RPGN Radio updates: Streaming via external media players!

Well, some good news for you radio listeners, I have been working on a solution to allow synchronization between a streaming server and our web radio player. This means soon you will be able to tune in to our game music radio using external media players such as winamp, foobar, windows media player, tunein, etc.

This feature is still being tested, but so far it has been running fairly smoothly. You can still request to hear your favourite songs via the website interface, and we will be working on an option to toggle the web radio player on and off, so you can turn it off if you are listening via an external player (so the music isn't echoing!). This way you can still use the radio page functions to see recent songs played, make requests etc. I hope to have these features done in the next few days.

We will also have some radio signature banners you can use to link to us, which will display currently playing songs and other information. These should be finished up soon.

As always, we are still welcoming any and all song suggestions for our music database. Adding new songs has been slow lately as we have been busy, but feel free to drop in to the chatroom, and we will see your requests and get to them as soon as we can!

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on October 04th 2013 at 12:55am 0 Comments

500,000+ Radio Streams, Site Adjustments

First, I would like to thank all of our loyal radio listeners for helping us reach our latest milestone: 500,000 songs streamed! I'm glad to see people enjoying our radio and using the site, as it has been rather quiet around here.

We are in the progress of a site slim-down to re-focus on the important and useful parts of our site. Our radio, game music lyrics, polls, forums and possibly music reviews will remain, while the rest of the site (FMVs, gaming news and reviews) will be archived and retired. We have many ideas, but the lack of design talents and artistic flair do slow things down a little bit. Do you have talents in image design and website design (CSS)? Please do not hesitate to contact us. We could use some help! Unfortunately, all positions here at RPGN are non-paying positions, but your work will be displayed here on RPGN for all to enjoy! If you think you might be able to help, please drop by our IRC chatroom or drop me an email (admin -at- rpgamers.net).

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on July 02nd 2013 at 9:37pm 0 Comments

Site Focus Changes

Over the past week or so I have been considering a direction for our humble community. We will continue to focus and expand RPGN Radio, our game music radio station. We will also work to spice up and improve our game music lyrics database. The future of our reviews section is still on the table. I plan to trim down and clean up the forums, simplifying them into a few sections rather then many.

The videos section (FMV's) which we were once very proud to host, have been long obsoleted by the coming of YouTube. Although the video section will be going offline, most of our videos can still be found on the RPGN YouTube channel.

I've also gone ahead and removed useless pages and links from the menu. Kilu has hinted at some changes to our layout, so maybe we will have a bit of a facelift in the process as well. We can only go up from here, so I'll stop rambling and get back to work. If you have any comments or suggestions for improving the site, just leave a comment on this post.

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on March 27th 2013 at 1:54pm 2 Comments

The Future of the RPGamers Network

As usual, our site takes one step forward and two steps back. It has been a sleeping beast for many years now, other then our fairly active radio station. I have been considering the future for the site, and am looking for opinions and suggestions. Should we try to get the entire site back up and running, or should we fold down some of the areas and focus strictly on the radio?

I mean, we haven't had a new review posted in ages, and the lyrics section is in dire need of updating and expanding. I just can't run this place by myself anymore, and finding motivated people to help me code and update the back-end and add content has been unsuccessful. The forums have not had a peep in months, our re-launch of them did not last long. Some hard choices have to be made in the next while about the future of the community.

I am happy to see our radio station continues to draw in listeners even while the rest of the site sleeps. We have a fair selection of music available now, and a huge to-do list of tunes to add as it expands. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to drop me an email or come in to our IRC chatroom.

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on March 09th 2013 at 2:01pm 0 Comments

October Updates: Radio, Radio, Radio!

This is just a quick blurb about updates over the course of October. Our main focus has been expanding our music selection on the radio, over 150 new songs added this month! Another task we have been tackling is audio normalization, tweaking current songs as needed so some of the louder songs don't scream out at you every time they are played. There are still some in there, but it's a work in progress.

I hope to get our voting polls into a regular rotation again, updated at the beginning of each month. Looks like October's poll results find knights and ninjas to be the most popular RPG character class with mages and archers coming in slightly behind.

As usual, lots of big plans for expansion and clean-up around here, but it will take time. We are in need of some help in various areas, but I'll go into further details about that soon enough. Think you'd be interested in volunteering some of your time to help develop our community? Feel free to drop by our chatroom and inquire!

Oh yeah... Happy Halloween! Going out to a party or maybe trick or treating? Drop us a comment below and let us know what you costume you chose this year!

