Since I already had a beard, I decided to do NoMovember this year (try to go the whole month without a beard).
All the photos used above were taken last night during the shave down at Ben's. See anything odd?
Thursday, November 01, 2012
NoMovember
Since I already had a beard, I decided to do NoMovember this year (try to go the whole month without a beard).
All the photos used above were taken last night during the shave down at Ben's. See anything odd?
Sunday, October 21, 2012
YASD by way of XCOM
Rookie Smith: First mission of the campaign he allowed an alien to flank him and critical hit, dropping Smith in one shot.
Captain Medina: Guarding side door when floater came up over the 2 story building. Medina and Bernard open fired from overwatch, but missed. Floater took aim from 15 paces and critical hit for 9 leaving Medina in a pool of blood. Traumatized, Bernard emptied the clip into it and brought it down.
Colonel Mason: Took a bold step in the raid against Alien HQ but stirred up a nest of Crysalids. The squad took down one, but 2 managed to get through and rip him apart before we could bring them down.
Rookie: While rescuing civilians he bravely stepped in front of another to fend off the last of a Crysalid wave. We are no match with them in hand-to-hand combat. Gutted.
Colonel Williams: Long serving sniper took a muton grenade in the opening exchange. Her cover was also reduced to rubble, allowing a 2nd muton plasma shot to take her out before she could react.
Colonel Van Damme: Gifted assault trooper who served well as front line subduer. Attempted to gain good position on the outside of a window against the initial target when she startled a berserker, 2 elite mutons and 2 mutons. A muton grenade removed the wall, then a critical shot by an elite muton and a berserker charge took her down. She remained critically wounded, but the berserker and elite mutons kept the only other medic at bay for one turn too many.
Colonel Sanchez: Extremely gifted sniper made the ultimate sacrifice.
Captain Medina: Guarding side door when floater came up over the 2 story building. Medina and Bernard open fired from overwatch, but missed. Floater took aim from 15 paces and critical hit for 9 leaving Medina in a pool of blood. Traumatized, Bernard emptied the clip into it and brought it down.
Colonel Mason: Took a bold step in the raid against Alien HQ but stirred up a nest of Crysalids. The squad took down one, but 2 managed to get through and rip him apart before we could bring them down.
Rookie: While rescuing civilians he bravely stepped in front of another to fend off the last of a Crysalid wave. We are no match with them in hand-to-hand combat. Gutted.
Colonel Williams: Long serving sniper took a muton grenade in the opening exchange. Her cover was also reduced to rubble, allowing a 2nd muton plasma shot to take her out before she could react.
Colonel Van Damme: Gifted assault trooper who served well as front line subduer. Attempted to gain good position on the outside of a window against the initial target when she startled a berserker, 2 elite mutons and 2 mutons. A muton grenade removed the wall, then a critical shot by an elite muton and a berserker charge took her down. She remained critically wounded, but the berserker and elite mutons kept the only other medic at bay for one turn too many.
Colonel Sanchez: Extremely gifted sniper made the ultimate sacrifice.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
GameLog 270 - 273
Another big slab of time without a GameLog ..
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (44h) - Lot of hype from the podcasts and websites I frequent made this a simple pre-order. Plays well in both a reminiscent way and an up-to-date
FTL (26h) - I thought I'd gotten into the kickstarter on this one, but it looks like I missed out. Still, made for an entertaining romp through randomly generated space with a near-complete game. Beat it with the Engi ship. Might be back to it ..
Warlock (20h) - Picked it up to pass the time until XCOM hit. AI still has problems spreading and got rolled by sheer economy. Could have won using any of the criteria, but put the AI out of its misery through conquest. Might be worth trying another one-city challenge for something like avatar victory.
GuildWars 2 (20h) - Veeyar Bones, 60 Mesmer - Still fun, especially at LAN ding dungeon runs or collaborative jumping puzzles.
Notoriously databased (5h) - More playthroughs and good discussions regarding the game. Added a couple more niceties to help smooth out play and am now working on a way to set bounties.
Pirates: Tides of Fortune (2h) - Level 39 - Finally someone wiped me. No incentive to rebuild.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (44h) - Lot of hype from the podcasts and websites I frequent made this a simple pre-order. Plays well in both a reminiscent way and an up-to-date
FTL (26h) - I thought I'd gotten into the kickstarter on this one, but it looks like I missed out. Still, made for an entertaining romp through randomly generated space with a near-complete game. Beat it with the Engi ship. Might be back to it ..
Warlock (20h) - Picked it up to pass the time until XCOM hit. AI still has problems spreading and got rolled by sheer economy. Could have won using any of the criteria, but put the AI out of its misery through conquest. Might be worth trying another one-city challenge for something like avatar victory.
GuildWars 2 (20h) - Veeyar Bones, 60 Mesmer - Still fun, especially at LAN ding dungeon runs or collaborative jumping puzzles.
