 1.0.6 version of the game, and then spent another two hours completing a, dare I say it, flawless upgrade from 1.0.2 to 1.0.6 (the upgrade was fast, the time was mostly spent checking for any obvious errors in case I needed to revert back to the old installation). Please let me know if you experience any unusual errors after today or see any defunct or awkward text and I will address it immediately. You will see several new modules popping up within the next week or so. Enjoy!

You might notice your title has changed... There is a thread in the forums that explains it all

Attention Game Players of Hogwarts Live…

Once again the topic and the act of cyber rape have surfaced on our majestic site. We would hope that you would know and realize that rape in real life or even on a game is not an appropriate action but for those of you who do not I am writing this to let you know in writing that it is in FACT not a topic that should be done on this site and will cause you to be banned from the site. What this means? Well it means do not run around touching, kissing, doing other things to people who have not agreed to do these things with you. If you think you might like someone then use the flirt area available to you in Maddam Puddlefoots located in the Great Hall. So once again just to make double and extra sure we all understand. IF you cyber rape someone you will be banned from the site. We also would prefer that the topic of rape is not talked about in the open chat areas if you feel that you must discuss this topic then do so in owls.

Here are your new Moderators:

auroraborealis 46
orchidarachnid 45
prettyginny 37
armandodippet 32
dharla 31
belgarad 28
keebler 27

PS: Hope you all enjoyed whatever respite you were given from work or school.

Happy holidays to anyone who celebrates something!
Anyway, reelections have finished and the votes are in (you can check the staff list for further details):

!DeputyHeadmaster Errol

YES: 130 NO: 6

@ArchAuror Jodi

YES: 83 NO: 51

@Alchemist Katane

YES: 18 NO: 121

&Professor asmith

YES: 102 NO: 19

&Snowman Soceror

YES: 131 NO: 8

&DemonLord Titan

YES: 131 NO: 8

&Auror poptarts

YES: 121 NO: 10

&Auror celebcrazy

YES: 123 NO: 9

&Auror Uzlezz

YES: 93 NO: 41

&Auror MayeficentKostage

YES: 71 NO: 64