GameLog 261-263

Football Manager 2012 (40h) - Boston Utd (2015 League 2: 12th) - Finished the season with a strong mid-table showing, even though I was in with a shot of the title by the midpoint of the season. When the doldrums hit the team it toook longer than usual for them to shake it off and found ourselves 10 points shy of the playoffs. That's more or less where we stayed as hunting for new talent to take us up next season was my main priority. 
Kongregate: Chronicles of Blood (20h) - Veeyar 22 - fB game converted to Kongregate. What's keeping me in the game are the random drops and crafting. This combined with trading makes for an interesting path for developing your character.

Warlock (15h) - Some updates added heroes and it makes another interesting part of the game. The AI is still floundering though, I can't figure out whether they don't expand fast enough or get locked into massive troops and stagnate themselves, but by the time I want to go to war, I'm ploughing through them with no real resistence.

What I'd like is a ratchet system like Empire Deluxe where I can specify how much more of an advantage I give them, then the trick is to see how high you can put them and still eek out a win.

Sins of a solar empire (12h) -  Steam sale. Picked up a couple of copies to try out at LAN. One loong game over 7h, and a couple of multiplayer attempts.

Kongregate: assorted (10h) - Kong is turning out to be more alive than I thought, but is also bringing in major MMO's from the interwebs.


Kongregate: Berserk Cataclysm (2h) -Ticking over the attempts at taking my lands. Somewhere between Stronghold kingdoms and Chronicles of Blood in this game's lifecycle.

Stronghold Kingdoms (1h) - Popped in to see how my castles have withstood any attacks and they have done pretty well. Lot a couple though, so it's not on the gaming radar anymore.

Notoriously Databased v0.25

So much for esxprecting a fairly easy process to get the turn resolution complete. It's been over 15 hours, but finally is taking shape. Lots of effort in outputting stories as they will be the main interface for players to see what happened, and lots of code comments. I think it's teaching year 12 IPT that has made me comment more. It's a good thing, but adds time ...

Resolution Phases

1. Validate the turn
2. Town Raids.
3. Hero attacks on Dungeon. 
4. Attacks by other Characters.
5. Returning trops.

Hero Attacks on the Dungeon

The main component of the game will be dealing with the escalating amount of heroes attempting to rid you from the world. in this section there's not too much to do. The Heroes' level will be dictated by the last turn's notoriety, or be found by a level 1 scout if no notoriety. The tricky part is absorbing the amount of damage to the fortifications and elites. I'd solved this earlier in the spreadsheet, but the different variable types made this a little interesting.

Attacks by other Characters

 When other characters attack, there is the chance that more than one will be attacking at the same time. If this is the case, they first all try to get past the fortifications, then combine strength to take on the dungeon. If there are any survivors they fight it out so that only one returns with the treasure. In the case of a draw (both sent the same amount of minions), the prisoners overpower them and escape back to the city. The outcome is that the dungeon is definitely wiped one way or another, and the attackers either havethe winning troops return or lose everything. Once again converting elite strength to overall strength and back again is a right royal pain, but having elites adds an additional way of spending money so I hope it'll be worth it.

Returning Troops

The raiding parties and attacks on other dungeons come back in this phase. Since there are data models set up to hold the results of these raids, it's simply a case of looking for any relevant data and integrating it to the next dungeon state.  There is also an opportunity to clean up the amount of minions ready for the next turn, dig out any new space, build any fortificaitons, or bring back the ransom.

Quite happy how the whole process turned out. Now to debug and make the stories more visible and enable a simple of triggering an end of turn.

Notoriously Databased v0.24

The interface for submitting a turn is more or less complete, and I'm happy with the progress of MVC in this design. The next thing to work on is the turn resolution itself. Since I'd completed most of it in the Google Doc version, I was expecting it to flow fairly quickly...

Resolution Phases
For this version I'll be breaking down the turn resolution into 5 phases.

