Underground - Blogs

Flow of Creation

Shriden — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:57:54 GMT

If you've kept an eye on the bug tracker, and more importantly the responses in them, you could probably see mention of "LCD." So what is it, exactly?

No, the LCD I refer to isn't the same as the LCD you might see when talking about monitors. LCD here refers to Local COM [Clan of Marchosis] Development. More to the point, there's LCD-1 and LCD-2 (and tentatively LCD-3).

Local COM Development 1 consists of my computer (sometime referred to as localhost) where most of the programming work is done (if needed), style designing, and just general work on creating the next version takes place. After a certain amount of time when I deem that things seem to be nearly complete (after several Alphas), then I upgrade/update LCD-2, where a copy of this current site resides, as seen during beta testing.

Local COM Development 2 in its most basic is nothing but a copy of this site, its users, and content. However, it also contains whatever is in the update, be it new images, pages, or changes to existing items. It is closer to a live site than LCD-1, since it contains real test data than that on my localhost. LCD-2 allows me to access the site from different operating systems (Mac and Windows) with different browsers (IE 6/7, Opera, Camino, Safari, and Firefox at the moment). It should be mentioned that this site isn't ready to be upgraded yet; when it reaches LCD-2, it only means it's in Beta. Verifying that everything is working correctly (mostly installing the newest code, importing the new database changes and whatnot). After a few back-and-forths with LCD-1 and LCD-2, between finding bugs in LCD-2 and fixing them in LCD-1, and then upgrading LCD-2 with the latest changes, it's finally ready to proceed through final checks. If it makes it through, then I'll upgrade LCD-3 (this site).

Of course, the above is rather cut and dry. Most of the time, simple changes occur from LCD-1 to LCD-2 to here fairly quickly without any serious checks or testing. However, when it comes to major versions, there's a bit of a change in pace, and this is currently what's going on with 2.1

2.1 has been in active development for about a month or so now, adding (as I count) about four new features just for the Stats section alone; a small number, but what you can do is pretty extensive. It's so far in Alpha 4, although I haven't upgraded LCD-2 to it yet (it's still running Alpha 3 code). Once development comes to a slowdown and is pretty much complete, I'll upgrade LCD-2 with the final code base, style, and image changes, and finally open it up for beta testing.

Once beta testing starts, there will be a period in which feature suggestions will be taken into account by testers, probably after the initial testing to make sure nothing breaks. Once everything goes well, features have either been implemented or put on hold for the next version, then this site will be taken offline and upgraded (which, from what I'm looking at, will take about three hours to upgrade and make sure everything is working and updated where it should be).

So overall, the entire development cycle is like this:

Development begins on LCD-1.
LCD-2 is later upgraded with the latest revision of LCD-1.
Any problems found in LCD-2 are fixed on LCD-1.
Repeat Step 2.
If everything checks out okay, update live site.
Take note of any bugs or feature suggestions from live site.
Start back at Step 1.

It might be a bit confusing, and it was even for me when setting up how I wanted the development system to go (especially when it came to handling the 2.0 and 2.1 branches, both of which have different code), but it makes working on it quite easy.

... and I should note that even though I'm not officially taking in feature suggestions now, you can still put them out there and I'll see if I can put them in before the first public beta.

OMG! Who am I? What am I?

Shriden — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:36:30 GMT

So over the weekend, my Xbox 360 decided to have a bit of an identity crisis. I know sometimes Microsoft products (well, not to single them out as other companies have their own quirks; for this I am), but this one made me laugh for a moment.

I know, it's an old setup... I'll be replacing it with an upgraded system soon.

I had popped in my copy of Halo 3, and this is what I got. I'm not completely sure if this was a sign that my console was finally beginning to die out, or was just a random glitch of sorts. I opened the disc port, looked at the game disc, and apparently my game has scratches on it... and I'm not completely sure, but I think my Xbox 360 has been scratching it. I take particularly good care of my games, so I'm not sure why it had scratches on it, and they're right along the lines of the disc (where the information is kept and the laser scans, if that makes any sense).

Nonetheless, I'll be keeping an eye on it to see if anything else happens. Has anyone else heard of that happening? Let me know. Just thought I'd share this bit of a random moment. :p

Zombie Woes

Shriden — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:01:01 GMT

I seem to have problems with Double EXP weekends, don't I? Well, this time it has to do with the zombie weekend Bungie had.

