Ok, I'm officially scheduling the test for 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Sunday September 2nd. Most of CTF should be functional by then, Territory is mostly in... basically if you are close to your flag you'll be in your own territory, close to an enemies you are in theirs. Where the regions overlap is contested territory. I hope to tie being able to tag into this so you can only use tagging defensively. We'll see how that goes. See everyone Sunday!
I've been cranking along and have CTF mostly complete. So far I have flag items which can be aligned with a faction, as well as flag rooms that are also aligned with a faction. If the proper flag is in a flag room then that flag will appear on the map, and be visible on survey. If you drop an opposing team's flag in your flag room it disappears and your team scores. Currently I'm working on adding the territory system which will allow me to limit tagging to be only valid in friendly territory.. so basically tagging to stop people will be a defensive tool like in the Capture the Flag I so fondly remember as a child. There are a few other tweaks left like adding some jail code and hopefully an automated CTF running system, then I will be complete.
I'm looking to schedule the next test this coming weekend, preferably Sunday or Monday. We will run with whatever level of completion I have on CTF and see how it works and make sure I haven't broken anything. Go hit up the Tester Group and give me some feedback.
It's been a little over a week since my last post. Things have been hectic as mentioned earlier, a weekend in Vermont, a full week as a TA for the summer program they have for incoming engineering students, followed by yet another weekend away to celebrate my birthday. Only two more things to deal with before I can relax... tomorrow I need to get my license renewed, and Wednesday I am moving into my dorm for the fall. Once that is done though, it will be a lot less stressful transitioning into the fall semester so I am really grateful for the early move. Once all of that stressful stuff is done then I can go back to working on finishing up CTF, I am projecting two good weekends to work on it, excluding the weekend of the 18th, I think I will be home then.
Other then this progress report I have only one other cool story I wish to tell. For FSI... Freshman Summer Institute I came up with the idea of running some computer games for the students as a night activity to help entertain the hordes of board 18 year olds. This worked out quite well, we played Starseige: Tribes, a 9 year old FPS that runs great on machines with limited graphics hardware, and could be pasted onto each machine. Didn't hurt that its freeware now. Thats all for now, and definitely expect another dynamic test in the next two weeks or so.
For those that haven't noticed I have been posting a bit less the past week or so. Things in life are picking up a bit so I will be short on time. I am heading out of town for the weekend, and upon my return I will be spending just about every waking hour working as a TA for a summer engineering program for the week. The weekend following that is my birthday, so I am heading out of town again. Sometime around there I need to take care of renewing my license, and right after I get back I need to deal with moving to my new dorm room for the fall, they're moving us earlier then I thought. Hopefully I will get a chance to finish up CTF by the next free weekend I have. I will try and squeeze in a test if I have a free afternoon. I'm hoping I will get a few posts in among all that mess, but if I don't, just know I'm not slacking.
As I mentioned on Wednesday, I worked on the accessibility issues that were found during the last test. There were three main issues at hand:
A method of disabling the map.
The map provides nothing but unpronounceable spam for a user who is playing using a reader program. I added a new config command, so by typing config map n the map can be disabled.
A method of disabling the prompt.
Like the map, the prompt must get annoying for a player using a screen reader. This was another direct request, and so I did my best to satisfy it. Config prompt n will disable the map.
Provide the information on the map in a verbal form.
This issue wasnt exactly a direct request, it was more or less implied. Previous to today a player with a screen reader had absolutely no information about their surroundings. By enabling the auto survey using config survey y, a player now sees a listing of the 'regions' surrounding them, and the direction they are in. This allows a player to have a better grasp of where they are without the map, and also shows them the players in the area, much like the highlight we have on the map.
The second method of providing this information was using an auto exits config option. This displays the names of the rooms immediately north, south, east, and west. This gives the player even more information about where they directly are.
These features appear to be working correctly, the only thing that remains to be done is testing them with actual an actual screen reader, and see if this provides enough information. Ultimately I think this is worlds better then we were at before, but I think there will always be a few features that will be impossible to convert, and a player with use of a map will likely always have at least a slight natural advantage.
For the past few weeks I have been reading a pretty new blog about breaking free of the 9 to 5 job and starting your own business. The Author, Brian Armstrong is a young entrepreneur who has had several small successes so far under his belt, and all in his early twenties. Brian has also written a book
I've managed to get items integrated with relatively little work. As a result I can move forward this week with some more new stuff. First on my priority list is fixing the bugs that were found during last week's test. Most of these are minor and quick fixes so hopefully shortly into this coming weekend I will be able to move on into the accessibility issues that were made quite obvious during the test.
