![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
All is Sunny
Kerri is home again and all is wonderful.!
We collected her at the airport, right on time. Here luggage may be in Vienna rather than Canberra, apparently. she checked it in at Paris and it didn't turn up in Sydney for customs inspection, so heaven knows what happened.
Her travels went well, she came back with a ton of photographs of the White House and Pantheon and Eiffel Tower and stuff. Washington was humid, Paris just right. Nobody knows how to make a decent cup of tea.
Interesting news is that the next meeting is in Washington in January. The humidity should be gone by then. Then again, I'm not entirely sure that I'm keen on wintry Washington, nor would it be easily combined with any other worthwhile trip worth writing a book about - I have in mind a trip around Civil War battlefields and that would take me at least a week, preferably in early summer when the days are reasonably long.
The meeting after is in Berlin in April, and there are distinct possibilities there to combine it with the London and Fort Worth thing. Have to see what the dates are like.
In other news, my site is coming along well. Meaning it looks like crap and doesn't work as it should, but I'm learning a lot. The login function works, I've put in a couple of validators which should prevent a trip back to the server if one of the mandatory fields is blank, and I've discovered how to snag the user IP address.
Next step is the register new user routine. That's why I need the IP address, so I can log who's using the site and pick up candidates for multiple accounts. Don't know what I'll do with them if I catch them, but.
First task for players will be to add names for characters, ships, planets, stars, empires... I'll need hundreds of these and I want several different minds on the job. Besides which, there's not going to be a real lot else to do while I populate the "galaxy" and get things working.
I've been thinking about how to process orders. In Magic, I used to run a vast program which moved planets, did terraforming, increased populations, moved spaceships, ran battles and so on and on. It used to take hours if not days to run, but everything got done, the results were printed up and mailed out, the players did their orders and sent them in for the next run two weeks later.
Obviously, this ain't going to work for a game where players can log on at any time and expect to see something happening. However, one of the beauties of PBM was that there was a delay when diplomacy could be conducted and you got to think about what you'd do next. That's one reason why I don't like "real-time" games - half the fun was the anticipation, and I used to think up strategies in the shower or while mowing the lawn or while lying in bed at night trying to get to sleep.
Besides, if some people can't log on more than once every day or so, they are at a disadvantage to the fellow who is online all the time (like me) and can respond instantly.
What I'm thinking of is having a delay of a day before an order is actioned. I think that's reasonable - you can't order a spaceship to a distant star and have it leap off on the instant, you'd expect to hang around for a day or so loading supplies, scraping the crew out of the starport bars and finetuning the molecular drives.
But here's the clever bit - instead of running lots of orders all at once, the act of submitting an order will kick off a process whereby the serverside program will look through the eligible orders, select a random player from that batch and run his oldest outstanding order. This will break the processing down so it is more or less continuous, and intermingle the players so that you don't get one player moving, then another and so on, which is what would happen if you merely processed the oldest outstanding order, seeing as how players would tend to log on and give orders in chunks.
I'll have to have some sort of "speed-up" factor, so that if there are lots of orders awaiting processing, they don't hang around too long. Maybe if there are orders that reach 36 hours old, I'll process them two at a time, and if they get to be two days old they will be processed automatically.
Must mention the orcas. Watched them this morning and they were initially just distant spouts against Vancouver island, then they moved closer and I could see their dorsal fins and then their backs and white eye patches as they came up. Apparently they came in even closer to the cam, but I had to go to the airport, and afterwords was taken up in printing out her photographs and listening to travellers tales. By the time I got back to the computer they'd buggered off down the strait, leaving a train of admiring comments in the chat room.
We're off for a celebratory dinner soon - my son who had his birthday while Kerri was away got to choose the venue.
We collected her at the airport, right on time. Here luggage may be in Vienna rather than Canberra, apparently. she checked it in at Paris and it didn't turn up in Sydney for customs inspection, so heaven knows what happened.
Her travels went well, she came back with a ton of photographs of the White House and Pantheon and Eiffel Tower and stuff. Washington was humid, Paris just right. Nobody knows how to make a decent cup of tea.
Interesting news is that the next meeting is in Washington in January. The humidity should be gone by then. Then again, I'm not entirely sure that I'm keen on wintry Washington, nor would it be easily combined with any other worthwhile trip worth writing a book about - I have in mind a trip around Civil War battlefields and that would take me at least a week, preferably in early summer when the days are reasonably long.
The meeting after is in Berlin in April, and there are distinct possibilities there to combine it with the London and Fort Worth thing. Have to see what the dates are like.
In other news, my site is coming along well. Meaning it looks like crap and doesn't work as it should, but I'm learning a lot. The login function works, I've put in a couple of validators which should prevent a trip back to the server if one of the mandatory fields is blank, and I've discovered how to snag the user IP address.
Next step is the register new user routine. That's why I need the IP address, so I can log who's using the site and pick up candidates for multiple accounts. Don't know what I'll do with them if I catch them, but.
First task for players will be to add names for characters, ships, planets, stars, empires... I'll need hundreds of these and I want several different minds on the job. Besides which, there's not going to be a real lot else to do while I populate the "galaxy" and get things working.
I've been thinking about how to process orders. In Magic, I used to run a vast program which moved planets, did terraforming, increased populations, moved spaceships, ran battles and so on and on. It used to take hours if not days to run, but everything got done, the results were printed up and mailed out, the players did their orders and sent them in for the next run two weeks later.
Obviously, this ain't going to work for a game where players can log on at any time and expect to see something happening. However, one of the beauties of PBM was that there was a delay when diplomacy could be conducted and you got to think about what you'd do next. That's one reason why I don't like "real-time" games - half the fun was the anticipation, and I used to think up strategies in the shower or while mowing the lawn or while lying in bed at night trying to get to sleep.
Besides, if some people can't log on more than once every day or so, they are at a disadvantage to the fellow who is online all the time (like me) and can respond instantly.
What I'm thinking of is having a delay of a day before an order is actioned. I think that's reasonable - you can't order a spaceship to a distant star and have it leap off on the instant, you'd expect to hang around for a day or so loading supplies, scraping the crew out of the starport bars and finetuning the molecular drives.
But here's the clever bit - instead of running lots of orders all at once, the act of submitting an order will kick off a process whereby the serverside program will look through the eligible orders, select a random player from that batch and run his oldest outstanding order. This will break the processing down so it is more or less continuous, and intermingle the players so that you don't get one player moving, then another and so on, which is what would happen if you merely processed the oldest outstanding order, seeing as how players would tend to log on and give orders in chunks.
I'll have to have some sort of "speed-up" factor, so that if there are lots of orders awaiting processing, they don't hang around too long. Maybe if there are orders that reach 36 hours old, I'll process them two at a time, and if they get to be two days old they will be processed automatically.
Must mention the orcas. Watched them this morning and they were initially just distant spouts against Vancouver island, then they moved closer and I could see their dorsal fins and then their backs and white eye patches as they came up. Apparently they came in even closer to the cam, but I had to go to the airport, and afterwords was taken up in printing out her photographs and listening to travellers tales. By the time I got back to the computer they'd buggered off down the strait, leaving a train of admiring comments in the chat room.
We're off for a celebratory dinner soon - my son who had his birthday while Kerri was away got to choose the venue.