Notoriously databased (5h) - More playthroughs and good discussions regarding the game. Added a couple more niceties to help smooth out play and am now working on a way to set bounties.
Pirates: Tides of Fortune (2h) - Level 39 - Finally someone wiped me. No incentive to rebuild.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
GameLog 267 - 269
GuildWars 2 (80h) - Veeyar Bones, 45 Mesmer - The pre-purchase and early access to the beta helped pick up on how good this one was going to be. The dynamic worlds are still Ok, butnot as impactful as expected. They do, however, fit into a wonderful puzzle of streamlined gameplay. I'm prety sure this is the new generation of MMO's and I hope it's going to kick on for a while.
Pirates: Tides of Fortune (10h) - Level 38 - fB game that seemed to have a good intro. Similarities to Notorious has kept me playing, although the insistence of inviting more and more friends to the game is getting pretty grating.
Notoriously databased (5h) - Actually got some time to play my web game at the LAN and with Sandy & Voidwolf for a few good stints. The game is maturing more than I expected, and rough edges (like player instructions) are being added that I thought I'd not bother about since it was a limited experiment on the larger design concepts.
So where's the steam games?
Nowhere ..
2nd time in 5 years of gamelogs where steam has had a clean sheet.
Pirates: Tides of Fortune (10h) - Level 38 - fB game that seemed to have a good intro. Similarities to Notorious has kept me playing, although the insistence of inviting more and more friends to the game is getting pretty grating.
Notoriously databased (5h) - Actually got some time to play my web game at the LAN and with Sandy & Voidwolf for a few good stints. The game is maturing more than I expected, and rough edges (like player instructions) are being added that I thought I'd not bother about since it was a limited experiment on the larger design concepts.
So where's the steam games?
Nowhere ..
2nd time in 5 years of gamelogs where steam has had a clean sheet.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
GameLog 264-266
Pirates: Tides of Fortune (30h) - Level 35 - fB game that seemed to have a good intro. Similarities to Notorious has kept me playing, although the insistence of inviting more and more friends to the game is getting pretty grating.
Fallen Enchantress Beta (20h) - New beta and a significant improvement. Not sure if it's coming off a lacklustre AI in Warlock, but the AI's have been performing much better here. The world itself has come alive a bit more too. Maybe not quite up to Warlock, but certainly holding its own now. Maybe just lots more quests would give it the final spark.
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.
Team Fortress 2 (12h) - New update for co-op mode. Not much co-op, but it's good to get back into 2Fort.
Left 4 Dead 2 (5h) - Picked up in a steam sale. Plays Ok for LAN, but didn't stick.
Realm of the Mad God (2h) - LAN game.
Notoriously Databased v0.31
User Interface
After a couple of multiplayer experiments, the main feedback was that there isn't enough information to show you what's going on in the dungeon. Some of that was intentional, but some was just poor placement (or no placement) due to the lightweight nature I thought this game would have. Now that it's being tested, it's kind of cool on its own to see a dungeon developing. With that, I put a bit more effort into presenting the data.- Reading the character's story defaults to only the story rom the last turn so you don't have to keep scrolling down to the end of the story.
- Redid the Character Submission to more clearly show dungeon state, and how space is allocated. Also added the village state and current defense ratio.
- Removed a couple of Edit / Delete hyperlinks to turn it into a more consumer experience instead of a database.
- Highlight public stories
- More stories about how many minions / elites are surviving
- Indicator of who is the most notorious and that they are the focus of heroes.
Bug List
- Elites not defending properly- spelling errors
- Villages now appearing back in the village when ransomed / released
- Hero focus on proper highest notoriety character
Notoriously Databased v0.30
Strategy tests
I feel confident that the turn processing is at a point where I can attempt to test individual strategies and see where they would lead in the main game.The Digger
The first strategy will be just a simple turtle that digs as much as possible. This will be the baseline to judge all the other strategies against as it will have the least amount of risk. If it is also sustainable without going through a wipe, then we'll have a big problem attempting to get the other strategies to eek out an advantage, so the first test is to see how far I can go before a wipe occurs, and also how long to get to, say, 10 spaces.Since the hero attacks are predictable from your current notoriety, the strategy will be to only leave enough minions behind to fend them off and dig with the rest. It may pan out to be better to drop the defense and go through a wipe rather than holding out on the defense right until the end. We'll see.
Run 1 - Always defend: 15 turns to reach 10 size. Not too bad, but there are a couple of places where treasure could be utilized either for elites or on fortifications.
Run 2 - Defend until defenders more than diggers: 13 turns to reach 10 size (10.8). Seems a little wasteful throwing 9 into digging when it was already on 9.9, but 10 size is just an indicator and I'd rather keep the tests consistent to the strategy for the long run. Start certainly seemed better, and no drawn-out sections of no digging.
