7YRL (the 7 Year Roguelike)

Back in the US

Jeff — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:00:46 +0000

I’m back after taking the family to Cabo San Lucas for a week. 7 days of 88 degrees and sunny – after that, Seattle’s weather is all the more painful .

The place that we were staying at was very nice, but a bit on the gouging side – $25 (American) for a bottle of suntan lotion! Even more egregious – $10 an hour for wifi, which is why I haven’t been posting here .

Made random bits and pieces of progress in various venues:

New Server (was: GoDaddy GoAway!)

In my desire to eschew myself of everything-GoDaddy, I purchased a dedicated server (no more virtual for me!) with softlayer.com. So far I’m very happy with both the service and the machine (soooooo fast).
I completed moving all of my services and files over to it last night, and flipped the domain over to point at it yesterday. Hopefully that’ll help a bit with mahjong stability. 7yrl’s file archive is there, so let me know if I missed anything…
I just checked off “auto-renew’ on the server with GoDaddy, so one step closer to being completely done with them! Now I’ve just got a few domains that I need to transfer away from them to a different registrar (I’ll eat the cost just to get away from GoDaddy), and then I’ll be done with them for good.

Mahjong

The game continues to do well, it’s now the #20 game in the marketplace (both free and paid), which is great!
It sounds like there’s still some bug in there that I just plain can’t track down; repro cases are few and far between. To counter this, I went through a whole bunch of the code and try/catch’ed it at very fine granularity – I report the exception up to my server (along with a code to determine which line it borked on). While that won’t catch everything, it should help point in the direction of the most egregious issues
Speaking of egregious: I just fired an email to microsoft’s pubcenter support alias because two unexpected things happened last Thursday: (1) the number of reported ad impressions in mahjong jumped 10x in a 2 hour period (but based on the number of submitted scores, I’m not suddenly getting 10x users), and (2) the eCPM dropped by 100x! So Mahjong is now pulling in 1/10th what it used to ><. Given that my other apps (and other developers) aren’t seeing the same drop, I’m hoping that it’s a temporal thing. Otherwise I’m going to have to rethink the server and even whether or not my next game uses the Microsoft Ad control. Ouch .

3D Blocks

My definition of vacation is “switching between lazing about in the sun and taking a break from being in the sun by being inside programming some fun project.” Over the last week, the fun project was a 3d version of the classic “Rush Hour” game. Huge amount of progress on it, but a loooong way to go. Here’s a few teaser shots (note that the name is a placeholder):

Unfortunately, tomorrow I go back to the real world. I’ve got over 600 emails awaiting my return (and that’s after auto-filtering out the detritus!). I’m learning that 6 business days is not quite enough .

Jeff

Well, that was a fun filled few hours (DB problem fixed)

Jeff — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 06:07:45 +0000

GoDaddy utterly fails again; absolutely no response. Great to see how quickly they respond to situations where they SHUT DOWN YOUR DB.

On the plus side, the problem is fixed, and this was a good forcing function to get me to go through the set of steps I wasn’t looking forward to:

Install SQL on my server
Install SMSS on my server
Backup the DB from godaddy (thank god they didn’t block that capability)
Install Java on my server (God) because that’s required to get a db backup from GoDaddy ><.
Copy the DB down to my server
Uninstall Java. Try not to think about the tendrils of garbage it left behind ><.
Restore the DB from within SQL
Create the user/pw within SQL
exec sp_users_change_login ‘Auto_Fix’ the user (hello, esoteric. thank god I knew about this)
Update the connection strings in the web services (for all 4 games)
Fight with the inevitable security issues. This was the most painful, but relatively less painful than I’d anticipated.
Spin up the game in the emulator and try to get high scores; work through the random errors
Finally see it work (thank god).

So, one less point of failure moving forward. If something goes down with the DB, I’ll be able to track exactly what it is and not be dependent on those morons. This’ll also open up better options for tracking down errors and perf stuff, so I’m happy about that. On another plus side, I wrote the game to work with intermittent connectivity, so no one lost any badges; however, the stats may appear screwy (more people having badge X+1 than badge X)… Given how the game’s written, it’s possible that the majority of people didn’t even realize it was down.

My email to GoDaddy’s incident response team after they did nothing:

You guys are just a bag of awesomeness. Thanks for doing absolutely nothing about this.

I have given up waiting for you to do anything and have migrated my database off of your shared hosting plan.

Utterly unimpressed. Do not respond to this, I don’t care what you have to say and will delete it unread.

Oh how I wanted to say other things, but I still have my dedicated server with them, and at this point I don’t trust them to not go and purposefully screw with that if I bad-mouth them too much. Asshats. At some point I’ll move off of them entirely, but I’m not looking forward to spinning up a whole new server (take the numbered list above and 3x it).

Ugh, I hate being annoyed/angry Jeff; but this really wasn’t how I was hoping to start my vacation. Tomorrow I’ll be on a plane for 4 hours and then step off into 80 degree Cabo – so, happy Jeff will return tomorrow!

Jeff

Damnit GoDaddy, you guys suck

Jeff — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 04:27:50 +0000

Well, you get what you pay for, I guess. I just checked my gmail for the first time in a couple of days, and found that they had shut down access to the score server db because it had exceeded some utilization limits.

a) There was no warning given, it was just shut off.

b) they don’t tell you what limit was exceeded (size? cpu?)

c) GoDaddy has no tools with which to view utilization, so you have no way of knowing if you are nearing a limit

d) they don’t tell you what the limit is anyways.

e) They shut down admin access to your db when this happens, so you can’t fix the problem yourself (by reducing table sizes)

f) When you call their support line, they don’t have the fucking ability to reinstate your admin access (hey, what are the odds that someone in this situation would want that?)

g) So you have to email them asking to be able to get into your db, which means you sit and wait AGAIN.

