The Energon Pub

Welcome to Mkall's Journal. Here I'll just blabber on about where I am in the coding process, various ideas I've had (feasible or not) and other things. I'll try to keep you informed as to what I'm currently working on, although I may not tell you everything I'm working on. Please do not take everything I say here as a certainty that it'll appear in the game. Many ideas I state here are still very much in their formative stage, and will most likely be changes or dropped completely.

I've had the code for 24 hours now and I'm still sifting through it. It's not really a mess, just complicated, very complicated; and yet kind of simple at the same time. I'm still setting up my development environment, which in itself is proving to be a bit of a learning curve since I've never done it before.

I haven't modified anything yet as I'm unsure yet as to the full extent of integration, however some things look like they may be easy to change/modify; number of characters for example.

Now that I see the code and know for sure how things interact, I can now properly evaluate all the cool ideas that have popped up on this board. The main issue that has plagued HMW for some time has been weapons and their imbalance. There has been suggestions of just setting the reload times of all the weapons to the same thing, however that doesn't sit well with me as it will leave us with clone weapons. Tammuz has given me the idea to ditch reload times all together and go with percentages instead. Every round a percentile is chosen, and if it falls within the weapons chance to fire entry, the weapon is fired. I think I may have found a way to get that idea to work. Experimentation will commence as soon as I finish setting up the environment. Oh yeah, it seems that it should be easy to include INT as a pre-req stat for some weapons. It might be more challenging though to include healing-style weapons as it would mean figuring out how to dynamically change the targeting part of the code. You don't want to heal your enemies after all.

The idea of victory points has always intrigued me too. For those of you that do not know, Victory Points (VPs), under Glyph's planning, were given to a character if they stasis locked a target, or brought a target below 50% health. These would then go to earning character and player badges. I have a few other ideas too, such as giving them out if you survive a successful territory defence mission, or help win a mission that secures a territory for your faction in the warmap. Maybe you'll gain VPs just for being brave enough to fight severely outnumbered in missions. The more difficult your opponent, the more VPs you gain. And I'm sure I'll come up with more ideas. However I don't intend to place them in until the warmap is implemented.

For now, I'm not going to be working on the challenge arena. I'm placing the warmap as a higher priority. Which brings me to my vision on missions vs arena in v2. We, the programmers, have always believed that the missions/warmap should have more focus than the arena/pit. To that end, when the warmap rolls out, I'm currently thinking about nixing the xp bonus in arena/pit matches. That isn't to say that those places won't be without their merits. Currently I'm thinking about replacing the XP bonus with something completely different: tokens (better name might follow). As you earn tokens, you can exchange them for prizes not normally available through regular means. How'd you like an alt class with a tactic that only Quints have? Or maybe an above-average weapon? Or maybe you'd like a pet Kremzeek? If you want to upgrade your character, go into missions. If you want shiny objects, enter the pit. Be warned though; only the winner of a match will get tokens.

Until next time, see ya.

Just a heads up for when the game is turned back up, there should be be plethora of new alt images in the heavymetalwar/images page. I'm uploading the lot that I had sorted before OS left. Once the game comes back on and you notice any strange changes, or broken pictures, please let me know. Once I'm assured that they went in ok, I'll start placing the ones the maximals and predacons want in their alt lists.

Maximals may make requests here: viewtopic.php?f=84&t=35162
Predacons may make their requests here: viewtopic.php?f=85&t=35160

Edit: Scratch that, turns out I need to do a few more things before adding them in to be recoloured, so I've removed them for now.

Right, time to answer the questions that are on everyone's minds: Where is Mkall and wtf is up with a down game?

I'm still here, working on figuring that out. The problem is that both HMW and the Energon Pub share the same server, once upon a time each inhabited separate servers but not anymore and for now Seibs isn't going back to that old way, granted I haven't pushed him yet until I'm certain that I can't do anything else to make this code more efficient. The upgrade to phpbb3 meant more CPU power and memory taken up by the boards, leaving less for HMW to use. I'm currently looking at the cron jobs, those are the tasks that are performed at regular intervals to process stuff. It's a slow process as I'm learning this by the seat of my pants. I have a white board with coloured markers that is messier than my kitchen with random thoughts and diagrams.

Personally I was hoping to come on, get new features going and lead HMW to it's salvation. Sadly that's a ways off. It doesn't help that I'm learning php from HMW code. Flying by the seat of my pants barely begins to describe things. Hanging on for dear life is more like it.

Enough of my complaining, I had a pretty good idea this was what I was getting myself into. It's just human nature to amplify the bad points over the good.

On the altmodes front, it turns out that simply uploading the base image isn't enough. One must also create a pure black and white version for the recolouring to work properly. That probably explains why we had so few robot modes when they were available. The only way OS could figure out was to wipe out the colour pixel by pixel. I've found a simpler way (4 steps per altmode 30 seconds per altmode), and am asking for the assistance of anyone with photoshop to help out. Drop me a PM if interested.

Now it's time for a random idea. I was reflecting on how easy it is to create spy networks through this game. A couple friends across factions could ruin a lot of planning. Now the simple way is to just ban those involved, but in the end that just makes it player vs staff, and that's not what I want this game to be about. Instead I'm thinking about adding real consequences and rewards into the game. If someone reports spies to their faction leader (with proof), the leader could give the spy a choice, imprisonment or defection to the side they're collaborating with. If they choose imprisonment, they're unable to do anything for a set period of time. If they choose defection, then they leave everything behind that they can't carry with them. All spare weapons, 90% of their energon reserves, and victory points all disappear. And woe be it to any faction leader if they're caught allowing a spy to infiltrate their own ranks. My theory is, spying can be fun, but like in real war there can be consequences.

Well, time to sift through the code some more. Until next time, see ya.

Back in the saddle! Well slowly anyways.

The past while I've been focusing on what I can't do; this led to me feeling kinda bummed out and that led me to say some things about the backend code that caused Seibs to take the cautious route and change the password on the FTP. Understandable of course, but I'm now looking at the code in such a way that I'm not making grandiose promises about things that are beyond my skill at this point of time. Instead I'm focusing on what I can do with HMW.

Right now that is four things:
1) Fix Kremzeek - I already got a hotfix ready for this
2) Quintessons (minus the minicons)
3) Beast Faction self-sustainability (this includes uploading and working with the new altmodes)
4) Secret

I had a quick chat with Seibs and we're both eager to get me working here again. I don't have back-end access yet, but I probably still have to have a more through discussion with the big boss first. I'm optimistic though. I'm staying tight-lipped about #4 for now, but I am excited about it.

This is how my testing plan will work, for anything I do:
1) Code and test on my environment. This ensures that nothing inadvertently crashes the live site. Also to make sure it does what it's supposed to do.
2) Import it into the live environment and use it on my account only so that if something again goes wrong, only my account will be affected. Also serves as a decent teaser for you guys to see what's coming up. This also means that you'll occasionally see strange things when spying on my account, or reading missions where my team is participating.
3) After I've made sure everything works and is the functionality that I'm looking for, I'll release it to the masses and then sit back and see what else needs to be done based on the masses' reactions.

I'm not making any promises at all as to the game's future. I'm taking baby steps here. Whatever 5) is is still a complete mystery to me until I finish 1-4. Fortunately the RAM upgrade has given me some room to work with.

Cheers
Mkall

I think I clicked the wrong button and started typing. Oh well, check the post above for the latest update