Run 3 - 1/2 Defend using elites: Elites look Ok on the first turn, but then break horribly. More debugging.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Notoriously Databased v0.26
With the turn processing finished, Notoriously Databased was ready for limited testing. Unfortunately some conflicts with the online database made the LAN tests a bit of a flop, even though I'd been able to test a couple of turns myself locally. Debug phase ...
The first issue was that the cascade on delete that I'd set up locally hadn't been merged over very well. I tried fixing it with a diagram system, but it kept complaining about multiple cascade loops when it was only cascading downward from multiple parents. Wierd. It allowed it on manual update of the foreign key though.
Next issue was that partially filled submissions were causing null errors, so I zero'd out all the null fields at the start of processing. Later on I found out that Characters not submitting a turn was throwing errors too, so created a default blank submission for those. Some other small errors were isolated & fixed in a couple of hours.
Testing the turn processing was getting a little tedious when triggering the proces from the admin panel, so I moved it to the player's screen to keep it all together for now. It raised another problem I've been having with MVC and the modelessness of web design: there doesn't seem to be a built in way of returning back to the previous caller, rather it lets the currently active action determine where to go next. I can see why this might be the case, but it's such a radical shift from traditional functional design, I'm surprised that they haven't tackled it in some way. There are far more complex issues (like entity framework) that have been solved. Hopefully I'm just missing something simple, which is quite likely.
Another thing I wanted was a quick way to see the character's story. Earlier changes to the controller and views made it quite simple to make a method receiveing the character's ID and only outputting those stories. Since it was only called from the player's screen, at least I didn't have to worry about the redirection on completion. Limiting the stories to those involving the character was one step, but I also needed to include all public stories as well. In SQL this would be a simple ID=x OR isPublic=1, but it took a while to figure out how an OR could be imoplemented. Many methods to do an AND, but only one looked like it could also be manipulated into being useful for an OR by simply using C# binary logic in the where() clause. It looks like Entity Framework does a nice job of processing the logic and converting it into an SQL statement. I haven't had to reduce entity framework to SQL queries just yet, although there have been a couple of wierd interfaces to do more or less the same job.
After the turn processing I thought it would be a good time so show the whole story of the turn to whoever processed it (as another debugging tool). Setting up another list was pretty easy, but unfortunately I couldn't trigger it easily with a RedirectToAction() passing a parameter to another controller, but it feels like returning to the Player's screen was a more concise alternative anyway, leaving individual turn debugging relegated to the admin panel.
It's feeling nice and solid. Now for some serious strategy testing ...
With turn processing triggered of fthe admin panel, and
The first issue was that the cascade on delete that I'd set up locally hadn't been merged over very well. I tried fixing it with a diagram system, but it kept complaining about multiple cascade loops when it was only cascading downward from multiple parents. Wierd. It allowed it on manual update of the foreign key though.
Next issue was that partially filled submissions were causing null errors, so I zero'd out all the null fields at the start of processing. Later on I found out that Characters not submitting a turn was throwing errors too, so created a default blank submission for those. Some other small errors were isolated & fixed in a couple of hours.
Testing the turn processing was getting a little tedious when triggering the proces from the admin panel, so I moved it to the player's screen to keep it all together for now. It raised another problem I've been having with MVC and the modelessness of web design: there doesn't seem to be a built in way of returning back to the previous caller, rather it lets the currently active action determine where to go next. I can see why this might be the case, but it's such a radical shift from traditional functional design, I'm surprised that they haven't tackled it in some way. There are far more complex issues (like entity framework) that have been solved. Hopefully I'm just missing something simple, which is quite likely.
Another thing I wanted was a quick way to see the character's story. Earlier changes to the controller and views made it quite simple to make a method receiveing the character's ID and only outputting those stories. Since it was only called from the player's screen, at least I didn't have to worry about the redirection on completion. Limiting the stories to those involving the character was one step, but I also needed to include all public stories as well. In SQL this would be a simple ID=x OR isPublic=1, but it took a while to figure out how an OR could be imoplemented. Many methods to do an AND, but only one looked like it could also be manipulated into being useful for an OR by simply using C# binary logic in the where() clause. It looks like Entity Framework does a nice job of processing the logic and converting it into an SQL statement. I haven't had to reduce entity framework to SQL queries just yet, although there have been a couple of wierd interfaces to do more or less the same job.
After the turn processing I thought it would be a good time so show the whole story of the turn to whoever processed it (as another debugging tool). Setting up another list was pretty easy, but unfortunately I couldn't trigger it easily with a RedirectToAction() passing a parameter to another controller, but it feels like returning to the Player's screen was a more concise alternative anyway, leaving individual turn debugging relegated to the admin panel.
It's feeling nice and solid. Now for some serious strategy testing ...
With turn processing triggered of fthe admin panel, and
Thursday, August 02, 2012
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.
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.
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