1. Validate the turn: If there are any commands that will not be possible, drop to the maximum achievable number (Eg 5 minions available and request 6 to dig = 5 digging)
2. Town Raids: Calculate all attacks on the town. Initially the attacks were to occur simultaneously and impact on the amount of guards for that turn, but for now a simple ratio of defenders to resources will suffice.
3. Hero attacks on Dungeon: Process all incoming attacks from the village. 
4. Attacks by other Characters: Any incoming attacks from other dungeon will occur after the hero attacks. This will allow for potentially easier attacks, but also potentially nothing if the heroes wipe it first. If there are multiple people attacking the same dungeon, only one will survive (or none)
5. Returning trops: Any successful raids or ransoms or dungeon attacks come back. Any digging or fortification building is also completed if not wiped.

Validate the Turn
 The validation itself was pretty easy to set up as I'd already done the logic for it, but the main sticking point in this section was creating a function to update the story with any errors. The story table will mainly be used to tell the player what happened in a turn, but it will suffice to also be the error reporting section for validation. The function itself should be pretty easy, but where to put it?

After another chat with Andrew, I decided on using a StoryRepository in the Models. Even though it's not technically a Model, the utility function does in a way act as a conduit to the model, and will not be doing much else apart from formatting and saving the Story into a new record. I played around with null values to allow optional parameters and unknown IDs, but it was cleaner to simply force IDs by seeding the optional parameters.


Town Raids
Initially I was hoping for the amount of defenders to be proportional to the amount of attackers as they would be pulled in different directions to defend all the resources (or go only one way if only one attacker). In the Google Doc version I'd dropped it in favour of a simple ratio of defenders per resource becuase of difficulties calulating all town attacks at once, but now that I can process them any way I like, I'll still use the ratio for now because it turned out to be simpler to calculate whether your attack will workor not by analysing the village state from the previous turn. It seems a little too controleld at the moment and I'd like a little more randomness, but for this large scale test it should be fine.

Once the raid has been calculated, the successful minions will return in phase 5. I could possibly merge this phase down to there, or merge up into validation, but I'm really unsure whether the town raid will need a different calculation method in testing, so it should be better in a self-contained section. Doing this means that I need a way to hold all raid data until phase 5. With my new-found love of Models, I made up a new class to act as a memory storage unit for raid data. This way I can create them into lists and process in much the same way as if it were table data.

GameLog 253 - 260

Hmm, 8 weeks of reports. Things are definitely going to be left out and times will be guesses.


 Football Manager 2012 (120h) - Boston Utd (League 2: 2nd) - Got a hankering for Management again and fired up the 2012 version I picked up a while back when it was on sale. 6 months unemployed to let the game settle, then accepted the first offer coming my way: Boston United in Conference North. Got them into the Playoffs that year, but didn't have the firepower to go up.

Next year was a completely revamped team and we finished 2nd only to be knocked out again in the 1st round of the playoffs. 3rd year we picked up another couple of gems and wouldn't settle for anything other than automatic promotion. We finished the season on 95 points, 15 clear of our nearest rival. 

Last season we were to bravely fight relegation, but after a mid-tier start, the team found their form and we moved up the ladder. Even I was a little suprised that we took over 1st, but the confidence in the team and our attacking style seemed to be working well. We've been having a poor showing in the cups, and with the League Trophy nearly in our grasp, we lose out in the quarter finals to an equally impressive FC Halifax who have risen along with us out of Conference North. Final game of the season and we're 1 point ahead. The stands are packed to see us win 2-1 and advance once again into the professional league.

Currently 4 games in with a somewhat understrength side. Hoping for mid table or possibly playoffs while the squad and stadium catch up to our rapid rise.


Kongregate: Berserk Cataclysm (40h) - An autoplay CCG with some interesting deck building choices. Cards are dribbled out fairly regularly to build some different decks, but the obvious advantages of rares over commons means that gaining cards is like levelling up. Unfortunately this leads into a direct pay-to-win option as the best cards are exclusively via the paid service, and having thousands of cards right off the bat is even more useful for the competitive side of the game.

