Hiring

We decided not to go with the title “Oliver’s Slave”.

http://www.battlegroundeurope.com/index.php/all-news/20-job-posting/2566-job-posting-game-server-programmer

Sims 3: Can’t write license data

I decided to give Sims 3 a shot – despite what Spore did for my opinions of EA. I’m not a Sims player, but I feel obliged to give it a whorl because its such a vast market segment. After playing fine yesterday, today when I tried to launch I got an error “Could not write license data”.

Now, I’ve fixed it and I’ll explain how after the bump, but before I do you need to understand a little about this error.

The Old Republic

LucasArts just released the first cinematic trailer for the KOTOR. Emphasis cinematic. I’ve been making something of an effort not to get sucked into any hype-tornado that might build up prior to the release, not wanting to set myself up for a brutal fantasy-gone-south bashing. I would have loved to work with SWG, with the original team! I didn’t know if I would have wanted to work on the KOTOR MMO (although I know I’d be proud as heck to work with their team, well – aside from a certain crazy German).

No, we won’t appoint you a new CO.

Work-related post.

We get periodic requests from people asking us to change the leadership of a squad. Our policy is very simple: squads belong to their current COs. There are only two requests we will handle regarding a squad, and only if they are verifiably from the current CO.

a) Re-enable voting so that the squad can elect a new leader,
b) Appoint a specific new leader from the current membership.

One particularly large squad seems to be having a bit of an issue right now. A few of their XOs and players have asked us to make them CO/make someone else CO/remove the current CO. Some claimed that the current CO is inactive, others claimed that they don’t like him. Meanwhile, the current CO and officers do seem to be fairly active – actively removing people, in particular the people who have tried to use /voteco.

This is all rather unfortunate, and I can imagine the guys contacting us are somewhat frustrated that we seemingly won’t help them. But there’s no way for us to tell who is who in this fight… Well, except for which player is listed as the CO in our database. And, for better or worse, that’s the guy that owns the squad.

Urgle…

Sunday evening, my motherboard died. I didn’t mind quite so much, the mobo/ram/cpu combo had been a thorn in my side since I built this system. So if I was going to buy parts, I was going to buy matching parts this time. But just in the process of checking out my existing parts, I scraped knuckles, tore the skin over finger joints and gouged a deep hole into my index finger, causing blood to spurt out all over the components inside the case. Ugh.

Building a box… I just don’t want to do it anymore. Sure it’s cheaper, if you count out the cost of neosporin and bandaids and carpet cleaner.

2702 lines of code to create … a variable

Yesterday the ticket to fall onto my desk was an odd one, rumors of the game client crashing on the 30th or 62nd despawn. Indeed, we had several confirmations. Martini provided me with a callstack from a crash which gave me an idea of where the problem was – but about as specific  as knowing that ‘Bob will be in the Bahamas, Tuesday’.

Been a lil’ busy

Sorry about that – heavy enough workload that I’ve not felt like spending time infront of the computer at home. Yeah, it actually happens :)

Thunderbird – why hast thou forsaken me!!!!!

done

Nearly done with PreparedStatement

It’s been a really busy week – starting out with me going locking down on Monday and working from home to get a whole bunch of stuff blasted out without having to go cowboy.

Somehow, inbetween everything else, I’ve managed to get a little ‘recreational coding’ out of the genuine need to get prepared statements integrated into the codebase for what we’re doing with the auth process.

So far, I only need data modifying statements, but the natural progression is a general encapsulation that will also support call/select etc. (Right now I never even both fetching the result set because none of my queries needs to).

I’m going to access the web now…

More experimentation with Managed C++ I mean C++/CLI and running in to an old friend: The Windows Firewall. My code wants to access the Internet, and Windows – properly – wants the user to approve this random piece of code doing that. It’s doing the right thing.

But the problem is until the user clicks approve, my application can’t access the Internet. I wouldn’t mind if it just sat there and waited. But that’s not what happens.