Cookies and Cola

That's this evening's dinner.

I have been working on organizing content for the V753 update since a little after noon today.  While doing some last minute additions, it came to my attention that one of the merchant NPC scripts does not support a function that I need for this update.  In fact, there are numerous merchant-related scripts and all of them do not support my needed function.  I could write the needed function, but I worry about the time remaining before my deadline.

Cookies and cola are certainly helping with the energy required to help me meet my deadline!  Hooray for caffeine and sugar!

Unpredictability

Fiona wins my favorite Quote of the Week:



I don't know what it is about her comment that made me laugh.

A Taxing Day

I spent the entire day sifting through the backlog of bug reports.  My eyes are tired, and I feel a little weary, but all of the bug reports have been organized.  I am quite pleased with my productivity today.

Some of the reports contained flattering comments.  Thank you; receiving a couple of Attaboys is always welcomed and much appreciated.  Some of the reports were ideas and suggestions (herpetid omelets, anyone?), and some reports were gripes and complaints (gotta love path finding).

The remainder of the reports were problems, and boy-howdy were there a lot of problems.  I spent some time fixing the easy-to-do bugs (anchors will now work properly within the waters of the Southern Shoals), and I asked for advice/strategies for handling the more complex, involved bugs (such as the Fire Island Drake bug; I will need to wear a long-sleeved shirt just so that I can roll up my shirt sleeves when debugging that problem).

Now that I have procrastinated all afternoon by organizing bug reports, I should probably get to work organizing my taxes.

The Pensive April Fool

I have closed access to the April Fool's Day areas.  Here are some thoughts about the Magical Kingdom area:

• This small area introduced some new quest mechanic concepts, including "monster spawns on demand," "quest NPCs which kill players failing to meet the quest prerequisites," and "conditional repeatable hunt master quests"
• I was a bit surprised that the Magical Kingdom area took four days to find
• I will need to improve the way that spawns are handled, giving the NPC clearer speech to indicate when a spawn has been triggered
• The quest reward item needs to be a little more durable (done for V750)
• I laughed with delight upon seeing "invisible" players in Clan Lord
• In hindsight, I probably should have added an NPC which healed fallen players, since I was introducing an NPC which killed players
• Perhaps the next quest NPC using the death-on-failure mechanic should start off a little easier and include a couple of warnings prior to killing the player instead of killing the player outright on the first bump ("This time I've given you only a minor scratch of a wound, but next time I'll go straight for your heart!")
• The Ninja quest should have been the last of the three quests
• I see some potential in a rock-paper-scissors approach to quests: making one choice opens one door but closes another

Any other thoughts?

Math FAIL.

One of my surprise areas had a surprise itself: some of the data was incorrectly set because I did some bad math.  Bah.

Once the problem is resolved (the mistake was corrected but the script needs to be restarted), then I'll extend the accessibility to the area by a couple of days.

[Edit]: The fix has been applied, thanks to ServerGM.  Whew.