Jolt & Netgamers

[Smudge]

Surely thou Kal there should be a "dedicated" Suggestions Forum monitor, who brings things up - also with regards to bringing the community back together, are we ever going to see the re-emergence of Creators Hour?

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Smudge

Surely thou Kal there should be a "dedicated" Suggestions Forum monitor, who brings things up - also with regards to bringing the community back together, are we ever going to see the re-emergence of Creators Hour?

Technically there is as thats part of the role that myself and the other suggestions mods are supposed to play. However since Jolt took over the mods have been viewed as propaganda tools rather than the information channel between the community and the game and as such we are get no feedback whatsoever and even if they would give us feedback to pass on we would struggle to find someone to get info from because PAteam are an inactive bunch whom when you do get hold of one ends up being completly clueless (unless its Kal)

[Smudge]

Then someone needs to kick some PA Team butt to get things into gear?

[Wandows]

i think that Jolt needs to get in gear first and actually show some interest in the game and the community before it is usefull to get PaTeam in gear.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Wandows

i think that Jolt needs to get in gear first and actually show some interest in the game and the community before it is usefull to get PaTeam in gear.

Everyone needs to get into gear. We need to do what we can to give Jolt a reason to put some more effort into developing the game while Jolt needs to realise the active audience and potential money spinner they have if they invest a bit more effort. And PAteam needs to also get a bit more involved as theres a lack of any real pressence offered by them which doesnt instil confidence.

If each of these groups would sit down, look at themselves in the mirror and makes an attempt to fix the problems they are able to fix rather than using the other groups as a scapegoat the game would stand a much greater chance of success

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by wakey

If each of these groups would sit down, look at themselves in the mirror and makes an attempt to fix the problems they are able to fix rather than using the other groups as a scapegoat the game would stand a much greater chance of success

Totally agreed. I know PA Team have r/l commitments but if they could get some time for a meeting with the people who makes thing happen in Jolt Land and show them that the community want / need to help structure things then maybe we can move on with PA and let it evolve

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Smudge

Surely thou Kal there should be a "dedicated" Suggestions Forum monitor, who brings things up - also with regards to bringing the community back together, are we ever going to see the re-emergence of Creators Hour?

my aim is that everything on the suggestions forum (apart form the really old stuff) eventually gets approved or declined. Declining is often easier than approving becuase it deosn't require any coder time. Other than my lack of time one reason I haven't approved anything recently is that we allready have a big pile of things to code, and people allways seem to think that when something gets approved it will be in the next round which won't be the case.

BTW if any perl coders happen to want to do some coding for free please do get in touch..

[Phil^]

Originally Posted by wakey

because PAteam are an inactive bunch whom when you do get hold of one ends up being completly clueless

thats a little harsh tbh. while i was there, the bulk of them werent inactive or inept. since theres not been significant changes in terms of whos there, i can only assume the same is true.
Not everyone is dedicated to doing the next round, there are those who do support, and multihunting for instance as their main priorities.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Phil^

thats a little harsh tbh. while i was there, the bulk of them werent inactive or inept. since theres not been significant changes in terms of whos there, i can only assume the same is true.
Not everyone is dedicated to doing the next round, there are those who do support, and multihunting for instance as their main priorities.

If you have tried to get even the simplist question answered this round you would really its hardly harsh. Those who have quit have simply not been replaced by adequate people and then theres people like kal whom are normally great but have been very busy with other things.

And its support and mh where theres also issues, its across the board. And even if the people arent focused on the area that the issue is with they should have their finger on the pulse enough to answer most questions or atleast get you the answer but even that fails.

Theres a MAJOR problem with PAteam atm which is just adding to the problems brought about by Jolt and the comminity

[Bashar]

Originally Posted by furball

At the moment, the biggest problem is the player base. With a total planet level of ~2500, 1500 of those are in serious alliances. Where are the little players who war amongst themselves and play for fun? There's just not enough of these people left.

A drip-drip effect of people entering the game just won't do. We need a large influx of people all at once instead, so that they can look after each other rather than just being used as farms by our current small people.

Did I not provide a viable way of achieving this?

[Bashar]

Originally Posted by wakey

Please remove your blinkers for a second so you can see the whole picture.

