Daisypark is down due to reparation work being done in my living room. I expect it will be back online by thursday, 10/17. Sorry for the non-existent notice.
Daisypark is down due to reparation work being done in my living room. I expect it will be back online by thursday, 10/17. Sorry for the non-existent notice.
I started the 14-day tournament. I think I'm going to catch heat for this, but I deleted all the accounts. It seems to be that players need to be on a level playing field for tournaments. Just putting the game in tournament mode did not reset luck, rankings, BP coffins, hit points, etc. How do other admins handle this problem? I wonder if it might be possible to have an opt-in tournament. Players that want to test their mettle will be busted to a rank beginner while those that want to continue playing in open-mode may do so. Of course open-mode players won't be able to attack tournament players. This would get weird.
Some other changes:
<ul>
*[*]Initial luck: 20
*[*]All of stock events, risks and news_blurbs have been removed. All my custom modifications are particularly stingy about giving out luck.[/list]
Hopefully, this won't make the game suck. :-)
Other changes:
<ul>
*[*]Reduced top seller luck bonus to 5
*[*]Added very low ticket soft sell items[/list]
With your current luck setup, players can only pray that they will not get any luck events. You can boost your luck up to 40 by buying Yang's for yourself, but that's it. Even for the top player, he won't have top luck near the end of the game, and the rest of players can only pray. Not a very good move in my opinion, especially in a server that people often get 5 to 10 luck events per day.
As for the very low ticket soft sell items, they are not any better than high priced soft sell items for reaching within $50, $100, or even perfect sale. Players might be pissed if they lost a customer while trying sell a $3 pepsi.
mimifish, thanks for your feedback. Daisypark is sort of a laboratory where I tweak FQ to make it better. Of course, that doesn't always work.
Risk events should be risky. Yes, I agree that the current setting is a little draconian (today I got screwed on a number of risks). That's the essence of gambling. I don't think any player, winning or not, should have anything close to a 100% luck -- where's the fun in that? Do the games in Vegas offer the player anything close to 100% odds? 50%? Yet, I love playing blackjack in Vegas. When you win, it's a tremenous rush. When you lose, you just suck it.
The daisypark games do not produce the daily BP scores of stock FQ games, but that's OK. I will probably crank down the probability of risks to 15% (from %25) for the next tournament. I may crank down the turns from 25 to 20 too. It is true that I enjoy seeing the luck events (I spent a lot of time on them). I would love to see the risks re-worked in such a way that they allow players to come from behind (and make winning players lose). Again, risks should be risky.
As for the lower priced items, you may be right. The problem I was trying to address was that customers rarely have budgets in even fifty or hundred dollar intervals. It seemed like providing very small ticket items would be a way to get more "perfect" sales. Part of me wants to have more control over what items of offered for sell. Can this be a function of psychology? Wouldn't a perceptive salesman be more likely to offer items that won't excede the customer's budget? I'm just spitballing here. If I get more negative feedback, I'll certainly remove them for the next contest.
Thanks again for your comments.
[QUOTE]Originally Posted by [b
Quote[/b] (jjohn @ Nov. 07 2002,08:23)]mimifish, thanks for your feedback. Daisypark is sort of a laboratory where I tweak FQ to make it better. Of course, that doesn't always work.
Risk events should be risky. Yes, I agree that the current setting is a little draconian (today I got screwed on a number of risks). That's the essence of gambling. I don't think any player, winning or not, should have anything close to a 100% luck -- where's the fun in that? Do the games in Vegas offer the player anything close to 100% odds? 50%? Yet, I love playing blackjack in Vegas. When you win, it's a tremenous rush. When you lose, you just suck it.
The daisypark games do not produce the daily BP scores of stock FQ games, but that's OK. I will probably crank down the probability of risks to 15% (from %25) for the next tournament. I may crank down the turns from 25 to 20 too. It is true that I enjoy seeing the luck events (I spent a lot of time on them). I would love to see the risks re-worked in such a way that they allow players to come from behind (and make winning players lose). Again, risks should be risky.
