Goal Setting 2009

It's been a while since I posted here, but I think I'm finally getting the hang of everything. It's time to do my best work, organization and planning! This is a skeleton outline that I will flesh out later.

Technologies:
1) Scriptaculous
2) Prototype
3) Ruby
4) Lua

Project X:
1) Research
2) 3 month goals
3) Take three month goals and turn into month, weekly tasks.

A New Hope: Google Chrome

I'm truly excited about Chrome. It's not nearly perfect, but it's the direction and message it puts out. Had another one of the "big guys" undertook this project they would no doubt not go the open source route or be thinking as ambitiously as the Google team is - the browser does so much work these days it should benefit from OS principles. 

This will not change the face of the web tomorrow - but I bet it will in a few years. I personally cannot wait.

Inadvertent Customer Support in IRC

I have no idea what this user was saying, I assume it's another language, but I digress:

[20:25] mia erotisi?
[20:25] ?
[20:25] 2 malon
[20:26] I'm sorry I do not understand
[20:26] xereis opo call of duty?
[20:26] I'm sorry I don't speak your langage
[20:26] *language
[20:28] keycode for call of duty?
[20:28] I don't have one sorry
[20:29] ok thenks bb

/sigh. It's so hard getting the message of a site and getting it to the end user in a form they can understand. We aren't even on the same planet.

Events Mania

I'm wrapping up polish on the new events system. I need to work on styling/themes. There are small items I need to work on as well:

• permissions, and ensuring they are respected.
• view issues making sure things look neat and smooth.
• management vs guild theme styling.
  
• adding tooltips.
• add ajax.
• add in logging.
• review security.
• add an option to allow users to display upcoming events in some sort of upcoming events queue
  

End of an Era

Sent of the FI server today and turned over my admin rights to their mail account. Wish them the best of luck and I hope that the server reaches its destination safely.

My 11 Favorite Eponymous Laws

• Amara’s law — “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”.
• Brooks’ law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
• Conway’s Law : Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it
• Edwards’ law: “You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem.”
• Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
• Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
• Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: States that one cannot measure values (with arbitrary precision) of certain conjugate quantities, which are pairs of observables of a single elementary particle. The most familiar of these pairs is the position and momentum.
• Keynes’ Law: Demand creates its own supply (The economists’ version of Gibson’s ‘the street has it’s own use for things’)
• Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
• Sturgeon’s Revelation — “90 percent of everything is crap.”
• Winer’s rule of alternatives: “One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is.”Two is more than twice as bad (Note: Thanks Dave!I need to find a proper citation for this. Google wasn’t helpful)

Totally stealing this.

Hard Work on the Events System

I have been building a new Event system for gamerDNA.com in parallel with our existing one. It will be the "crawl" version, but the basis is there for future work and eventual DKP integration.
I wanted to do this one differently than our existing PHP code structure while at the same time learning more about current PHP and javascript. Launch will be this Monday and I hope to add more dynamic interation and Ajax next iteration. We use Prototype so I need to learn that as well.

I also need to learn CSS so I'll be doing that as well in the near future.

Links used:
Old but goody - RGB Color Picker

GamerDNA and FI

After moving to Massachusetts to work full time at GamerDNA, things have been crazy. As I wrote in my playtime blog, everything in my house is a mess. I'm slowly getting things in order though. This week I'm working on a revamp of the Events system at GamerDNA.

Things at FI are slowly getting in order as well. We have a new engine we are trying out and things are picking back up from the post GDC slump

Amazon Web Services

Tonight I set up our MMO on Amazon Web Services. I must say I really like the system. I know it's in beta, but so far what I'm seeing I like. I do not think it would work for a full population MMO, but the bandwidth is much better than my home machine. The AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is slower than our current beta server, but worth the trade. I'm sure you probably could cluster machine images or move processes to different images as well for performance increase.
There are also two larger base image options with increased memory and processors.

Either way our game is running at 45-60 FPS which is an improvement merely from bandwidth. I documented all of this on our private wiki, but there is too much private information to post that here. It's about three pages of information.

Here is my success picture from when I got the default AMI engine up and running.

Web Administration for FI

Tonight I upgraded our email to use Google apps for FI since the webmail we were using just wasn't cutting it. Thanks to that we got a lot of needed features for our email. I also added Google Analytics and enabled Webalizer and Awstats on our foreverinteractive.com and infernalworld.net domains.

Server Upgrades

After recovering from another root canal this week, I am working right now on backing up our current copy of our world and update our server to the current copy, Multiverse 1.1.

Current files:
Assets:
/var/www/manual_backups/fi_alpha_assets.2008.01.25.tar

World File:
/usr/multiverse/config/manual_backups/iw_a0_1.2008.01.25.tar

Server Config:
/usr/multiverse/manual_backups/bin.server.cfg.2008.01.25.tar


I also moved all of these to our local FTP server just in case:
ftp:\\home\data\Manual Backup

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I also updated the environment variables in our server account to automatically set the Multiverse properties file. When upgrading Ubuntu Linux flavors have a particular issue that needs to be fixed. To get the sample world going after installing the new version of FI, I change the JDBC library location and mysql DB user and password in the multiverse proprties file.

I upgraded our world successfully to the current version, so the next task is to look into external hosting and demo world hosting for GDC.

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Here is a brief roadmap of items I would like to do next:
= Splash page with guidance
= Move to AWS
= Dark Guardian in world
= Dark Guardian following player
= See if Quest can be adjusted to give Rewards.
= Make quest non repeatable, and the items LORE to prevent bags getting filled.
= Pre GDC Char Wipe
= Public demo
= Update dotProject
= Team Bio's
= Tutorial for getting started to add content in IW.
= Add Python Books to our site.
= Add game design books to our site.
= SVN architecture and backup scripting

GDC here we come!

We have been selected to represent Multiverse at GDC 2008! It's been a long road, but I'm very happy. (That is aside from Monday's dental surgery.)

GDC Submission complete!

Media Package

Now we have to wait for the Monday announcement if we are one of the lucky candidates that get to go represent Multiverse. I am very lucky to have found this project, we have an excellent team!