One thing I had a problem with was with betrayals and booting, partially to what I would perhaps call a bug in Halo 3. There have been times where I've betrayed someone because we were in a crowded area with a ton of zombies, and they got in the way when I pulled the trigger. So what happens? I get booted for an accident. I'll admit there was a few times where I accidentally pulled the trigger and prematurely ended the life of a teammate, but still those times are rare. If there's going to be booting for betrayals, there should be at least a threshold to pass before you're eligible for booting (say, two or three times; any more than that and it's not accidental I'd think).

One of the more annoying things I find, and this I think is more to do with Halo 3 itself, is when you are killed by a zombie to become one yourself, when you first spawn, your allies are temporarily labeled as enemies on your radar. Not only that, but if one of them happen to be in front of you, you're reticule is red... so what's the first reaction? Pull the trigger and kill it, then ask questions later. This again goes back to accidentally killing a teammate and then getting booted, even if you say "Shit, sorry dude!."

Of course, that's not bad compared to how many people were using areas on the map to basically cheat their way to victory. I'm talking about the glitches/exploits on maps that can be used to basically survive a game far longer than you should. So far, the things I've see are:

Highground Getting on top of the left tower (above the canvas top where the Spartan Laser usually is I believe). Although it's not really a glitch or anything, it does make things difficult when you're trying to kill someone standing at the top and can't quite get to them without doing some jumping around. Meanwhile, they're getting kills picking zombies off one by one.
Narrows Apparently (I believe on Blue side), you can jump off the bridge and stand along the side out of reach on the wall. You could also get into a certain position under the bridge on the rotating belt (the one with the green electricity around it). Although you should die within moments of standing on it, apparently there's some spots where you can survive for some time while everyone else is dying trying to get to you.
The Pit The trick with hiding under the ramp here has got to be by far the most annoying I have ever seen, and I'm surprised at how many people do it. If anyone played this past weekend, you'd probably know what I'm talking about, so I'm not going to spend much time on this one.

Oh yes, and that's not all. Finally, I think the last thing I didn't particularly like was the CreepingRockets and Creeping Death variants (and was quite happy to find I wasn't alone). It's bad enough that zombies are invisible, but they've got Gravity Hammers too? It's bad enough you can't see them, but now they've got a weapon that can kill you and several others in one swipe. You can't really counter either when all you've got is a shotgun and a magnum. At least with CreepingRockets, you're a little more well-armed, but the challenge and claustrophobic environment of zombies is kind of gone.

I think the best games played were those on Save One Bullet on Last Resort, and on Foundry under Haunted Manor. Overall it was fine besides those problems I labeled above. I just hope Bungie looks into those map holes and patches them before the next time they do a zombie weekend. I'm just happy I got my EXP from the games I played. :cool:

Feature Storm

Shriden — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:32:43 GMT

I'll admit I've been quite mute one the subject of 2.1; in fact I don't think I've really dropped many hints about what exactly is coming except that it should prove promising.

For starters, I've been taking a look at the information gathered so far for the Gamercard feature (which I give credit to Chris for creating as I was working on many other things for the initial 2.0 release) to see how to expand upon it since most of the features for 2.1 rely on your Gamertag, and I learned something interesting. Most of the information in the database is printed out to the site, which you can see when viewing posts in whole, or in part when viewing or profile or on the home page, which shows your Gamerscore, last achievements, last five games in which you got an achievement in, and a few more bits of other info. There was one bit I didn't know that we tracked as well: Xbox Live subscription type (Gold or Silver). The information is kept in the database, it's just there's no code to output it your Gamercard here.

I'm not saying that I will or will not use this for any feature, but it makes a good standpoint where I could make the choice if I wanted to; show come content for Silver users, and show more detailed content for Gold users. Chances are though I don't be making any use of that information at all in the foreseeable future, and in fact I hadn't even realized that it was there until after I had finished creating the feature outline for 2.1 and started to code it out.

So now onto the topic of features: What will you be able to do and not do?