I mean no offence by this, and I hope you take none, but you are honestly not the person to be saying this. You are so caught up in your noble one alliance crusade to right the wrongs of planetarion and pursue world peace and love to all men that you too easily see fault in other peoples approach to the community. There is no doubt that you do things from the good of your heart, and that you achieve things, but you really do have too critical an eye when judging other peoples contributions and intentions. It is possible to puruse a realist approach to the game and community as opposed to a liberal one without causing detriment. It is a war game, and people will do what they feel is best. Ultimately, people signup for a good fight and some political fun. I think you are too focused on the little new players at 'stage 1' of the game, and too quick to criticise others who don't conform to your ideal.

Again, no offence intended, but you do need to broaden your scope a little at times.

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Kal

BTW if any perl coders happen to want to do some coding for free please do get in touch..

Surely, with the lack of people coming forward saying they know Perl its time to change the language of PA. I know for a fact that in Web Dev courses they put more emphasis on PHP than Perl.

[Phil^]

waaaaaaay back there was a few efforts to code a php based pa, all never got finished for one reason or another. ultimately it never got completed because the people coding it left before they could finish it. ever since then php-pa has been a sort of cursed word - at least in the inner circles.

[Smudge]

Its not exactly rocket science for a transfer over to PHP, the only hard part I see would be the Covert Ops system, and even then it would be do-able.

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Smudge

Its not exactly rocket science for a transfer over to PHP, the only hard part I see would be the Covert Ops system, and even then it would be do-able.

why on earth would coverts ops be more of a problem than anything else?

the second problem with a php pa would actual;ly be the ticker as it would need to work in a completely different way.

the biggest problem is simple, designing, coding, testing all requires significant time and resources.

[Mit]

Originally Posted by Kal

the second problem with a php pa would actual;ly be the ticker as it would need to work in a completely different way.

I'm interested how you work that one out

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Bashar

I mean no offence by this, and I hope you take none, but you are honestly not the person to be saying this. You are so caught up in your noble one alliance crusade to right the wrongs of planetarion and pursue world peace and love to all men that you too easily see fault in other peoples approach to the community. There is no doubt that you do things from the good of your heart, and that you achieve things, but you really do have too critical an eye when judging other peoples contributions and intentions. It is possible to puruse a realist approach to the game and community as opposed to a liberal one without causing detriment. It is a war game, and people will do what they feel is best. Ultimately, people signup for a good fight and some political fun. I think you are too focused on the little new players at 'stage 1' of the game, and too quick to criticise others who don't conform to your ideal.

Again, no offence intended, but you do need to broaden your scope a little at times.

At no point have I ever said I expect everyone to play the game like I do but everyone in this game espeically the people in command positions of alliances and the respected members of this community can do alot more to make it a more welcoming place. When we get people like you sitting there saying theres not a problem in the big alliances and they do help you just give those whom are causing a problem a way out

Now you say people signup for a good fight, if thats the case why do so many people in this game pick the weakest targets possible and deny their targets to have the chance of having any good fights . In real life wars generally have rules, certainly in traditional combat yet in PA people in this community push a view that anything goes which stands in the way of the games growth.

As for saying I'm too focused on the new players, its alot better than being one off the people whom couldnt care less and just goes around bashing people half their size so that they have no chance to have a good fight. Theres no reason for such actions to be happening as its not an effective way of gaining score yet they continue to do so and drive out new players. The games growth is reliant on the small and more causal players NOT the big players and these people need to be given a chance and given a friendly enviorment to play the game in, they do not need bashed to peices by some idiot who thinks because they are more experianced and have a goodish alliance they have the right to act like an inconsiderate fool.

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Kal

why on earth would coverts ops be more of a problem than anything else?

* Galaxy stuff (ie status, forum etc) is easy
* Attacking / Defending is relativly easy
* Production / Research / Construction is easy
* Engineering is easy - simply a case of modifying DB fields
* Waves is easy
* Fleets and Missions are easy
* Covert Ops will take some thinking about
* Galaxy / Universe screens are easy
* In Game Alliance would be tricky
* History is easy
* Journal is easy

Originally Posted by Mit

I'm interested how you work that one out

* Ticker would be easy to code tbh

Originally Posted by Kal

the biggest problem is simple, designing, coding, testing all requires significant time and resources.

That is utter b*******. If there are other "PA Clones" out there who can get a game up and running on a dodgy server, a company with the "resources" of Jolt to put into things they should surely be able to do something.

