C:SI archive at Daikon Forge

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OMGBOTS! - Using bots for unit testing

Jun
05
2008 in Testing, Software Development, C:SI and omgbots!.

It’s been one of those days… On top of still dealing with the stress of Albertsons.com losing my order and having all of my grocery money locked up and unavailable for a week, I’m still working on my RL project even though I’ve been at it since about 5:00 this morning.

And yet, a conversation I had with Ayame recently keeps coming back to me, even while I’m working. She’s got some ideas and some projects she’s working on which utilize bots built on libsecondlife code which will, I believe, be a very nice benefit for the C:SI community. I’m going to be assisting in any way that I can, and I’m quite excited about the idea.

Thinking about her ideas keeps bringing me around to the idea of how I could do so many things with bots to make my own life easier, unit tests being a prime example.

I’m still very much trying to come up with more objective methods to determine whether a weapon is balanced, and I can think of several ways that automated testing via a bot running a predefined script of actions can assist in that process.

Unfortunately, my schedule being what it is, I haven’t really had time to think on this too deeply. The technical details of how to implement the tests are not the big challenge, really. The big challenge, as I see it, is coming up with a valid and reasonably complete list of tests that should be performed for all C:SI weapons.

I will continue to think on this topic as time allows, and should have some time this weekend to really dig into the topic, but I wanted to post this now in order to elicit feedback from the community as well.

I know that many C:SI members are software devs, and even many who are not have repeatedly shown that they have a pretty solid understanding of ways to test the weapons for balance and "correctness", so I’m asking anyone and everyone who has ideas to go ahead and submit them.

So whatcha think, got some good ideas for ways to objectively test C:SI weapons for balance and correct function? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Popularity: 57% [?]

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Taketori sales halted until further notice

May
30
2008 in Server Issues, Epic Fail, Asset Server, C:SI and WTF.

3 Comments

Due to Second Life being full of fail and the Lindens taking several hours to finally even notice the problem, I’ve disabled all sales of the Taketori Katana until further notice.

Once I’m convinced that Second Life has returned to some semblance of stability, and that people can no longer continue to take advantage of the fact that my network vendors are scripted to err on the side of customer friendliness - delivering a product to the customer in certain circumstances sometimes even after a refund has been given due to Second Life hiccups, then I will re-enable sales.

Popularity: 44% [?]

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Kick bug fixed - Could it be? Really?

May
28
2008 in Kick a Linden in the junk, JIRA, Bug Reports and C:SI.

9 Comments

Seems that some regions that were updated in today’s rolling restart include Kelly Linden’s fix for the infamous "C:SI Kick Bug", which was introduced with Havok 4 and removed the push part of the C:SI weapon’s kick attacks. This was a major annoyance for many of us, and required a dramatic change of strategy for most.

Zero Gee sent me an IM notifying me that Samurai Edo was included in today’s update and that it would be a good time to check whether the fix was included, so in-world I went and work be damned

It seems that the behavior is a little bit different (kicks are more vertical than previously), and that might take a bit of getting used to, but overall it’s a great deal better than kicks doing nothing at all, and I’m very pleased to report that Kelly Linden is now my favorite-est Linden of all!

Popularity: 45% [?]

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C:SI Weekly Statistic - News and Changes

May
26
2008 in Stats and C:SI.

Closed

Many of you already know that I’ve moved the C:SI Weekly Statistics to the Official Combat: Samurai Island Website, which has been a goal of mine for quite some time :

Because I’ve finally moved the stats to their rightful home on the web, I will be removing them from my site at some point in the near future, most likely today.

Another thing I’d like to mention about the statistics is that I’m working on extending the information that can be retrieved by the community. I’ve gotten a lot of requests from admins and owners of C:SI-themed sims for the ability to track more detailed information for individual sims, so I’m trying to incorporate enhanced functionality where-ever and when-ever I can.

For now, that basically consists of the ability to track wins and losses for a given region on a weekly basis rather than just for all time (previously you could only get historic totals), as this gives a more current view of fight activity :

region-stats-example

There are some pros and cons to the method I’ve used to gather and store this information, mostly as a result of the criteria that I used when designing how it would work :

It must not break any existing functionality. This is absolutely the #1 priority, and the safest way to ensure that it doesn’t break existing functionality is to ensure that it doesn’t touch existing code and data.
It must not overburden the database or web server. We have a pretty good hosting plan with plenty of horsepower for our needs, but every hosting plan has it’s limits, and it was important to make sure that this didn’t cause us to exceed those limits.
It should not require any extra work from the other devs. We all have a full plate, and nobody has the time to do everything that sounds interesting. This means that I had to find a way to implement it without causing weapon or script updates, or really anything else that would make the others have to work on it.

Because of those criteria, what I have ended up doing is creating an in-world LSL script separate from the weapon scripts, which reports the relevant data to our website for storage.

On the pro side, this means that #1 and #3 above are met. It’s entirely independent of the normal C:SI script and data, so it shouldn’t cause any problems with the existing system. There is a little control over #2 as well, since by making the script myself I have some control over the polling interval, though of course nothing is bullet-proof.

On the cons side, however, is the fact that it is *entirely* opt-in on a per-region basis. While this may not be considered a con by many, it does at the very least mean that if you want your region to be tracked, you have to know about the system and also know that you need to ask me for the relevant scripts. Not every region owner will know about this at first, and I suspect many will not be interested in any case. So the weekly win/loss records per region will not be universally available, at least while the system is in it’s current incarnation.

I’m sure there are still many kinks to be worked out, and there are currently only two regions actively involved (Phoenix Syndicate and Samurai Edo), but I’m hopeful that this is a good start and that people who run C:SI-themed regions will be interested in participating.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and opinions, leave ‘em after the beep!

Popularity: 26% [?]

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