Yappy Anniversary

It's hard to believe that it was six years today that I became a GM.

7/24/07 10:29:38p Yappy thinks, "eldon I can use my sunstone without a sunstone?

/facepalm

Clan Lord Memories

I have a strong memory from one Fourth of July, and it is related to Clan Lord.

Several years ago I spent my Fourth at home.  It was evening, and I had the television tuned to the fireworks celebration.  There was music and singing and speeches and celebrations, but my attention was elsewhere: I was playing Clan Lord, and I was trying to solve one of the mystic puzzles.

Occasionally I would pause to watch the fireworks, and then I would resume my quest to understand the puzzle.  I spent well over three hours on this puzzle, taking a lot of notes on paper.  Ultimately I solved the puzzle and collected my token.  Ever since then, on every Fourth, I recall how I spent my time celebrating Independence Day.

I am such a nerdy patriot.

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?

Negative Thinking

I spent the past couple of days polishing the new silly quest, fine tuning the scripts for the quest NPC and chasing down a small speech bug (the NPC was not properly articulating which quest components she was referencing).  As I read through my script I felt something that I had never felt before: I felt ashamed of my script.  My script was just plain bad.  Although it worked well enough, it was poorly designed and the layout was just awful.  I completely Frankensteined the script together, and it was obvious.

To understand my displeasure is to understand some basic scripting logic: throughout a typical NPC quest script, comparisons are made:

if a player has the quest item
{
 then say some things
 and take the quest item
 and give a reward
}
otherwise
{
 tell the player that they do not possess the quest item
}
end

The problem with this format is that it's too (ahem) positive.  The script begins by making a comparison for a true condition, and if the comparison is true, then I do some positive stuff – otherwise the comparison is false, and I do the negative stuff.  This style becomes harder to read when there are multiple positive comparisons:

if the player is alive
{
  if the player has the quest item
  {
   if the player's gender is male
   {
    then say "Attaboy!"
   }
   otherwise the player's gender is female
   {
    then say "Attagal!"
   }
  then take the quest item
  give the reward
 }
 otherwise the player does not have the quest item
 {
  tell the player that they do not possess the quest item
 }
}
otherwise the player is dead
{
 look sympathetically at the player
}
end

While there's nothing wrong with the logic of this code (at least I hope so; I have not debugged it!), I find it rather difficult to read.  What I should have done is to design the script to make negative comparisons, and if the negative comparison is true, then do not make subsequent comparisons:

if the player is not alive
{
 look sympathetically at the player
 end
}

if the player does not have the quest item
{
  tell the player that they do not possess the quest item
  end
}

if the player is not a female
{
 then say "Attaboy!"
}
otherwise
{
 say "Attagal!"
}
take the quest item
give the reward
end

The rewrite is easier to read in that it filters out any of the negative possibilities first; by first eliminating any "negative" conditions, then whatever conditions remains must be "positive".  If the player is not alive, then it does not matter if the player has the quest item: stop here and check no further.  If the player does not have the quest item, then the player's gender does not matter: stop here and check no further.

Who would have thought that negative thinking would have been so positive?

Yappy New Year!

How YOU doin'?

One of my New Year's goals (and I am quick to note that this is not a resolution, as I seldom keep those) is to return to activity within Clan Lord.  I had a nice 10 week break – plenty of time to relax and gorge myself on Team Fortress 2 – and I feel ready to return to work.  I have numerous projects that need attention!

I stopped by the fairgrounds for some shenanigans after the V684 update:

Here's wishing everyone a healthy and happy New Year, and that 2011 brings us lots of gaming fun!  (That reminds me: I need to change the splash screen and update the copyright notice.)

Eliminating Share Dependency

I was pleasantly surprised by the responses to my ramblings about sharecads.  Thank you all for your comments.  I wish to quickly address some points:

• It is not my intention to remove sharecads from Clan Lord, but the macro's popularity lead me to scratch my head and wonder if there could be an in-game alternative.
• I have no intention of removing @env.textLog or any other macro features.
• I recognize that healers are dependent on shares.
• I recognize that some healers use sharecads to harvest shares for experience rather than for the action of healing.  In my opinion, this is an exploitation of the macro.  A clever macro scripter could address this issue by adding a personalized blacklist of healer names to their copy of the macro.
• I recognize that Clan Lord's sharing system has numerous limitations.

Changing The World

It was on this day, July 3rd 2007, that Yappy entered Puddleby as a Helper.



It certainly does not feel like three years have passed since I was granted a back stage pass to Clan Lord.  During my time as a Helper, I asked a lot of questions and I made some mistakes.  During my time as a GM, I have asked a lot of questions and I made some mistakes.  I suppose that I should be pleased that I have remained consistent!

Upon reflection, I feel that I was unprepared for the amount of knowledge that is required for Clan Lord development.  I recall feeling very overwhelmed and feeling very much that I had made a gross error in judgment in accepting GMship.  I admit that I was lured by the dream of "if I were a GM, then I would change the world," and I quickly realized just how much work – real work – is required to change just one element of the Clan Lord world.  For example, the mannequin bug on which I am currently working requires knowledge of how housing works, how color works, how clothing works, how naming items work and how player data management works.  Add to this some special exceptions (belts are wearable like clothing but can not be dyed, therefore they have their own special set of rules), and pretty soon ten hours of work is spent just learning about the mannequin – ten hours to change one small detail of the world.

Three years later, I find that my lofty ambitions have been tempered.  Somewhere along the way I had abandoned my aggressive goal to change the Clan Lord world.  I am but one man, and changing the world is not a one-man task.  Instead of changing the world, I settled my focus on repairing bugs, reasoning if I can't change the world, then I can – at the very least – eliminate some of its problems, one bug-fix at a time.

And in doing so, I find that I have changed the world.