* You DONT need to design, its the same concept we have at the moment, just in a different language

* Coding would agreeably be the most time consuming, but since Jolt have given us a "coder" then surely that would be his job

* Testing. That is laughable. Surely Testing comes under the Betas. Oh wait, let me remember this rounds Beta. As I said, laughable

Yes, I am aware I may earn negative rep for this but someones gotta say it.

[Chaos]

Originally Posted by Kal

the second problem with a php pa would actual;ly be the ticker as it would need to work in a completely different way.

uhm. wouldn't crontab work fine for that?

[Wandows]

Originally Posted by Smudge

* You DONT need to design, its the same concept we have at the moment, just in a different language

Although i agree with most you said in ur post. I think he means designing the code setup. As i suppose some things might work different in php than they do in perl (don't know perl myself so can't really tell). Concerning the game concept you are right, but coders are usually better of if they put some thinking in the way they build the code up aswell. Since its easier to add / change stuff if you have a structured code than when you have bits of code spread all over the place

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Mit

I'm interested how you work that one out

a php ticker running in the same way as the current perl ticker would eat a lot of CPU during the idle times, its not a major issue, but the ticker design proposed my mist et al would be less fleixble than the current ticker.

[Kal]

combat is far harder than covert ops smudge

but none of it actually needs thinking about if nothing changes does it...

a) would the community be happy with the new version of the game appearing with no changes?
b) why code something the same when there are clear and obvious ways in which things can be done better
c) jolt have never provided PA with a php coder, a complete recode would require someone effectlivly full time if it ever wants to get back, and PA does not have a great enough income to warrent a full time coder, especially becuase this year is going rather badly - round 13 was late due to spinner's illness, round 14 is low on numbers, as things stand there really isn't much money in the pot.

chaos: that is how you would do it in php, yes but its not how we currently do it.

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Kal

combat is far harder than covert ops smudge

but none of it actually needs thinking about if nothing changes does it...

a) would the community be happy with the new version of the game appearing with no changes?
b) why code something the same when there are clear and obvious ways in which things can be done better
c) jolt have never provided PA with a php coder, a complete recode would require someone effectlivly full time if it ever wants to get back, and PA does not have a great enough income to warrent a full time coder, especially becuase this year is going rather badly - round 13 was late due to spinner's illness, round 14 is low on numbers, as things stand there really isn't much money in the pot.

a) If it meant things being more reliable and for updates, yes. You yourself have asked if anyone knows Perl on the forums. Asking for people who know PHP would get you much more of a response

b) If you want to try and do PA in a language other than PHP and Perl, go for it

c) The current coder should be able to do atleast another language other than Perl, otherwise to be honest, Jolt have been ripped off. For a re-code it would be like getting Digital TV - there would be a one off "fee" followed by the regular costs, with the one off fee being there only once. If Jolt arnt willing to invest into something which the think "has potential" then there pretty shit.

edit : Combat is easy, just repatitive code

[Kal]

i'm just trying to figure out why anyone would think covert ops is in anyway complicated.

a decent flexible combat engine would be the primary goal of a recode.

pishmishy is not employed by jolt as a coder, he just happens to know perl - hence why we have a part time coder atm.

jolt has been advertising for a coder for some time now, and as far as I know only one person has applied and he was unsuitable.

i fully agree a recode into php would be useful, but we would not want it to just be the same game - maybe it would look the same from the commnites perspective - but for it to be easier to change in the future more than a langauge change is needed, the code needs to be redesigned in a much more modular format. Frankly unless a load of people who are great coders and are willing to sign NDAs I don't see much happening

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Kal

jolt has been advertising for a coder for some time now, and as far as I know only one person has applied and he was unsuitable.

Thats because there asking for Perl

Originally Posted by Kal

i fully agree a recode into php would be useful, but we would not want it to just be the same game - maybe it would look the same from the commnites perspective - but for it to be easier to change in the future more than a langauge change is needed, the code needs to be redesigned in a much more modular format. Frankly unless a load of people who are great coders and are willing to sign NDAs I don't see much happening

Surely thou recoding the game, putting things into place which are new gives you a great chance for it to be modular as you can say what you want there.

