Friday, October 24, 2008
There seems to be something very wrong with Linden Lab's network right now. Around 3:00PM PST today, calls from scripted objects via llHTTPRequest started silently failing some of the time. This means that En Garde scoreboards won't update, games won't get recorded, and in general things are a mess.
I've called support and filed a ticket and they say they have an engineer looking at it right now. The problem is easily reproducible. I'll file an update when I know more.
[UPDATE 7pm]: We have narrowed the problem down to DNS, which seems to be broken at Linden Lab. They are looking into it.
[UPDATE 7am Saturday]: Linden Lab claimed they fixed the problem, but it's still there.
[UPDATE 1:30pm Saturday]: Still no further response from the Lindens. This bug is responsible for games not registering, score boards not updating, and remote controls not functioning. It also causes some of my vendors not to deliver products.
I've added a Jira issue for this. If you own one of my products and are affected by this bug, please go to
JIRA SVC-3318 and vote for the issue. (You will have to log in using your Second Life name and password; then a Vote link will appear in the left column)
[UPDATE 3PM Sunday]: I have no new word from the Lindens, but my tests seem to show that the problem has gone away. If you are still seeing this problem please let me know
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Linden Lab has done something today that killed the bot I use to upload name textures. So all my pretty scoreboards that show players' names in nice fonts in just one prim won't show any new player names. If you're already "in the system" your name will still be there ok. New players, however, will just show up blank until I can figure out how to fix this.
There is also a problem with Local Scores -- if a new player is on there, it kills the whole display (since they don't have a texture to show). I can maybe fix that so they're just blank and it doesn't kill the whole score display. Not sure how long that will take either.
[Update 10:58] I've fixed the bug so that blank names won't kill your Local Scores. No new players will show up in any scoreboard, though. Still working on that.
[Update Oct 3] It seems Linden Lab re-enabled bots, so I've turned the name upload back on. There are some new players who didn't get a name during this period. If your name isn't showing up, IM me and I can reset you.
[Update Oct 4] I spoke too soon. I'll work on this some more this weekend and see if I can get it going again. Hey Linden Lab, when can we get HTML on a Prim, hmm?
[Update Oct 5] Okay, giving this another try. Let me know if it's working... or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
