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.

The Joke's On Me

I threw the switch and opened this year's April Fool's Day ("AFD") area.  While I was busy doing some last minute fussing, I noticed within the player window that one player's name had suddenly changed.  I went to investigate and I found, to my horror, that the old Angbang area was now opened.



This came as a surprise to me, because this was an area which I had not opened!  I did a quick check and discovered that (somehow) the portal leading from the current AFD area to town was not leading to town — as indicated within my copy of the world file — but instead was leading to the old AFD Encore Nexus.



Ugh.  I quickly applied a patch so that the exit portal to town actually lead to town.  I would have left the old Nexus area opened, but some of the areas within the encore required preparation (and bug fixes) which simply had not been prepared (nor fixed).

I hope that this is the only joke played on me for this update!

Like A Boss

One of the super secret additions that I included this update is a "Boss Template," a generic monster that can be used (and modified) as a Big Boss Monster.

The idea behind the boss monster is that the boss will always be a slaughter, regardless of how much of a terrifying histia/troilus/detha combination it has.  I want the focus to shift from "let me as an individual tag so that I can get my experience" to "let's work together to bring this beast to its knees!"  I have had some thoughts on such design, and I now enter the phase of testing this concept for viability.

It is an experimental template — I assume that it will work! — and perhaps this weekend I can ask for some suckers volunteers in the fairgrounds to test it out.

[Edit]: The part that I forgot to mention was that, upon the Boss Monster's death, everyone within the area would receive experience.  It will not matter if you tagged or not.  You receive experience when the boss is defeated.

Ready For A Change

I can't believe that I got everything done, although after staying awake past 2:00am, I am certainly paying for my labors this morning.  Nothing that several cups of coffee can't cure!

There were two scripts that I wanted to modify and both goals were achieved. The first change concerned one of my favorite scripts which powers "itemless" quests.  One of the issues that I discovered whilst using this script is that there is more math than there needs to be: I struggled to find the sum of bit fields, such as 2^15 + 2^11 + 2^7 + 2^0.  I created a shortcut for this script which eliminated my need to provide the calculations; the script now cheerfully does this math for me.

The second change was a little nerve-wracking, as it involved adding a new feature to our filtering function.  I am always nervous when modifying any of the major scripts, and filter.func is a major script.  I added a small hook which enables other scripts (such as sayinitstring, our major speech script, or the reward script which runs almost all of the New Ash quests) to check the bits of an itemless quest.  This opens a lot of options for quests and, in a weird way, nearly eliminates the need for the itemless quest script itself.

And as a bonus I added some giant spider-chickens.  These monsters are both terrifying and a challenge and okay no I didn't really do that.  Updating those two scripts were challenging enough!

I am ready for the changes of V747!