I think part of the lacking NDA is that people have heard things about what have happened to former PA Team (ph8 springs to mind instantly), so there not willing for it

[Wandows]

Originally Posted by Kal

i fully agree a recode into php would be useful, but we would not want it to just be the same game - maybe it would look the same from the commnites perspective - but for it to be easier to change in the future more than a langauge change is needed, the code needs to be redesigned in a much more modular format. Frankly unless a load of people who are great coders and are willing to sign NDAs I don't see much happening

I thought the reason for creating PaX was 1) they lost the old code, and 2) they wanted a better setup making it easier to add and change stuff. From what you say it seems all they did was replacing the lost mess with a new mess in a even less common used / known language that makes it even harder to maintain.

I have to agree PHP has its downsides, but like Smudge already said, the chances on keeping a decent maintaince/development crew on that are far greater.

And investing some extra time into a decent setup is never bad. PaX has hardly changed the past 2-3 rounds apart from bug fixes (funny how those bug fixes all had to be fixed again in this rounds beta). So you might aswell have another unchanged round with changes to the stats and get a crew to spend their time on setting up a decent game/code envirement. But again, like Smudge already mentioned, it seems to be Jolt who is holding back all the time as i am quite sure that you could have found a decent development crew already if it wasn't for their NDA (and the lack of ppl having decent knowledge of perll).

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Wandows

I thought the reason for creating PaX was 1) they lost the old code, and 2) they wanted a better setup making it easier to add and change stuff. From what you say it seems all they did was replacing the lost mess with a new mess in a even less common used / known language that makes it even harder to maintain.

Says it all really!

By the way for a reference point for Jolt / Kal, they are a business able to put money into funding, I am just a student (ie no funding) and I have virtually completed a version of PA in PHP and it just needs some fine tuning and tools added.

So if I can create it in my own spare time with limited resources, I find it hard to imagine that Jolt cant do it.

[Bashar]

Originally Posted by wakey

Stuff

If you look, you'll see I have not denied that there is a problem at any point, I am denying that the problem is as widespread as you suggest. The impression you give is that everyone except F-Crew bash everyone into the ground then eat their babies and rape their waves (you know, the old story). This is simply not the case, and constantly suggesting that the big alliance players are the problem is not going to give them any incentive to help more. If you ignore efforts they do put in and berate them for other peoples lack of effort, you are actually compounding the problem yourself.

[Ramihyn]

Not another discussion about a complete re-code in another language :/

Considering the past years of re-development, discussions and request for volunteer coders it would seem that people see a pattern repeating itself over and over again and even if this time it would work out "as planned" - i doubt the longterm goal would pay off.

The main problem doesnt seem to be a specific language but a general resource problem (and i suspect a smaller coordination problem in the past) regarding development capabilities and its absolutely of no use if you have a bunch of "enthusiastic" people who just leave again in 3 weeks.

AFAIR and from what i know by working with/on clones it is absolutely no problem to mix different languages for a project like PA. If people write clean code and document it a bit (with comments in the source) there should be no problem to have PHP and perl pages mixed and use a ticker in C/C++ or whatever. If seriously more people can do PHP instead of perl, then naturally over time the code would migrate to PHP anyway and a commercial/payed coder should be able to edit/change any clean PHP or perl code.

Maybe Jolt should do bounties like other projects do. Put the code of a specific page together with detailed descriptions about what should be changed and which new feature is desired on a webpage - offer a bounty of something like 50$ to 200$ for the one to do it. You get cheap solutions by partial outsourcing and will find one or two capable part time volunteers who can maybe used for other stuff too.

Suggestions like that have however been met with cries about the precious IP of the "sourcecode" in the past but it seems you have to weight pro and con in the year 2005 about things like that.

[Mit]

Originally Posted by Smudge

Says it all really!

By the way for a reference point for Jolt / Kal, they are a business able to put money into funding, I am just a student (ie no funding) and I have virtually completed a version of PA in PHP and it just needs some fine tuning and tools added.

So if I can create it in my own spare time with limited resources, I find it hard to imagine that Jolt cant do it.

PA _HAD_ a largely completed PHP version of PA that I was doing before real life took over.

[Mit]

Originally Posted by Kal

a php ticker running in the same way as the current perl ticker would eat a lot of CPU during the idle times, its not a major issue, but the ticker design proposed my mist et al would be less fleixble than the current ticker.

I'm probably missing something large here.. but surely the ticker happens at the 'tick', therefor lots of work for a short time.

Not that language matters, tis the implementation counts - so whatever mist may suggest can be implemented in any language.