As for the lower priced items, you may be right. The problem I was trying to address was that customers rarely have budgets in even fifty or hundred dollar intervals. It seemed like providing very small ticket items would be a way to get more "perfect" sales. Part of me wants to have more control over what items of offered for sell. Can this be a function of psychology? Wouldn't a perceptive salesman be more likely to offer items that won't excede the customer's budget? I'm just spitballing here. If I get more negative feedback, I'll certainly remove them for the next contest.
Thanks again for your comments.
I do agree that PSY should play a more active role - currently it only plays a small portion of the game. As PSY increases so should the possiblity of guessing customers $ in pocket, increase the luck possibility, treat customers proper so they dont get offended and also insuring that thier resistance lowers and possibly not going over a customers budget, but only if the the PSY level was extremely high (? 15-25 ?)
Currently a player need only have PSY at 4 to be really effective if they are experienced in the game. The players seem to focus on attacking others which I dont think is the main theme of the game.
Other parts of the game need to be utilized to be really effective, church, hospital, Di-Mart, Yangs and Spirit U. Perhaps, When these other elements come more into the game, the game will focus on managing a Funeral Parlor instead of just attack your opponant.
I agree, the PSY and customers become a sideshow after a while. Having said that though, if your PSY is at/above level 15, you never get angry customers coming through the door.
High levels of Psy *does* do most of these things already. There are 4 or 5 things Psy can do total.
Seth A. Robinson
Robinson Technologies
Islander bet the pants/skirts off the players on Daisypark. The next 14-day Tournament starts Monday, nov 18. Soft sell items below $50 have been removed. Risks will occur %15 of the time. Top seller bonus is set at 10. Base turns are set to 10. Alliances are encouraged to improve luck.
Let's GET IT ON! *
Well, Islander is most likely not going to play in your next 14-tournament, mainly because he experienced strange IE crashes in the past few days and could hardly finish his turns without interruption. He was not sure where the problem came from, his internet connection or IE settings or your tweak.
Besides, as mimifish, he's probably going to go back to the test server to meet some old friends.
It would be remarkable if editing risks, events and whatnot could crash flash (and then EI). I have had the client crash on me while I was then only one logged in and my character Pip was at the bank.
Oh well.
Well I decided to give your short 10-turn game a try. You should know what name I am playing with.
As for the crashing, I don't know if it's something to do with some possible firewall on the LAN in my working place that occasionally crash the flash. But you (and/or Seth) did add some extra flash to the original game. I don't know if the new flash has some weird things. I did notice that the game usually crashed when a flash animation was loading unsuccessfully. It crashed on both computers I had in my work (running on Chinese version of Win98 and Widows2000), but as far as I can remember it did not crash on my computer at home (WindowsXP English version). So, maybe I should check if I have the latest flash version.
The most weird thing is that the crash only started a few days ago...
A woman emailed me the same thing not long ago, "My flash client has started crashing from just a few days ago, did you change something."
I told her no. I really have no idea. I have not changed the flash or .exe since right after Flash 6 was released and didn't work with FQ, I did an emergency patch to fix that and that was it.
Seth A. Robinson
Robinson Technologies
Most likely it has to have something to do with the new add-ons. I never experienced such a crash in other server(s). Maybe you can ask jjohn to send you or tell you all he changed. Is it possible that some of the new flash animations are not completely compatible with FQ server program or something else weird?
I haven't added any flash (I don't have Flash MX). I can't draw to save my life. The only modifications have been to the text files. I have used flash files that I found lying around in the FQ public/flash directory. I figured those were fair game. That said, it is remarkably easy to make typos and the like that may be throwing the FQ engine for a loop. Debugging this is tricky, since I can't run a debugger on the server without the source code. However, I have zipped up all my currently loaded files and made them available here. If you can spot the syntax errors, please post the the fixes here. I'm sure the last thing anyone expects is a bug in a windows program.