So the high score server hasn’t been storing high scores for a day, I’m stuck waiting (at 9:30 at night) to see if those asshats are going to respond, and I have no way of knowing if the changes I’m going to make are going to keep this from happening again (since they provide neither metrics nor the tools with which to track against them). I’ve actually got a dedicated server with them already and had planned on migrating the db from a shared hosting plan over to that, but hadn’t done so yet because I didn’t want the score server to be down for a couple of hours. And now it’s been down for a day. Awesome.

Mahjong continues climbing (after squashing a bug)

Jeff — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 03:48:53 +0000

Up to the #37 app (from #42), which is great news!

Unfortunately I missed a bug in the previous update – it was fixed within hours and is already posted in the new version on the marketplace, but I got a fair number of negative comments before MS posted it (sigh). I can understand why (it was a pretty stupid bug to miss), but it does leave me a bit gun-shy to do more releases. If it ain’t broke and all that… I’ve got 20 more tables all ready to go, but don’t want to risk another bad impression . Think I’ll let it settle for a while; more time to focus on other projects

Anyways – hooray for breaking the top 40!

Haven’t had much time to work on the Dungeon yesterday or today; ton of work piled up right before vacation. Bit of a separate distraction with a possible 3rd project as well… Playing around with that a bit tonight – good way to kick off vacation .

Jef

Mahjong pauses for a breath in its climb

Jeff — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:01:17 +0000

Not stalls, just pauses . Still at #42 of all apps, but it has climbed to #23 of all free games!

Discovered a bug yesterday in one of the layouts ><. Submitted an update, impatiently waiting again.

On the positive side, I’ve spent time working on additional tables and have a cache of 20 that I can publish when folks get to the end of the current set. Over next week’s vacation I’m going to put some time into improving the end-game; right now when you complete the last table you’re done, and your only option is to restart or wait for more tables. Bleah. I don’t want to stall out people that want to keep playing, so I’m tending towards a “meta-badge” model where you get some badge for each time that you complete the last table. I think that’ll provide incentive (read: won’t feel like wasting time), but it pushes me even more to want a “badge champions” high score table. I’ve actually got 99% of that code written, it’s mostly just design considerations…

Jeff

Day 41: Working on the Animation/Turn system still…

Jeff — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:56:22 +0000

… but nothing to announce yet. Taking a queue from animaleante, I’m moving to a model where I go from two distinct update steps (“do animations” and “update turns”) into one combined update step (“do animations if there are any, update turns if not”). This’ll require replacing the Actor list with a priority queue (to eventually support an Energy-based system where Actors are not locked to one-turn-per).

Jeff

Mahjong unseats Fruit Ninja

Jeff — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:43:23 +0000

Up from #43 to #42. But I’ll gladly take it, as that one game bumped was Fruit Ninja, an awesome game (and one which my kids would much rather play than my own games )

Thankfully they’re not ranking based on revenue or quality or any of the other attributes with which these games trounce mine .

Next to fall: Spell It!

Cheers,
Jeff

Day 40: Miscellaneous cleanup

Jeff — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:18:50 +0000

I’m still pondering the right way to incorporate real-time Animations in with a turn-based system. While that’s percolating, I did a bit of miscellaneous cleanup:

When the player targets an empty cell for an AoE skill, display the Cell background and Adornment (if any) in the targeting dialog
Slight refactoring to Cell.Render to handle how AoE range is rendered over out-of range cells (thanks animaleante!)
Actors regen health each turn (‘n’ turns after performing the last action). This was just adding some health directly each turn; I refactored that to use the Event (and eventually Buff) system. This will allow things like Levels that disallow any healing (including regen).
I cleaned up the DecideNextAction/PerformNextAction stuff a bit in anticipation of figuring out the Turn/Animation issue.

Here’s what the AoE targeting UX looks like when the area of effect falls outside the range of the Skill:

I’ve got vacation coming up next week (sunny Cabo San Lucas, hallelujah! ) - I’m hoping to resolve the Turn/Animation issue this week so that I can focus on more fun aspects of the Dungeon .

Here’s the code and exe:

Updated source: http://wanderlinggames.com/files/dungeon/dungeon-4-19-11.zip

Updated executable: http://wanderlinggames.com/files/dungeon/dungeonexe-4-19-11.zip

Mahjong continues climbing (albeit more slowly)…

Jeff — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:56:20 +0000

3D Mahjong Solitaire continues climbing the charts, although it looks like it’s slowing down; it’s up from the #45 app to #43. Still waiting impatiently for the difficulty curve fix to get posted; hopefully that’ll help boost it up the charts a bit farther…

Full House Poker and Deer Hunter 3D down, Fruit Ninja and Harbor Master to go (gulp!)

On the plus side, it’ up to #29 of all games (paid and free), which means that it appears above the fold on my 24″ monitor . Now I need to get there on “all apps”!

Cheers,

Jeff

Day 39: AoE targeting improvements

Jeff — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 03:17:16 +0000

Some more improvements made to AoE targeting today:

When AoE targets a cell with a monster in it, CAB-select the monster
Support targeting valid empty cells for AoE skills

I’m still wondering what to do about Animation timing ><…