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Mit

I'm probably missing something large here.. but surely the ticker happens at the 'tick', therefor lots of work for a short time.

Not that language matters, tis the implementation counts - so whatever mist may suggest can be implemented in any language.

mist's php solution uses the crontab.

current perl solution uses an idle state within the perl code - so the ticker is continually running - in php this would result in it hogging lots of CPU according to mist and some others.

The perl solution gives us a slight advantage in terms of flexibility, only slight I admit, and its hardly a complex change, but my real point was there are things that require some thought when changing to a different language, covert ops is not one of them.

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Ramihyn

AFAIR and from what i know by working with/on clones it is absolutely no problem to mix different languages for a project like PA. If people write clean code and document it a bit (with comments in the source) there should be no problem to have PHP and perl pages mixed and use a ticker in C/C++ or whatever. If seriously more people can do PHP instead of perl, then naturally over time the code would migrate to PHP anyway and a commercial/payed coder should be able to edit/change any clean PHP or perl code.

in theory its not a problem mixing languages, no. There are some issues though:

It means that PATeam/jolt needs more in house coding skills available for routine bug fixing, maintence etc and atm we only really have a perl coder.

With the way the game is currently coded in perl depending on what pages were coded in php it would result in a reasonable amount of duplication of code as atm we use quite a few custom libraries and ofc we would need to code php versions of all the needed functions of theese which then means code needs changing in two places if the funcitons ever change which is rather messy and bound to result in bugs at some point.

Ticker being in another language wouldn;t be so much of a problem, but C doesn;t offer huge advantages over perl, and perl seems to be better than php for a ticker, so there is no major reason to change this.

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Kal

It means that PATeam/jolt needs more in house coding skills available for routine bug fixing, maintence etc and atm we only really have a perl coder.

*bangs head against table repeatedly.*
Kal have you not even read the posts above this? The reason you only have 1 perl coder its because its too "complex" for the average coder (Note - I use the term complex loosly)

Originally Posted by Kal

current perl solution uses an idle state within the perl code - so the ticker is continually running - in php this would result in it hogging lots of CPU according to mist and some others.

Please explain how I have been then able to write a ticker which performs a tick at a designated interval (ie 5 sec, 30 min etc) and that the ticker doesnt hog the CPU in comparison to what you are saying

Originally Posted by Kal

With the way the game is currently coded in perl depending on what pages were coded in php it would result in a reasonable amount of duplication of code as atm we use quite a few custom libraries and ofc we would need to code php versions of all the needed functions of theese which then means code needs changing in two places if the funcitons ever change which is rather messy and bound to result in bugs at some point

Sorry Kal, how many bugs have there been in this round so far? Looks like your not doing a good job on that so far this round so that arguement is pretty void

[Ramihyn]

Originally Posted by Kal

current perl solution uses an idle state within the perl code - so the ticker is continually running - in php this would result in it hogging lots of CPU according to mist and some others.

I havent used PHP for 2 years but even if TIME_SLEEP_UNTIL() hogs the cpu and also SLEEP() and USLEEP() do, why not just use something like:

$num_seconds = 3;
$result = shell_exec("sleep $num_seconds");

[Ramihyn]

Originally Posted by Kal

It means that PATeam/jolt needs more in house coding skills available for routine bug fixing, maintence etc and atm we only really have a perl coder.

PHP isnt hard - any decent perl coder should be able to change PHP code in short time. Not necessarily vice versa :O

Originally Posted by Kal

With the way the game is currently coded in perl depending on what pages were coded in php it would result in a reasonable amount of duplication of code as atm we use quite a few custom libraries and ofc we would need to code php versions of all the needed functions of theese which then means code needs changing in two places if the funcitons ever change which is rather messy and bound to result in bugs at some point.

Keep all libraries in perl and use the PECL package in PHP: http://pecl.php.net/package/perl
See http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/ph...ynamicwebpages

Might be too much overhead though.

[Ramihyn]

Originally Posted by Smudge

Sorry Kal, how many bugs have there been in this round so far? Looks like your not doing a good job on that so far this round so that arguement is pretty void

That argument from Kal isnt void - redundancy in codebase is one of the worst things in any project (unless you do high-security software . There is no upper limit for bugs for any given project - so be careful what you ask for

[Smudge]

Ramihyn - I was using that to say how many bugs there have been so far this round which should have been found in the beta