Isolating the Flash crashes is difficult. I have seen my sessions crash when the winning money bag animation comes
up (a stock file). I have crashed at the Bank, a game element I can't touch. I have crashed in other places too. I recall that my crashes began after I rolled up my XP box to the latest Winders and IE patches from Microsoft. Again, this maybe be entirely concidental. *
Daisypark is also behind a Linksys firewall. Earlier this week (or last week), I patched the firmware in it (a serious exploit was discovered for the firmwear I had). The FQ server is in the DMZ so that it can talk to the licensing server correctly. The box is a 333 Celeron running Win 98 SE v. 4.10.2222 A.
With any luck, FQ V.1.0 will quell the cranky Flash client.
Well I'm playing on Daisy Park now and have not had any disconnects. I'm on W2K with Flash 6, have not upgraded for a while so there might be a newer flash 6 version out there.
If it is an XP/ie/flash combination that's pretty bad.. ugh I hate when stuff just doesn't work. Oh well, I have XP here so I'll do some tests on it.
Seth A. Robinson
Robinson Technologies
It's not XP/IE/Flash combo problem. In fact, I cannot play it under either Windows 2000 Chinese Edition or Windows 98 Chinese Edition. I CAN play Mr. Brown's server under those 2 machine. However I can play Daisypark at home using XP home edition (English version). It appears that I am not the only one who experienced some strange behavior.
Is it a virus?Or the Daisypark server computer has a virus!
There is no malicious code on the Daisypark machine. I have strip that machine bare and turned off all networking services except for FQ (although sometimes VNC is on too). What you and I are experiencing are application failures due to unknown causes. Is it bad flash? Bad scripting? The only way to solve the problem is to identify it.
One clue to the problem is that other machines, running stock FQ don't seem to have as many client crashes. This does point to something screwy on Daisypark. I have posted the modifications that I have made and that are currently running on Daisypark. These include my own events and risks as well as commenting out the stock events and risks. You are encouraged to "spot the bug" and help eliminate the problem. I have also created a bug report form for Daisypark users to report crashes.
Magically, V1.0 may fix these problems and we can worry about sticking it to grieving customers rather than hunt computer bugs.
Why you should care about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The machine that I used to run Funeral Quest has lost all its data. It was running Windows 98. During the reboot that occurs after installing the lastest service packs, I was greeted by an ugly DOS message accusing me of violating the DMCA. There was no way around this message, it appeared to be installed on the master boot record (just as "old skool" DOS viruses used to do). When I rebooted the machine with Win95 rescue disk, fdisk reported that my partition was changed to NOVELL. Although I tried several recovery methods (I used to have to deal with broken DOS boxes a lot before I became a Unix hack), I was forced to remove the existing hard drive partitions, destroying all the data on that machine.
I was accused, judged and prosecuted by Microsoft's updating software. I had no chance to plead my case, nor recourse to the punishment. In fact, I do have a license for the copy of Win98 that was running. This point is moot now, of course. The DMCA allows large corporations, such as Microsoft, to assume control of my personal property. A more reasonable approach for Microsoft to have taken is, on determining that my machine had an invalid license, to refuse to install the software. Although that still would have angered me, I would not have lost my (and my player's) data.
And this all happened because I was installing patches to fix Microsoft's bug-ridden software.
This is not an urban legend. This happened tonight, at 9:45 EST 12/30/2002. Whether I like Microsoft's software or not, the destruction of MY intellectual property has galvanized my opinion about the DMCA and companies that abuse their customers under the guise of protecting their business. This isn't healthy development for America or business in general.
To more learn about the fight against the DMCA, take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's page about it.
In the meantime, I've cobbled together another system to host Daisypark's FQ game. Those angered by the needless interruption of their game should direct their wrath towards eliminating the DMCA once and for all.
UPDATE: I was hoping to run FQ under Linux using Wine. That *nearly* worked, but the server choked when trying to seen the flash client down the pipe. Then I install FQ on a win2K VM that was hosted on Linux. That looked promising, but began crashing regularly with any kind of use.
I'm install NT 4.0 on the old Daisypark machine. With luck, that will be stable enough. Seth, consider developing your next game in cross-platform scripting language pleasepleaseplease *
For the first time in weeks, I have a little time to work with FQ. I have set a new virtual machine (via vmware) that's hosting FQ. I hope the performance adequate. Enjoy.
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