Online since 2020.
Browser based / No Download: https://www.sbbd.xyz
Spellbound by Darkness Online MMORPG
Re: Spellbound by Darkness Online MMORPG
Update!
This game was released in 2020 and had some initial success. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as successful as my previous online game form around 2015. The previous game called Lands of Chaos Online had over 3500 player accounts and an average of 20 to 30 online at any time. SBBD has only over 800 accounts (all from 2020), but was slightly popular for a little while.
Most of the success was based on the initial concept of the game. For a while, you could withdraw in-game currency as Bitcoin! Like a faucet game (faucets are sites that give crypto for viewing ads). It was a beautiful concept, get paid to play. It worked for a while... until Covid and the crypto crash of 2020. Messed up everything I had going at the time. It was a struggle.
Eventually, disabled/commented out all of the crypto related code on the site and in the game. Aside from that there was no updates and therefore no players. Just a lonely online game now.
Apparently Solvemedia has stopped working on the site recently, so login and registration became broken. I used Solvemedia along with Recaptcha for bot security. In the game, another captcha appears randomly to prevent botting. This captcha was an incomplete design of my own that needed updating.
A while back, I also started the service Faucet Security. A captcha security service. It also needs updating regarding the crypto situation, but works perfectly fine as a third party captcha. I just needed to replace the old in-game captcha with the Faucet Security challenge. Seems to work great.
I also removed all ads from the site (for now). They were no longer maintained, so I will keep it ad free until I find new reputable advertisers. (hopefully first party) Maybe I will post on more sites for promotion like itch.io.
Long story short, Spellbound by Darkness is ready for action!
This game was released in 2020 and had some initial success. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as successful as my previous online game form around 2015. The previous game called Lands of Chaos Online had over 3500 player accounts and an average of 20 to 30 online at any time. SBBD has only over 800 accounts (all from 2020), but was slightly popular for a little while.
Most of the success was based on the initial concept of the game. For a while, you could withdraw in-game currency as Bitcoin! Like a faucet game (faucets are sites that give crypto for viewing ads). It was a beautiful concept, get paid to play. It worked for a while... until Covid and the crypto crash of 2020. Messed up everything I had going at the time. It was a struggle.
Eventually, disabled/commented out all of the crypto related code on the site and in the game. Aside from that there was no updates and therefore no players. Just a lonely online game now.
Apparently Solvemedia has stopped working on the site recently, so login and registration became broken. I used Solvemedia along with Recaptcha for bot security. In the game, another captcha appears randomly to prevent botting. This captcha was an incomplete design of my own that needed updating.
A while back, I also started the service Faucet Security. A captcha security service. It also needs updating regarding the crypto situation, but works perfectly fine as a third party captcha. I just needed to replace the old in-game captcha with the Faucet Security challenge. Seems to work great.
I also removed all ads from the site (for now). They were no longer maintained, so I will keep it ad free until I find new reputable advertisers. (hopefully first party) Maybe I will post on more sites for promotion like itch.io.
Long story short, Spellbound by Darkness is ready for action!
Server Migration
The past few weeks have been difficult. We went through a server migration (still working things out).
All of my websites went down for a few days between waiting for the migration and getting the DNS reconfigured.
While coming back online, some of them had server configuration issues that needed to be worked out. Limited subdomains etc.. That took time.
Things really became messy when all the sites were back online. In particular, SBBD was having major issues! All of a sudden, now captchas aren't working anymore. No more registration, login, or in game captchas. Yikes.
But wait... I've had this problem before... With the previous server admin. We were able to get it going. In 2020... four years ago. I had to figure out what we did to enable DOMDocument loading. Basically allow the setting and restart the server. Except this time it isn't working.
Did I miss something? Maybe, but I'm desperate. This project means a lot to me (along with many others - a stressful situation). I tried multiple approaches to a solution including messing with the PHP version. Doesn't make sense why it would have changed during the migration. I think the version stayed the same, but the permissions/settings changed in some way. It was at version 7.4 initially. Trying lower versions didn't help. Trying newer versions really didn't help either at first.
Anything newer than 8.0 seems too wacky for me right now. With each version, I observed different errors related to the horrible backwards compatibility of PHP. I found that PHP 8 alone allowed my captcha services with my current settings, but at a cost. There was SQL and GDI errors! Ahhhhh!!!
Turns out PHP 8 gives FATAL WARNINGS over closing mysqli connections!! What?! Also, doesn't like GDI image manipulation functions having NULL being passed to them, so gotta check if NULL before doing any GDI stuff.
Seems I have "successfully" migrated sbbd.xyz to PHP version 8 by force. YAY!
I did leave the old code commented out to switch back to PHP 7.4 if ever needed (say another random migration out of nowhere after years of virtually no hickups). I simply hate the assumption that we must be expected to "upgrade" just because a new "version" of something exists. Look at Windows. I am typing this on a Dell Inspiron 1150 with a Pentium 4, Windows XP Sp3. Web browser is Seamonkey 2.49.5 with NoScript.
All of my websites went down for a few days between waiting for the migration and getting the DNS reconfigured.
While coming back online, some of them had server configuration issues that needed to be worked out. Limited subdomains etc.. That took time.
Things really became messy when all the sites were back online. In particular, SBBD was having major issues! All of a sudden, now captchas aren't working anymore. No more registration, login, or in game captchas. Yikes.
But wait... I've had this problem before... With the previous server admin. We were able to get it going. In 2020... four years ago. I had to figure out what we did to enable DOMDocument loading. Basically allow the setting and restart the server. Except this time it isn't working.
Did I miss something? Maybe, but I'm desperate. This project means a lot to me (along with many others - a stressful situation). I tried multiple approaches to a solution including messing with the PHP version. Doesn't make sense why it would have changed during the migration. I think the version stayed the same, but the permissions/settings changed in some way. It was at version 7.4 initially. Trying lower versions didn't help. Trying newer versions really didn't help either at first.
Anything newer than 8.0 seems too wacky for me right now. With each version, I observed different errors related to the horrible backwards compatibility of PHP. I found that PHP 8 alone allowed my captcha services with my current settings, but at a cost. There was SQL and GDI errors! Ahhhhh!!!
Turns out PHP 8 gives FATAL WARNINGS over closing mysqli connections!! What?! Also, doesn't like GDI image manipulation functions having NULL being passed to them, so gotta check if NULL before doing any GDI stuff.
Seems I have "successfully" migrated sbbd.xyz to PHP version 8 by force. YAY!
I did leave the old code commented out to switch back to PHP 7.4 if ever needed (say another random migration out of nowhere after years of virtually no hickups). I simply hate the assumption that we must be expected to "upgrade" just because a new "version" of something exists. Look at Windows. I am typing this on a Dell Inspiron 1150 with a Pentium 4, Windows XP Sp3. Web browser is Seamonkey 2.49.5 with NoScript.
