Ramp’s stuff looking good…

A long time ago, I added a whole bunch of sortie statistics to the “Mission Results” packet, but then Ramp got derailed by one of Rafter’s evil plots and it never got added to teh AAR screen.

Rafter was on vacation last week, so we knew we had a whole week of Ramp time, and I was all set to bust Gophur/Ramp’s chops to get the darn stats onto the AAR screen. Fortunately, Ramp’s just been waiting for a long enough slice of time to actually give it a decent treatment. And so far it’s looking good. Well, any presentation of this long-needed info would look good. It’s just a list, and some stats, and a general improvement to the AAR screen and possibly a fix for some of those “Waiting for mission results” states (there did seem to be a quirk in the way the client handled the messages so that it could decide it needed the results *after* having processed them).

Ok, so I’m blogging about someone else’s work. I’ve been contributing! Little things like “How about we not color-code the missions differently than everything else?” so attack missions are the same color as we color town names that are attack objectives, and defense missions … go on, guess.

We’re also adding resupply missions, although that is purely informational just now unless I can afford to divert a little more time into them. It’s mostly so that when you post a mission you can see what are valid types. You can only choose a Resupply mission type from your current DivHQ TO your BrigadeHQ.

TOE stuff paused while we get a few of the other features into open beta, and yes, its possible TOEs might be 1.24.x where x is > 0, but they will be in 1.24.

I’m currently trying to find a way to add the Squad Name to player data we send you, without increasing the size of the player data.

Magic!

Crappy stats

Still regretting, see? So I’m looking at my blog’s puny stats. Oddly I get a lot of referrals from brokentoys.org and raphkoster.com. But I couldn’t help but chuckle when I was looking at the search terms… Following in Lum’s footsteps, here are some of the most common and/or esoteric:

Sit & Regret: Post-EVE note

As I sit here, regretting spicy chicken wings, I’m browsing around on my laptop, and I notice I finally got a response to my Eve /petition:

2006.07.28 06:19:00   GM Markab
————————————————————————
After an investigation, we have now returned the ship to your hangar. Some items might be missing from the ship (the ones left in loot container), and those we are unfortunately unable to replace. Note that we have removed the insurance payout you received for the ship loss. Further details are available in your character’s eve-mail inbox. Thank you for your patience.

17 day turn around. Guess the Free Trial has killed their tech support guys. Feel any better, Bloo?

I’ve died

Which means that I now qualify for life.

Earlier today I took a short break from working on hulks, to try and notch up a couple thousand points on MUD1, having lost my character at the rank of Enchanter (it’s a rank, not a class, in MUD1) and his ~25,000 points on Tuesday night when I lost my network connection (The irony of my trip down memory lane being spoiled by a CTHL…)

I’d just about done gathering this and that, when it started to rain (uh, in the game). I had been about to go sailing, but the waters around The Land are lethal when its raining. So I decided to finish one last quest before logging. And then I was dead.

Now playing

Now playing:

Penguin Cafe Orchestra/, Fight Club (Soundtrack)/, Tron 2.0 Theme, (Odd that I find this helps me focus), Schoene Blaue Danube, Vindaloo, Fatboy Slim – Praise You, Blur – Song 2, Shakira/Britney/Beegees QMix

Code in progress:

  // Check the population of hulks in the zone around this 
  // hulk's grid, tracking which cell has the highest count so that 
  // we can pull an older hulk if population limits are reached.  
  GridKey key(gx, gy) ;  
  ChatGrid& cell = _chatGrid[key] ;      

  if ( _countHulks(cell) > wwii_config.stosHulkLimitPerCell )  
    _popHulk(cell) ;     

  // Setting shlpa to zero disables this functionality  
  if ( wwii_config.stoHulkLimitPerArea <= 0 )  
    return ;     

  // Start with the assumption ours will be highest populated  
  ChatGrid& highestPopulatedCell = cell ;      

  // Iterators/counters for the loop  
  NEIGHBORS::iterator nIt ;  
  STOS::iterator sIt ;  
  UINT32 hulksInArea ;      

  for ( nIt = cell.neighborhood().begin()  
      ; nIt != cell.neighborhood().end()  
      ; ++nIt )  
  {  
    ///TODO: Track the highest populated neighbor, count  
  }     

  // Are we worried about population counts?  
  // NOTE: shlpa values can go down as well as up, so  
  // don't assume we'll never be more than 1 over  
  // (hence while instead of if)  
  while ( hulksInArea > wwii_config.stoHulkLimitPerArea )  
  {  
    _popHulk(highestPopulatedCell) ;  
    --hulksInArea ;  
  }

Incredible hulks

There’s nothing incredible about them, actually. Incredibly sucky, maybe?