World of Tanks (10h) - Some LAN attempts, but the 2-person platoon limiter is really pretty ordinary for any coordinated action.

Stronghold Kingdoms (10h) - Big long stints with nothing. Game over I'd say.

Kongregate: Chronicles of Blood (10h) - Veeyar 9 - fB game converted to Kongregate. Probably the best feeling action-point limited game I've played. Drop rates and proc rates are varied and I think I'm finally coming to an effective overall strategy with mostly PvP and some PvB planned.

Kongregate: assorted (10h) - Some new things appearing on Kong, but it still feels like it's playing second fiddle to fB and iOS

League of Legends (10h) - LANs and first wins.

Diablo III (5h) - Real money auction house is out now, but I can't see any evidence of anything selling on there. With Blizzard charging at least a $1 service fee per transation, I would say that its usefulness will be pretty bad for the general public. In beta people had a starting credit as well. I think this would have been a good choice to loosen up the AH. If there's no trading, then people are less likely to post stuff, then there's less liklihood of trades, etc. It has a real chance to turn into a ghost town.

Notorious Monetisation

Random thoughts on ways to monetise a Notorious server as we drove home from Mackay. I'm not a fan of secondary economies, but this might be a way to set one up with a clear distinction between in-game and out-of-game interactions.

"The Club"
As the players are ethereal beings ‘competing’ for notoriety in the game world, there exists a number of services for these beings to interact with directly through the ether. Most of these services revolve around trading information. For now I’ll call this “The Club”

-       Provide access to a gem: The club has people scouring the world looking for suitable gems to link to. For a fee they will provide the location of an unlinked gem. Price is dependent on both maximum power of the gem and the closest city size and current dungeon layout. Possible selling methods:

o   Auction system with random gems being placed on there with a price. 15% value to AH for player-listed gems.

o   New gems generated in clumps on the frontier zones, with some generated in more settled locations for people to advance to.

o   Offer a static price to ‘locate’ a new gem. ~$1 for a village level gem to ~$5 for a capital gem

.

-       Player power graphs: For a very small cost, players can see power graphs of other players. It should indicate long & short term notoriety. From this players should be able to deduce the best time to attack that player. Inactive players should have a fairly regular graph. Active players should show advancement in fits & spurts.

-       Player dungeon layout/minions. For a small fee, players can look up the last known dungeon layout of the target player with possible minion information.

-       Possible black market for minions. Include minions that are already linked with gems. This service provides access to the gem and possibly free teleportation to the home stone. Minions bought this way may or may not know of the existence of the ethereals. New gem keepers can be picked up this way.

o   Player auctions – additional 15% added to them

o   Football manager contract system opening payment goes to either the originating player or the “Club” if newly generated. Once the initial price is agreed upon it allows access to talk directly to the minion to negotiate. Once the 1^st negotiation for a minion has been set, give 5 mins for competitive bids.

o   Possible alternative is that once a price is settled upon with the original owner, they give access to the minion’s gem for a non-refundable fee

o   Look at introducing a ‘trade band’ that has a gem inside it specifically for talking to minions to set up contracts. Original owners would then pick up a trade band from The Guild and place on minion. All discussions and memories are then accessible through the new band. The Guild can then use these to monitor the trade, set up filters of likely candidates to accept a trade, and give independent information regarding the minion to the buyer.

Multiple dungeons

An auction house would potentially mean having multiple gems for the player to link to. Look into whether only 1 is active with an interface to select the next active gem or have multiple gems active at the same time.

- If multiples active want so it is beneficial to have gems in better places.

- ways to mitigate gem spamming. If pay a power maintenance cost to link to a gem, maint cost increases by the amt of gems linked to. Eg: an inactive gem 5 power, 1^st gem 50 power, 2^nd gem 100, 3^rd 150, etc.