The problem that needs to be solved here now is finding a way to represent large amounts of data that is intended to be visual in a way that could be easily consumed by a user using a reader program. I have a few ideas, the simplest of them is implementing an exits display, listing the 'rooms' that surround your current room like most mud's already have as a normal feature. The harder problem is representing the 100 or so rooms that might be within a 5 room radius of the player. Does anyone have any ideas?
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was trying out spotplex. Since I have set it up I really haven't gained anything from the experience. Their code does an ok job at tracking activity on each individual page, but it still seems to be flawed, it was able to ignore some of this activity. Even on the best of days, when I was getting what for me was very good traffic for a single day, on an individual post page at that, I didn't receive any traffic from spotplex. They have managed to prove to me that unless I am already a big player I do not have any chance of gaining any benefit from their service. Hell, I got more hits from technorati because of my post about spotplex then from spotplex itself.
The Bottom Line: Unless you already have a reasonable amount of daily traffic I wouldn't even consider using it.
Over the past couple of weeks I have begun to pay more attention to link popularity and page ranks. In my searches I came across a pair of tools that can be helpful for performing analyses in this area.
The first of these tools is at www.widexl.com. This tool takes the url of a site or sites as input, and produces a count of the number of search hits on a handful of search engines: Google, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, and MSN. The output also displays a handful of other sites as a reference.
The other tool I found is used for predicting your google page rank. Google is constantly updating their own page rank, but this doesn't appear in the directories (as seen with the google toolbar for example) immediately. Instead google does an update to the directory several times a year. This tool predicts the page rank based on back links to your site. Quite useful for planning, and to see the fruits of your page promoting efforts.
Within the past week or so this blog has broken into the top million websites listed on Alexa.com. This really isn't that big of a deal, but things have been moving up right along. To be honest I am still unsure if this is because of all the increased traffic I have have picked up, or if it is just because I now check the blog about twice a day with the toolbar I installed. Whatever the cause its a definite plus!
Reminder: Anyone with questions about DynamicMUD should read this post. I will aim to start answering questions over this next week.
Todays test went quite well. A few bugs were found, but not many, which is always a good thing. During the test a lot of questions started flying, so I think this is a good time to let people ask questions about DynamicMUD. So far a bunch of people have expressed interest in the project so far, but I think a lot of people so far have only had a chance to scratch the surface per say. If you haven't yet I would definitely recommend reading about what DynamicMUD is. If you have any questions about gameplay, features, the timetable, or anything else about the project please post a comment here and I will either post an answer to the question, or reply directly to the comment.
The test that I keep mentioning is tomorrow! The event is scheduled for tomorrow at 3:00PM Eastern Standard Time. If your not in the EST time zone then look up what time that is for you here. If you haven't already signed up or haven't considered showing up, please do, it will be very helpful for development, and should be a good hour or so of entertainment.
This is a good opportunity to explain what is in the plan book for the next few weeks. This Saturday we are running our second test of the summer. This coming weekend and next week my current plan for coding is to work on integrating items with the persistence system that the game world and being are all tied into. This will allow for a great expansion of potential options for players during testing. The first few off the top of my head are capture the flag, find and retrieve, and keep away type games.
I am going home for part of the weekend to drop off my car for some work so hopefully I will be able to accomplish all of my goals for the weekend. If I can pull this off, then my plan for the following weekend will be to implement a capture the flag game by integrating tag and items. This also might be pushing my luck because of a wedding that weekend. And of course the weekend following that I will be out of town for karate. My plans for the remainder of the summer involve lots of testing and polishing of the core code. Hopefully by early net year I will be ready to start expanding on the core.
Yesterday I got a chance to try out an interesting new game... the only First Person Shooter I have ever seen then is entirely implemented in shockwave. The game plays much like Quake or Unreal Tournament, has a handful of weapons, and some great visual effects for a 3d game implemented in only shockwave.
The name of the game is Phosphor, and as far as I can tell it is being developed by a group called rasterwerks. Phosphor includes bots for a single player arena type game play. While a single player FPS implemented entirely in shockwave is crazy enough, there is still more! The game includes network and internet multiplayer! 
