Tuesday, January 27, 2009
I need to take the Procyon Games website down this Saturday for some back-end maintenance. If all goes well it should only be down for 15-30 minutes, starting at 8AM PST. During that time, no game plays will be recorded. That means that any game you play while the site is down will not count for World Ranking or any local tournaments you are playing in. I will update this posting right before I take the site down, and again when it's back up.
[UPDATE 7:15AM] I'm starting a little early. The server is now down. All games should continue to function normally, except scores during this downtime will not be recorded.
[UPDATE 8:00AM] And we're back! Everything seemed to go smoothy. There may be a couple hiccoughs today but I don't think you'll notice.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
This is something that a lot of folks have been asking for.
You can now link your Second Life avatar with the Play Procyon web site. What that means is that you can go to the Registered Players section of the web site and see your personal play history. Right now, to start, the first thing I added was En Garde games. So you can see every game you've played in the past two weeks, who you played, where you played them, and what your scores were.
In the future I'll be adding more games, and maybe more options too, like a versus feature that shows you how you're doing against specific players. Game owners, too, will have their own section that will let them manage their teams and see how their game units are being used.
Registration is very simple. All you have to do is visit the
Registration Kiosk at Procyon Games and click it. Then follow the link to the Procyon Games website. It sets a cookie in your browser -- you don't have to sign up, give me an email address, or even think up a password.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Nonsmokergirl Tulip is running another Frootcake tournament. If you think you're good enough to win money at the game, here is the place. The tournament runs for seven days until Wednesday the 29th. You have to play at the table in North Norway, but every game adds to your score and the top three scores at the end of the week win prizes (in addition to what you win for each game) — First place is 1000 L$, second place is 750, and third place is 500. Remember you can check the Frootcake main page to see who has been playing lately, and you can also join the Frootcake Players group to look for players.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Second Life has been up and down, pretty much all day today. It's frustrating for me, it's frustrating for my customers, and pretty much everyone who wants to use Second Life.
I remember when Philip Linden, back when he was CEO, made a big deal out of his promise to bring stability to the grid. And when Mark Kingdon came on, he made the same vow. I don't think they've made any progress, stability-wise, in the past year at all. I mean, look at the log. It's ridiculous. They keep taking the system up and down, up and down. It makes me believe that they don't really know why the system is so unstable. If they knew, they wouldn't keep bringing it back up, would they?
Linden Lab points to the increase in concurrency as a rebuttal. I say that's beside the point. So what if more people can connect to the grid, if it still provides the same inferior service to all of them? "Yeah," they seem to be saying, "we're flinging crap at everyone, but these days we can cover ten times as many people in crap as we could before!"
As a content creator, I find these continuing outages especially distressing. Imagine if you ran a store in a mall (a real-life mall), and the mall operator randomly shut off the electricity several times a day. Not only that, but also locked the doors so none of your customers couldn't get in to your store. Now imagine that the mall operator does all that, but not just at random, but instead watches your store to see when it's busiest, and then shuts you down. Because that's what's happening. Second Life shuts down during its peak hours. The times where there's the most customers in the grid, the most people willing to spend money and by my products. The worst time for them not to be able to see and play and buy my games.
Frustrating.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
I've done some minor tweaking on the web site. The main change is I've added a list of recent blog entries in the sidebar, so you can see all the latest news from every page of the site. And I made some spiffy "Buy my games" buttons. I think I've got all the bugs worked out, but if you get any errors or broken links please let me know.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
And now we have the recent games listing added to the Frootcake page. I'm on a roll!
Sunday, January 11, 2009
I've added a recent games display to the En Garde page at Procyon Games. My hope is that if you're looking for someone to play, or just interested to see who's been winning lately, you can use it to meet new players and find out more about the En Garde community.
This is something that a lot of folks have been asking for.
Nonsmokergirl Tulip is running another Frootcake tournament. If you think you're good enough to win money at the game, here is the place. The tournament runs for seven days until Wednesday the 29th. You have to play at the table in North Norway, but every game adds to your score and the top three scores at the end of the week win prizes (in addition to what you win for each game) — First place is 1000 L$, second place is 750, and third place is 500. Remember you can check the Frootcake main page to see who has been playing lately, and you can also join the Frootcake Players group to look for players.
Second Life has been up and down, pretty much all day today. It's frustrating for me, it's frustrating for my customers, and pretty much everyone who wants to use Second Life.