- potentially have 1^st home gem link for free. Look into a base amt of power for characters

Skills
Players may have the opportunity to tailor their character toward a certain playstyle:

-       To mitigate the multiple home gem links cost

-       Mitigate multiple gem links to monsters

-       Decrease costs of scanning

-       Decrease hiding/masking costs

-       Raise base power

Information tracking

Use roguelike monster info (observed weapons / damage / HP etc) for what they know about your minions. This will be used in knowledge discovery for the “Club”.

Resurrection

If creatures are resurrected at the home stone with nothing on them, how do they maintain the gem for communication?

-       Make the equipment they are carrying when bound be brought back too.

o   This would be the same as WoW / EVE and expected of the NPCs In the city. Problem with this will be NPC heroes would not bring anything into the dungeon to drop. 

-       Make equipment that has gems attached also returnable.

o   This would give the minions and NPCs a reason to desire gemmed items.

o   Requires the Ethereal to pay an additional fee to link to gemmed items? Maybe a link for returning purposes is not as strong as a link for communication.

o   Look into linking gemmed items to the minion / NPC. This way any binding of the minion / character will also include the cost of the items.

o   If an item can be returned to a home stone, what would happen if another Ethereal managed to establish a link to the item? Could they return it to their own dungeon?

o   Gems allow access to sentient thoughts, so there would be nothing to link to in the items themselves. Maybe a cost to return the item itself is cheaper.

o   Once a link is established with a mind, maybe other close gems can be added to the link for a minimal cost to strengthen the link (allow more power). New items linked this way don’t add to the total gem linking increases, but have an independent power cost escalation. Eg 50 power for original link, 5 power for secondary, 10 for tertiary, 20, 40, 80. Items linked this way must be strong enough in their own right to support the link.

Running a City

-       Have a high amount of NPC Heroes linking to your home stone.

o   Require a different build, with attributes heavily focused on new minion link reduction to cope with the amount coming through. Possibly too much for more than one stone’s worth.

o   Access to NPCs, but virtually no power left to manipulate them.

-        Charge a service fee for the resurrection power that you will need to use to pull them back. This will typically be through a front man, quite possibly a reputable person established in the city, or a gemkeeper working undercover.

-       Use access to NPC heroes to sell dungeon layout / minions back to “The Guild”

o   Offer NPC heroes an in-game reward for information regarding layouts / minions / etc.

o   Offer NPC heroes information on layouts for a fee (miniature version of “The Guild”)

-       Use access to Heroes to sell their links to the club for people wishing to raid targets

o   Make up bounties for certain dungeons with potential upfront payment, confirmed wipe payment and loot division options.

-       Act like the “Adventurer’s Guild”

o   Branding all services as part of a corporate entity provides all players that run individual sites to share the power.

o   New Adventurer’s guilds can be set up in the city by paying for a large enough gem to be moved into place (and secured, they are rather expensive in the game world too. Wouldn’t want anyone walking away with your home base.

o   Run by exclusive members of “The Guild”

-       Power mainly generated from “good” thoughts about the owner. “Good” thoughts ½ as effective as fear thoughts and reputation harder to maintain. Also less amount of population concerned about the service (adventurers) compared to the impact of character actions (whole city/village)

o   Good rep mutually exclusive to bad rep. linear linked scale.

Nototriously Databased v0.23

With the Admin panel finished, it's time to start working the the player's UI. Ideally I'd like the user to log in and go directly to a list of all his characters in the various games. From there they should be able to:
 -  submit new turns
 - view the results of the previous turn
 - view their current dungeon state
 - view old turns
 - view public information for the whole game

PlayerController
Off to build a new controller. Most of the UI will be the same as the CharacterController for now, so it's a good one to pinch. Pretty easy < 2mins.

Limiting PlayerController
Looks pretty good, but is showing all characters, not the currently logged in user's characters. Since I haven't created the link between User and Account, I'll leave that for now and see if I can limit the list to a single ID.

