abaddon’s development thingy

I’m filling in for Pixie over at Pirate Cat Radio today, from 4-6.

Which means I’m turning it into Last Train To Mashville.

Pirate Cat Radio for details.

This shouldn’t take me more than a day, given my workload. I know that may seem like a long time, but please understand that work has been really murderous lately. I didn’t even get in the fancy redesign I’ve been craving so badly for so long.

But, owning your own alts is going in. Some behind the scenes restructuring. And if I’m lucky, Level 3.

It was a whirlwind of a trip, that’s for sure. But let’s start from the beginning: The Teddy Bear Toss Fundraiser. Michael, a good friend of mine from college, was putting it together. I asked the people from No More Whales to throw in their support, and they came through in spades.

Last week, Michael asked me last week if I wanted to fly out for the presentation. I said sure, but I didn’t have the money and couldn’t justify the price of the ticket. After thinking about it, I put out the feelers to see if any of my players had some Airline miles that could be used for the ticket.

I got a hit, and someone came through. Though I have to pay for the taxes on the ticket still. So, Wednesday night, I caught a 10:30pm flight directo from SFO to Cincinnati. I landed about 7:00 in the morning.

I grabbed a shower (thanks Giia), and then it was off to meet with Jim Questa, president of the Blueliners club. He had all the donated animals in his basement. We had two vans to transport them. I’m not sure if you can appreciate the sheer volume of 1500 stuffed animals until you see it. But luckily teddy bears are mostly air and survive squishing. We got them all in. No bear was left behind.

Parking at the hospital proved problematic, but we got unloaded and eventually everyone was together for a photo of all of us presenting the boxes and bags of toys and the proverbial Giant Check to the appropriate people.

Even compressed, boxed and stacked, the donations covered about 100′ of hallway to a depth of about four feet. I’d have loved to have seen all the donations spread out in one place, but there just wasn’t room. It was 1500 (1527 actually) stuffed animals - that’s a big number but until you see it you just don’t know. The people at the hospital kept saying, as we were unloading, “Wow, this is… Oh, more? Wow, I didn’t expect… Wait, MORE? Wow…” And if you could have seen the mound of bears and toys you’d understand. On top of that, many of the donated items that came directly from people were really good quality - it made a nice pile.

As impressive as the pile was though, that experience paled in comparison to just standing in the hallway and watching the children pass by. Many of you are probably lucky enough to have never spent much time in the hospital as a child.

It sucks. It’s cold and boring and terrifying and it makes you feel smaller than you really are. As Michael said, “To a child, there’s no such thing as a routine medical procedure.”

So to stand there in the hallway, and watch these kids get wheeled, rolled, walked and escorted past us… it all came hard into focus. Some of them weren’t too sick. Some of them were very sick. But I didn’t see one who didn’t light up at least a little when they saw the Gigantor Mountain Of Toys.

You all made a difference. I wish you all could have been there to see it. I don’t care if you bought one bear or a hundred bears. You all made a difference.

The rest of the day runs together. Michael and I hung out, ate, geeked out, caught up and before I knew it I was on the 8:30 flight from Cincy to SFO. Just a little over 24 hours out and back, with only plane naps to compensate.

Exhausted.

Totally worth it.

Thank you, every single one of you who made it possible and helped the cause.

I don’t have pics of a reasonable size yet. When I do, I’ll post them here.

Half my stuff is down at dreamhost right now. This includes mob-style.com and soulxchange.net.

It appears to be a dns problem. I don’t have more details. Should be fixed by morning.

Apologies, I was travelling when it all happened. It’s out of my hands right now.

I plan to issue some credits at mob-style manually, and I’ll reset the $$$ button on soulxchange to try and make up for the downtime.

Known Changes Coming To Round 5

You will be unable to switch from pure to indulgent once you reach the point level for Greenies.

You will be unable to start two consecutive rounds as an indulgent. This does not mean you can’t play the rounds back to back indulgently - You can start the round pure and switch to indulgent before you miss your first otter. But you can’t start the rounds back to back as indulgent. This means you won’t be able to carry your credits through multiple rounds. I may end dealing with it when I reset the db. Reset indulgent player creds to 0 before the switch, so speed turns are unaffected.

If it comes time for a new round to start, and you haven’t even logged in and gone through the Pure/Indulgent choice, your credits will be cleared.

Ok folks.

Look, I’m not oblivious. I totally disappeared on you guys and am just now coming back around. A lot of this was work related, but honestly, some of it was me putting some things off.

When I wrote the current codebase for soulxchange.net, I had some very specific ideas in mind. Over time, those ideas have turned out not to be completely viable. I am speaking now from the perspective of how I wrote the code, not how I designed the game. That’s another debate, and I’m not having it here right now.

The bottom line is, the more I do this, the better I get at it, and the better I get at it the more mistakes I find in how I did things in the beginning.

So, as Level 3 became necessary and as I agreed to code in the changes to allow people to own their own alts, I came to the realization that I simply could not continue to maintain the code in it’s current incarnation. I needed to rework the db. I needed to restructure the underlying code. Especially now that I’m maintaining other games, I need to unify the codebase as much as possible, so I don’t go insane trying to keep them in sync.

That’s a lot of work. So, I put it off.

And put it off. And put it off.

But, that was really lame of me. So, I’m not putting it off anymore.

I have started working on the db redesign and the code restructure. As I work on this, I will work into in the ability to own your own alts, and Level 3. I also will probably redesign the site in some ways, from an organizational standpoint. For those of you who play no more whales or mob-style, I am not redesigning to go to the look and feel I have at those places. I’m going for an aesthetic and organizational upgrade, hopefully with some features people had been requesting. Like collapsable ports, for example.

The release date is not carved in stone, but I am expecting to have everything done, tested and live around the 3rd-4th weekend in March. I will be using this site as the main place where I’ll talk about boring old development crap, probably with some progress screenshots along the way.

Let me put it here, in black and white, so that everyone understands me. How Level 3 is going to work is a complete and utter secret. I have not told anyone how it will work, and I never will. Everything I post about how it will work between now and the time it goes live is probably a lie. I say this because I want to dispel any rumors. Lots of people will say “I heard X, Y or Z. Right from Abaddon himself.” They might even be telling you the truth. But I told them a lie.

Absolutely no one will know how it works until it goes live.

So, that’s the scoop. Sorry I took the lame way out and put this off so long, but there it is. You know when it’s coming now. And you can check back here for progress. I’ll post a bit in the yapper whenever I update this site, if you don’t want to keep track of this. But it has all of the standard features, so this should be easy for most people to keep track of.

Meanwhile, if I can get it in, I hope to hold the Winter olIMPics. No promises.

Sign up and comment away if you like.

-A