This is a crazy find, and definite good free game to try out. I think this is the future model for games, and provides a great opportunity to become profitable while remaining a free game. Great for a short break from work or as a short diversion, but ultimately the best MMO style game is still going to be DynamicMUD. At any rate I would still recommend you give it a try!
A few weeks ago google adsense added a new set of referrals. These referrals are unlike the previous set, as they come from a much larger base of advertisers. These referrals are basically CPA or Cost Per Action ads, which means that the publisher is paid when a specific action is performed (for example sign up for a service). These ads can be run in conjunction with the normal ads, and many of them offer some serious pay outs. These also come with the advantage of letting the publisher guide his or her users to the ads through recommendations, which is a serious no-no with normal adsense.
I am hoping that these new ads (they are now rotating in the top right hand corner of the page) will bring in some additional revenue. I choose mainly gaming related referrals, two of them are for game design educational programs, and a few are casual games, and a computer hardware one. I can and will recommend you check out these services.
Like I mentioned on Friday... and yesterday, a test is planned for the end of this week. That test will be on Saturday at 3pm EST. We will be testing to make bug fixes, minor code tweaks, and internal changes are all fully functional and stable. The main event for the day will be several games of tag, probably in several rounds, including a free for all, and a team vs team game of tag. If you wish to attend please go to the Tester Group and rsvp. Thanks all.
The past day or so away did some good I think, got a good chance to relax without thinking about work, school, or even Dynamic (though I guess I really didn't stop thinking about dynamic.. I ended up having a good discussion on the subject with my brother. I got some reading in, played some monopoly, and even spent time outside on purpose!
I'm still looking for information on when the best day and time to hold the next Dynamic test. So far I've only have a slight indication that one individual will only be able to show up on Sunday, and someone did sign up for the tester group. Other then that its still open, so please let me know, Saturday or Sunday, what time of day? Post a comment here, post a reply on the tester group, or email my DynamicMUD gmail account.
I've been making some progress, not a lot of crazy new features, but some internal changes of reasonable magnitude. I think next weekend (21st and 22nd) of July would likely be the best time to run the next test. This should give me an opportunity to make sure the kinks are out of all the new internal changes.
In order to run this test I need people, preferably more then last time. So my question to all of you is: what day and time is the best for you? I will be scheduling this test even next week, probably on Sunday or Monday, and I could really use some feedback for planning the best day and time. Anyone who isn't already a member of the tester group please go join if you are interested in helping out.
This will be my last post of the week, I am leaving tonight to take a weekend
on vacation, I will be back Sunday night.
It's been a few days since I last posted, mostly because I've been caught up with a few things, and quite frankly couldn't find anything I really wanted to sit down and write. I still have more then a week before I will be able to sit down to code a bug project so I've been slowly working at some functionality for dynamic to make it more stable, and I have some more things planned to help with debugging. The most notable change I did this week is to write some code to cleanly shutdown instead of crash. As long as the game doesn't hit an infinite loop then there is no reason why the game wont shutdown cleanly, saving all player and world data. This was implemented using a java shutdown hook. The hook allows you to create a thread that will be started when the application is terminated. For more details check out the Java Runtime Class.
The next major debugging tool I plan on writing wont happen until sometime after my next two 'weekend projects'. I am considering writing some code that would dump the state of every variable in the game when it exits prematurely (crashes). This would give me a snapshot of everything at the moment of the crash, and would be very beneficial for spotting the causes of bugs. Most importantly it will help me diagnose issues that occur when I am not around to see them, which will become an increasingly important issue as dynamic gets to the point of release.
A productive weekend so far, and I still have some time yet tonight. I managed to fix a bunch of bugs, correct some flaws in how some core modules operated, and added some useful staff functionality. And for the first time in a while it feels like the end of my short term todo list might be reachable. Things are going so well that the next weekend I have to code should hopefully be spent entirely on integrating items fully with the persistance model I have. The weekend following that and I will have Capture The Flag coded! Should be a great method of testing when that is done, given enough players show up. Speaking of testing, expect the next one sometime during the weekend after next, as next weekend I am heading out of town.
Slowly but surely the system behind Dynamic is growing, here are some stats. Dynamic is now up to 23335 raw lines of code. Of these lines, 12574 are actual executable lines of code (non comments and whitespace). This code is organized into 10 packages, 124 classes, and 1137 functions. Since moving to subversion I have commited 70 revisions. So far so good, i'm still hoping for version 0.1 by summer's end.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
digg
reddit
del.icio.us
Stumble It!