After a number of false starts, it seems that grabbing everything from CharacterController wasn't as good as grabbing the extensions I did on UserController's edit action. Changed it over so that I could pass in a User model that is limited to the single ID and includes Characters.

User user = db.Users.Include("Characters").Single(u => u.UserID == 1);
return View(user);

Took a couple of hours of wrong turns and dead ends to get there, but at least it's working and looks pretty clean and simple. Now to change it to the logged in user...

Currently Logged In User
The intenetion of using the ASP.NET default account management was to make sure passwords etc were handled a little more securely than if I did it myself. The upshot of that choice meant that I'd make a User table that shadowed the account and use it to link all the game data to. Since I'd successfully added other tables when generating the creation of games, I set about modifying the AccountController to also give me a User record if they successfully registered.

Username and email were simple as they already existed in the Register action, but I'd also wanted to link the user table to the account using the guid. Try as I might, the standard code to return the logged in user's Id simply returns null:

Guid userGuid = (Guid)Membership.GetUser(User.Identity.Name).ProviderUserKey;

I'm assuming that the Register action has just created the account and they haven't actually logged in until exiting the action.

It would have been nice getting the account ID, but I'll have to suffice with the username. It'll be a little less secure, but fine for the scope of this little project. User record created and working!


Limiting to Logged In User
There should now be a User record for each account, and since the "User Info" page isn't visible until someone logs in, all I need to do now is find a way to get the current user. While searching for a way to get the account ID, there seemed to be a number of ways to get the current account name, so dropping back to username rather than ID has made this step rather easy:

User user = db.Users.Include("Characters").Single(u => u.Username == User.Identity.Name);  // assign currently logged in user
return View(user);

 Tidy up
Now that the page is working moderately well, I spent a little bit of time to rewrite the intro and remove / reword the character list fields to make it cleaner. All ready to make the submission...

Custom Data
For the next section I'll need to pass in some custom data to tell if the character is ready to submit a turn for their game. I might be able to do it in the view, but I confirmed through Andrew that it's definitely the controller's job to collect and prepare that sort of stuff. So how do I get it to the view when I am already passing in the User model along with associated Characters?

It seems that I need to create a separate model specifically for the view and pass in only the information that the view needs to display. I don't need all the Character fields, I do need some other fields from DungeonState and Game, and I also do need some custom variables to tell whether the turn needs to be submitted (or changed).

With Andrew's help, I made up a new ViewModel specifically for the Player controller with all the character information added as another class. In the end it felt more like creating a view in SQL from related data, but I could construct almost anything to put in there. A little bit of pre-work for a much more simple and clean implementation. I like it.

Now that the custom ViewModel is in place, I have to redo the way the Character table is laid out on the view. It needed a change anyway as I also took the opportunity to bring in all the data I'm expecting to show, as well as the IDs for all the relevant actions.  

Notoriously Databased v0.22

The next objective is to build an administration panel to link all the table controllers to. This will allow quick access to the game's internals in case the proper game fails.

•  Added an AdminController with a simple list of table links.
• Tested all links and found that CharacterSubmission controller failed due to pluralisation issues.
• Fixed CharacterSubmission to CharacterSubmissions in the db, and rebuilt the model and controller.

Now some initial prep work on the game. If a new game is created, it would be best to have defaults set up immediately for VillageState and Turns.

• Located the creation of game objects and added code for creating a new Turn object once successful
• Reviewed changing ID fields for the new record, but it looks like it does that automatically once saved. 
• Reviewed adding linked GameID fields from the original object. Does it pick up what the new ID field is once added? Yep, fantastic. Nice and easy.
• To check that all the IDs are working, I redid the display view for Turns. Entity Framework is a treat for getting related data out. 
• Formatted GameDate to Now() until I know when the game will be pitched at. 
• Added VillageState object, linked to the current turn, and saved.  

