En Garde scoring adjustment

Sunday, September 14, 2008

I'm experimenting with an adjustment to the En Garde world ranking algorithm, so you may see more fluctuation in the World Champion scores today.


The problem I'm trying to fix is this. Your ranking is determined by an algorithm based on Google's PageRank. You get points for having winning records against other players. Or, to look at it from the other side, everyone else gets points for having a winning record against you. But what if nobody has a winning record against you? In the Google search ranking, this is equivalent to a web page that has no links to any other page. It's treated as a special case. It gives its points equally to every other page on the web.

So that's what I did in my ranking algorithm. The problem is, it can make a big difference when you go from "only one person is beating me" to "I have no losing records." If someone you know is getting points from you, then the chances are those points are circulating around a circle of friends you play with, and you get most of them back. But when you switch to "no losing records," your points get scattered across everyone, and that had the deleterious effect that winning a game could decrease your score.

The change I have made is to track partial game scores. So even if you have no losing records, you will still give points to people who have scored touches on you. They will then give most of those points back to you (for the touches you scored on them), so the next point flow should be the same. The difference is, the only way for a player to switch to "no losing point" mode is if nobody has ever scored a single touch on them. That's really rare, so it should be less of a problem.

For those of you who have been affected by this (you've noticed that winning a game could drop your score, or vice-versa), let me know if this change improves things.

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25,000 Games of En Garde

Monday, September 8, 2008

I keep a log of every game of En Garde played. It's mostly used for calculating the player rankings, but I can also use it to run statistics and keep track of the data. One thing I've been monitoring is a total count of every game played. And today, we crossed a pretty big number.


Twenty-five thousand! That's how many games of En Garde have been played in Second Life, ever since I released the game, just about a year ago. That works out to about 71 games per day, or a game every 21 minutes on average!

The 25,000th game was won by David Tapioca, who defeated Richard Brink 5 to 3.

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New Take it Easy v2.14

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Take it Easy Multiplayer v2.14

A new version of Take it Easy (Multiplayer) is available.

This version fixes a bug that corrupted the display of some of the player names in some circumstances. It also adds in some logging information so I can track games, which is the first step to adding a player ranking system like the other Procyon Games.

The update is available for free to all current game owners. You can deliver it straight to your inventory with your remote.

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New Follow Me v1.9

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

A new version 1.9 of Follow Me is available!

New Features:

  • Fixed the on/off button. When you click the green ball, it will toggle off, and when it's off nobody can follow you (and you won't get TP notices)
  • Fixed the Summon button. It would only work if your follower was in a crowd. Now it's much more responsive.
  • Added Map on/off. If you don't want your map to popup every time someone teleports, you can change it to only give you a TP link in your chat history.

To upgrade, just visit Procyon Games and click on the Follow Me vendor.

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Rez with confidence

Monday, July 28, 2008

There is a new exploit that has some people concerned which allegedly makes it possible for people to steal items you have rezzed. You can read the thread for all the details, but basically:

  • You have to have a custom-hacked viewer to do it. You can't steal things with the standard viewer
  • People can only steal things if they're rezzed in-world. It's not possible to steal items out of your inventory. It is possible, however, to steal an item that you're wearing (attached).
  • If someone steals something that's copy-ok, they get an identical copy to yours (same creator, same permissions). If they steal something that's not copy-ok, then you lose your copy.
  • Unlike CopyBot, which can't copy scripts, this exploit takes everything -- prims, textures, scripts, and all.
Understandably, a lot of people are taking expensive, no-copy items back into inventory. And some people have reported losing chims that were full of no-copy anims, which is unfortunate.

But, if you own an expensive Procyon game, you don't have anything to worry about. The Procyon Asset Protection system comes to the rescue! If you notice one day your game is missing, you can use your remote to get a new one. No big deal. So keep your games rezzed and available for everyone to play.

If someone does steal your game, the thief won't get much. The Asset Protection System locks the game to your avatar, so when the thief tries to rez his stolen copy, it won't work.

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One more scoring tweak

Sunday, July 13, 2008

I've made one more change to the ranking algorithm.

For those who don't know, the ranking algorithm is based on the same algorithm Google uses to determine its search results (which is the same algorithm SL is now using when you enter a search query in the "Find All" dialog). The change I made a couple days ago fixed a problem with points leaking out of the system, but it concentrated those points too much with people who had undefeated records. This latest tweak distributes those points evenly among everyone who's played games in the time window (two weeks). This is actually closer to what Google does for their own rankings.

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New En Garde T-Shirts


Samantha Poindexter has created a line of En Garde T-Shirts. Choose from a variety of witty saying guaranteed to enrage your opponent. And you don't have to say a thing! The shirts are offered as "sharewear." When you pick up a pack, you can make a donation for however much you think they are worth. Just come visit the En Garde Arena and pick up your set from her vendor there.

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