It's an interesting question and one that I had asked myself for the last couple of weeks while approaching a private deadline of planning before going to full-on development. As one could guess, the stats feature of the site will contain information about stuff. What kind of stuff? Well, if you look in your profiles you can sort of get the hint of where it's going to go, and it was going to be a fairly short list of information early on when I sat down to work on the idea. The more I thought about it, the more doable certain things could be, and the greater the list of features grew until it became quite an extensive list. In all honesty and from my perspective, it wasn't really that special of a feature set (if you were to see it however, I supposed you'd say different) until I came up with one that even Bnet doesn't have; and I shall remain quite silent on the subject until probably the beta testing phase of 2.1. However, I think most of you will find it quite useful and interesting. ;)

Another subject while creating the feature set was flexibility. Although for now the stats would be limited to information from Halo 2 and Halo 3, I also needed to leave room for anything else Halo-centric that Bungie or an associated project might put out (mainly in reference to Halo Wars). If Halo Wars were to have some sort of statistics available in some form similar to Bungie, I could easily slip that information into the framework and display the information easily. Thankfully this was something easy to do, and when and if the time comes, it would just be a few days worth of work to code out and update the site. :cool:

Unfortunately, there are some features I might not be able to complete by the time I release 2.1. Odd, yes, since I am in control of when versions get released, but I can't spend all my time working on just this; there's a number of other things for COM I need to get going with. Fear not though! Even if they do not get included with 2.1.0, they can get lumped in with the next release (2.1.1) shortly thereafter. It's not so much complexity but rather length of time it takes to incorporate the features, make sure they work, and iron out as many bugs as possible while making sure that the server doesn't take a massive hit every time someone loads the page. So if I don't have all the code in for one release, it'll be more likely in the following one a few weeks later.

Nonetheless, 2.1 is under full development now so expect more information pouring out over the next few weeks. How soon can you expect it? I can't say right now but it would definitely be out before the end of the year.:p

Grifball Annoyances

Shriden — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:32:55 GMT

So I've been playing Grifball this weekend in the Double EXP (if you want to play later, send me a message whenever I'm on), and I've noticed a few things that kind of bug me.

For one, it's people who get annoyed when you betray them. If anyone has played Grifball for a while, you know what I mean; you try not to betray your own teammates, but if you're all clumped together it's kind of hard not to. I'll admit I do accidentally pull the trigger once in a while though but it's rare. Sometimes I don't get betrayed at all in a game and yet others I'll be lucky if I don't get betrayed shortly after every other respawn. There are people who just go "Oops, sorry dude" and that's the end of it. Others make a big deal out of it, which really don't make any sense to me since it's not even in the ranked listing and the only thing you don't get if you lose is EXP.

The second, probably the most annoying, is the fact that you can get out of the Grifball map [with a bit of work]. I'm not completely sure if it's designed to be that way since the RvB guys placed teleporters above and slightly behind the wall that blocks off the back corridors so if you do manage to get up there you can teleport to the center of the map, but it's completely annoying and unfair. There was two games where this had happened; the first I really wasn't sure what had happened, but the second one someone on the opposing team was camping with the bomb at the top and of course we couldn't get to him with the three other team mates keeping us from getting up there. It was a stupid tactic since we were already up by one (and still managed to get another one when he finally jumped through the teleporter with seconds left in the round and we grabbed the bomb from him), it's just annoying having to spend more than a minute trying to get at him while he sat there trying to let the round end.

Besides both of those things, it's been pretty fun playing nothing but Grifball, and once in a while getting teamed up with a group of people who are having fun too. I haven't played it since that day with some of you guys a number of weeks back, and was itching to play again and this weekend was perfect. :cool:

Initiation

Shriden — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:51:46 GMT

As you may have noticed by now, I've now set up a blog portion of the site. This was set up for several reasons:

Provide an informal means of giving information without making an announcement about it (so it wouldn't count as an "official" response so to speak).
Reflect on certain events or happenings (such as tournaments).
Give updates to what is soon to come, but not quite ready to make a debut of any kind (such as 2.1).
Receive comments/reflections on things mentioned here.

For now, the blog is limited to just me. Eventually, I may allow everyone else to have their own little section but right now I don't feel that the way the site's currently set up will make people use it constantly. There's also the issue of abuse: Yes, it'd be your own section, but that doesn't mean you can just put "hai guyz " and post it. I want to make sure what people will use it in a productive way.

Hope you guys enjoy this. :)