All in all a pretty good night's programming (plus F1). Slowly coming to grips with MVC / EF / C# and it now feels like I can put together data onto the page where I like. Will still have a little work to prep for user account interaction, but hopefully it's only a Google away from a standard solution.

Notoriously Databased v0.21

Now that the tables and relationships were mapped out on paper, I then put them into a fresh database. Pretty easy after finding out some autoincrement foibles in the previous testing. 8 tables in all:

Users will have Characters inside each Game. The Characters will have CharacterSubmissions for each turn in what to do with their dungeon, which, once processed, is stored as the DungeonState. The Game will also revolve around a single village, that has VillageStates stored for each Turn. 

(Almost elemental facts, but meh ...)

Generating the App
Next step was to create the new MVC3 C# app. There were a number of steps that I needed memory jogging on, but I finally got the app set up with the database brought in by adding an ADO.NET Entity Data Model class to the Models directory. 

Account Control
The standard template came with ASP users and login hooked into a separate db, and not having to recreate login scripts and password obsfucation seemed like a good thing so I set about attempting to integrate it. Since the final version will be hosted online in AppHarbor using only one database, it seemed logical to bring all the ASP database tables into my own db and possibly link into the User table.

After some research it turns out that placing relationships onto the aspnet_user table is a bad thing in the long run, so I left the original tables as they were and added another field to handle linking to the unique ID. Hopefully I'll be able to link them together using API calls once the whole thing gets going. Creating the aspnet_ tables was relatively easy with aspnet_regsql , and apparently there's a lot more stored procedures that I would have missed if I tried to bring it over from the generated db file.

Once the db's had been merged, the next thing was to get the models to be merged. After a little bit of frustration, it seemed that the AccountModels didn't like accessing the aspnet files under the entity data model, so it was easier in the end to leave the connection string as a separate connection adressing the db with a simple SqlClient. The future problem will be that once I move it all to AppHarbor, it will only migrate one of the connection strings internally, so I'll have to manually update the ConnectionString to permenently point to the online db. Shouldn't be too much of a drama as there's not going to be much separation between production and testing.

Adding Controllers
User accounts complete! Adding controllers for the new tables worked relatively well once I figured out that the Data context class it was after was the complete NotoriousEntities class. Since I had added and removed it a couple of times, I had to restart VS 2010 to get it to pick it up. I'd heard that I should be able to refresh the database if it changed (because dropping the entity model and recreating is a pain) and once you double-click on the edmx file you can 'Update Model from Database..' from the NotoriousModel. Tested and working MUCH better.

Moving to AppHarbor.
I followed the general instructions to set up the new application, but finding the git info still needed a visit to the knowledge base. After previous tests with local git, I'd settled on integrating it into VS 2010.  Right click on the entire project in the project tree enabled me to start up a local git instance, then update it either with the Git Pending Changes addon, or straight to Git Bash. The shell will eventually be more useful, as once the remote git is set up I'll be constantly running the update and push commands. Update is nicer in the addon, but I can't see a push.

AppHarbor with SQL.  
It was easy to pick the free SQL shared server, but finding the details of the server to manually connect once again seemed harder than I remembered. There some new configuation variables that indicated a different method for connecting, but I finally found the options I needed by going to the SQL server. The connection string is going to be the main one to the entity model, and because of that it also needed the resource metadata to complete the connection string rewrite. After looking at the output, I pinched the ConnectionString data for the server itself and placed it over the account model connection. Seems to be working, but getting errors. Doh! no tables!

Once connected using SQL Server Management studio, the next task was to get all of the tables across. From the local database I could run a 'Generate Scripts..' task and point to all the tables. Hopefully the aspnet tables will be fine coming across as I'm pretty sure I won't be able to run aspnet_regsql over on the server.

Databases look good, but running the app looks like there's still issues. No stored procedures. Looks like I can output generation instruction for all stored procedures as a script in itself, and with a bit of massaging I got it to work. Now I need a schema :/.