I’m slowly learning why when I got here, all the coders were “Can’t do!“ers. Apparently last week I agreed to do hulks. Actually, I thought what I said was more on the lines of “sure we could do them but they need a lot of work and design or they’ll either be crap or use a lot of bandwidth, and I don’t think we want to use more bandwidth just now do we”?

Ramp’s been working on various UI things this week, there’s some real goodness potential there. Missions and brigades you have squad members on will have a squad icon next to them, you can switch to a squaddies brigade/mission with a click (agh, I better make sure he’s taken country into account there).

I was also trying to talk him into some other concepts like (common) mission shortcuts (e.g. right click on a town next to your brigade and get a context menu offering probable mission types), and the holy grail of right clicking on a town to select a brigade. Today, I believe, he was working on adding the AAR scoring details that I’ve been sending since 1.20 on the AAR screen – so you’ll now whether you bombed things, killed AI, etc, etc.

Gophur was also tossing around an idea to let you use “/join player” to switch brigade/mission to where a particular player is. Given the reaction to “/who” I think that’d cause hissy fits, so I suggested we limit it to a mission leader — i.e. if you type “/join gophur” and he’s running a mission, it’ll switch to the neccesary brigade and select that mission for ya.

I’m going to finalize what I was doing with hulks tomorrow, hopefully round off the /takelead and related mission changes, take a last look at the practicality of some changes to the multicrew system I was making (maybe late at this stage), and see if I can find somewhere to squeeze the 48 bits into an already crammed data structure so you can see squad tags under icons (if you turn the option on).

Spam?

Monkey elevated by anal probe vacation.

I think it probably is. But, no links, no dodgy markup in the message headers, body or transport. An address collector (based on non-returns) maybe?

Ok, game related

Just to convince some of you I do actually still work. For CRS, too. On WWII Online.

I recently lobbed this at the production team as a possible option for replacing the current auto-leader selection. Shouldn’t take me more than a few hours to implement.

Frontal lobe massage

Maybe it’s been the heat, but I’ve been a little run down lately, so I’ve been doing some serious … resting … on the weekends lately, as well as finding some simple, short-term problems to engage my programming faculties on.

I think too much multi-tasking, or multi-tasking during the wrong phase of programming, can train your brain into becoming a “make a start”er, and I like not to slip into that, so I like to find a problem or two that I figure I can tackle fairly quickly, and that I can only tackle if I can get my brains attention on it.

My only issue is that I won’t solve abstract problems. They have to be practical to me in some sense, so it can take a little effort finding a problem on which I will engage in all aspects.

This weeks problem, I will present for your entertainment, but in an abstract form ;)

You haven’t lived until you’ve died in MUD

Playing MUD1 has been both a trip down memory lane and a nice, gentle mental exercise. But its also been a strange experience; MUD1 is so tiny and so disjointed that it seems much less removed from the sample adventure (“Precious Days“). But then according to his book at the time, Artificial Intelligence & Computer Games, part of the purpose behind MUD1 was to create a system that both people and AI/expert systems would interact in. MUD1 has that clinical compsci feel to it, eclectic puzzles and mind ticklers like “aucg minus O = ?”.

So this weekend I decided to give MUD2 a try. The same guy that runs MUD1, Viktor Toth, also runs MUD2.com, but MUD2 isn’t free. (Cheap, but not free). I downloaded a client, clio, and was setting it up when I noticed it had links to both MUD2.com and MUDII.co.uk…

Being a limey, I felt inclined to check out this co.uk version… As well as stiring thoughts of home, I noticed it was run by some guy calling himself Foddy. Wait a second, that name rings a bell.