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on October 31st 2012 at 12:26pm 0 Comments

Minor Site Updates, NEStalgia is a fun NES-style MMORPG!

Hey everyone. We're not dead! I've made some minor changes in the past few weeks, working out bugs around the site, improving our code to be more search engine friendly, and just generally sitting and wondering what the future of RPGN will be like. I struggle to come up with ideas for the site, how we can remain unique and useful online. We've just kind of floated in cyberspace for quite awhile now, ever since our FTP mirrors went offline the site has been in decline. The tracker tried to take on the burden but it was too late I fear, that ship has sailed. Now it's time to figure out what comes next....

I am happy to see our new radio solution has been a success. We've seen an increase to radio listeners and regulars, and it seems to be working flawlessly. We continue to expand the music selection and still welcome feedback and suggestions as always. I've added two new pages to the radio -- A changelog showing recent updates to the radio system and a list of newly added songs, so you can browse and see what's new in our music collection.

A special shout out to the NEStalgia community, who have been giving me a lot of positive feedback about our site. I am a casual player on the Algol server and they seem to be enjoying the music smile It's a great game if you loved classic NES role-playing games such as Dragon Quest, highly recommended. Imagine NES goodness, in MMO-style!

Oh yeah, I also finally rotated the site voting poll! I was meaning to do it monthly, but I fell a bit behind on my plans! The last poll was about what character you'd be in a role playing game, turns out most of you want to be either the main hero (24%) or a friend of the main hero (26%)! Time to find out what kind of class you'd play as a member of the party...

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on September 16th 2012 at 8:27pm 7 Comments

Game Music Radio: Changes and Updates

I'm here to fill you in on some recent changes to our radio system. The major change is most noticed when you switch skins on the radio system. Before, the radio page would reload and the music would get interrupted and restart. Now the skins change without requiring the page to reload or the music to stop. Your preferences are still saved as you change skins, so it should work like before just better.

I also spent some time standardizing the code behind the skins system so they are cleaner and should work properly in all major browsers. The new changes require JavaScript to be enabled on your browser, but most people will have this enabled by default. Please report any glitches or problems while changing skins if you find them.

Next goal is to keep expanding the music library with new tunes. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions for new songs to add. Drop by the chatroom or forums to provide your feedback, or even comment on this news post. I hope everyone is enjoying the music!

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on August 20th 2012 at 5:36pm 0 Comments

Goodbye Torrent Tracker: Service Closed

For the past 15 years, we have tried to be a good source for game music downloads and information. We have hosted various projects trying to keep the community alive. Our torrent tracker was intended to be a lifeline for our retired FTP downloading section. It had a good run, but the usage over the past year has been very low and a decision had to be made. We are retiring our torrent tracker in hopes of focusing on finding a solid direction for the future of the RPGamers Network.

I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who made the torrent tracker great and helped seed files, fill requests and keep the service alive. A special thanks to Marona for undertaking a huge part of the seeding an administration of the tracker.

Still looking for a good resource to download game music albums? Luckily nowadays there are many good resources and game albums are not nearly as rare or hard to come by. One place that does an especially good job at releasing albums in top quality is GameMP3s. I highly recommend you head over and check out their selection of torrents.

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on August 17th 2012 at 4:49pm 6 Comments

Brief outage due to abusive search engine bot

RPGN had a brief blackout this morning due to our server being heavily hammered by an abusive Chinese search engine bot called Baiduspider. I have blocked the abusive hosts, and hopefully everything is back to normal. The spider managed to spam reload our page over a quarter of a million times before things shut down. So fear not, if you saw the message saying our site was disabled it was just a precaution! All is well again.

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on July 11th 2012 at 3:02am 0 Comments

Game Music Radio: Updates

Just wanted to drop a quick note to mention that we have been working hard to improve our radio system! Most importantly, a major Internet Explorer bug has been fixed which was preventing IE users from enjoying our radio station. The bug was caused by an XML file exploit in IE (this is why you should not be using that browser!) The radio should now work properly and not just repeat the same song over and over. Please report any bugs you find!

Happier news now, check out the wide selection of new radio skins! Special thanks to Kilu and Mystro for creating them! (more to come!) We have also expanded the selection of songs. Our database is now well past 1,000 songs with new songs added every week. We welcome suggestions for songs to add so feel free to give some feedback on the forums or in the news comments.

I am working on a new feature for the radio to allow you to customize your listening experience more then you can currently. I won't go into details yet, but I hope you will enjoy it. Watch for more information in the coming weeks smile

Posted in Site News by Locke Member on June 09th 2012 at 5:17pm 0 Comments