Looks like I can get all the elements from generating scripts, so back to square one. Generating the complete database brings in too much database specific changes, so I tried picking all the items instead. Some ALTER ROLE scripts were ging to fail, but the rest seemed Ok so I merged them and manually added the role members using the GUI.

Still having issues with the schema, stating that it's an older, incompatible version; a task for another day ...   

EDIT: After a bit of Googling, it seems that the schema was fine, just aspnet requires some data to validate against. A quick merge of aspnet data files and it's all working. Now to build an integrated admin panel for manipulating the game data directly...

Notoriously Databased v0.2

After discussing with Andrew the benifits of MVC3 and AppHarbor, I was finally convinced that it was the way to go for the next step of developing Notorious. Hopefully it will allow a little more freedom in testing as I'll be able to fully automate the process and serve it up as a web app rather than Google Doc forms. Been a pretty long journey to get all the setup in place:

 - Looks like I'll need MVC3, EntityFramework, and AppHarbor testing
 - MVC3 needed Visual Studio 2010 sp1.  (250Mb)
 - Downloaded Windows Platform Installer to speed up the process. It was able to get most, but not entity Framework.
 - Tested MVC3 apps locally.
 - Downloaded GIT and merged local app to cloud
 - Needed to move data over to SQL, so downloaded 2012 SQL Management studio (600Mb)
 - Needs Windows 7 sp1, so it and another ~100 windows updates later ..
 - Management studio didn't seem to work by itself, so decided to move to 2012 express as well (200Mb)
 - Installed and running, and apparently management studio 2012 now magically works.
 - Played around with developing tables, and then merging them into MVC using entity frameworks. Lots of guidance by tutorials as this was not obvious. Eventual model first approach seems pretty slick rather than building LINQ.
 - Merged to cloud and then needed to figure out cloud connection. I could see the db fine in Management studio using the given user / pass, but couldn't connect to it using the app. finally figured out that it's rewriting the connection string itself. All I needed to do was to provide an alias to the model's connection string and also the resource metadata. 5 hours :/.
 - Looked at merging the data in case I neded to to that later on, but couldn't get a nice, simple way to do it across servers (I'm pretty sure the apharbour user doesn't have the right privelages for most options)
 - Ready to go!

3 days to get into a position to develop, and possibly 20 hours. Most of that was waiting for downloads, so maybe 8 hours in watching tutorials and testing stuff.

With all the tucked away, I spent 1/2 hr designing the table layout for the new NotoriouslyDatabased app. After building the guts of it on Google Docs, it's going to be pretty easy to convert the logic, but the file layout changes might mean a different approach is possible.

GameLog 251-252

Diablo III (30h) - Plays way better than the beta, but always-on has had hiccups that really, REALLY frustrates me. I know it's more like an MMO in that regard, but when you've played previous versions that didn't require constant connectivity and server stability, this one just feel wrong. Was hoping to use the gold AH for hardcore, but it looks like there'll only be one for softcore. AH is almost ruined now anyway, so I don't think it'll add up to much.

World of Tanks (20h) - Ticking over in this one requires about an hour a day though.


Stronghold Kingdoms (10h) - Maybe 1/2 hr per day now. Just popping in to keep things ticking over.

Company of Heroes (6h) - Finally let me finish Carentan, and spent the next 5 hours playing and replaying then divided road scenario. Might finally be able to move through this one.


Warlock: Master of the Arcane (5h) - Tried a one city challenge. Think I've missed my window.

Kongregate: Mud & Blood 2 (3h) - Part of WW2 LAN. Reminiscing on it made me replay it a couple of times.

Kongregate: Monster's Den Chronicles (3h) - Newest in the seeries. Getting a slick interface, but the gameplay isn't different enough for people that have played the previous versions.

Kongregate: assorted (3h) - Kongregate is feeling a little old now. I'm not sure what's changed, but it doesn't feel as vibrant as it once was. I thyink it's the move toward Facebook and iPad games that has dropped off the flash-based industry, but there's enough new stuff to wander through.