The discombobulated office is a strange sight. And sound too, the acoustics are all whacked. The strangest thing though is the conference table jam-packed with computers sweatshop style (if sweatshops turned out online role-playing games instead of tennis shoes). I couldn't resist, I had to write OBEY on the whiteboard in big bold letters. :) Somebody added "your thirst", mitigating the effect somewhat, but oh well.

Couple more raytraced products for your consumption.

It's not a Ford, but it is a torus, and you're soaking in it. It's made of translucent, reflective, pearly blueish stuff. There's a light just around the bend where you can't see it. :)

Inside a big textured sphere, looking directly at two concentric crystal balls with fun refractive properties. The camera's field of view is something like 140 degrees, so you're actually seeing both "poles" of the smallest crystal ball according to the wireframe. Which doesn't mean much to PoVRay other than that things are really twisted around. :)

Since Tuesday, Multiplayer Splunge has been a PvP game. I stripped out all the special weapons, started players with 100% energy and it recharges slowly, but getting shot by somebody else drops it fast. Wednesday was spent accidentally coding a denial of service attack on our back end that was really supposed to be those tracking mines... the way I originally slapped them together wasn't smart in the first place, and a bug made it so every frame, every client tried to tell the server that every mine was targetting somebody else, and the server dutifully echoed those messages out to every other client. Messages per second = frames per second * mines * (clients + 1)*clients. We were running at 25FPS, so with only two clients and three mines we're talking 450 messages per second. The elderly hamster in the server gets tired pretty easily trying to run that kind of load in unoptomized Java, and the clients are already pegged doing graphics stuff so they can't deal with all the traffic either. Which is why nobody writes MMORPGs in Java, and we're only using it to nail our design. :)

So yesterday I wrote a less lazy version of the mines, which result in (5 * clients * active mines) messages per second, and mines don't even go active until they have a target. Meanwhile the indispensible (and constantly nagged by all the rest of us) Bryan fixed the server so it won't stand for that kind of trash talking from its clients. Things are working pretty well once again, despite the fact that Multiplayer Splunge is really a hack. The only thing the server really knows is who's connected and where the inactive mines are (so a new player logging in can see them). Nobody really ever writes online games that way; the only way to stop all cheating is make sure the client never, ever makes a gameplay decision. Usually it's a compromise, which results in things like CounterStrike's wallhack and aimbots, and GEAR to mess with running speeds in some 3D games.

After work, we're heading up to Tawy House for the Founders' Weekend. In my ultra yellow car, with Steph's brand spanking new copy of No! This time, along with the drums (yay drums!) I have finally remembered to pack the book I have been meaning to bring for a year now.

Posted 07:57 AM CST [Link] [Archives] [Index]

The wallpapers you've made in Raytrace are quite cool, Dave. :) On my other computer, I'm using the second wallpaper you made (I like the purples and blues!). I was considering using one of them for this computer, but they don't quite have enough color to replace my current desktop wallpaper of a space nebula (I think). I took a quick snapshot of my desktop:

http://t90.homestead.com/files/desktop.jpg

I found it on the web somewhere, and I'm not sure if it was made in a 3D program or if it's a real space picture. Anyway, it looks cool. :)

It sounds like things are going pretty well for multiplayer Splunge, and that the testing that needs to be done is, well, getting done. :)

I've been playing a lot of Warcraft 3 lately, mostly online. The record on my current name is pretty bad (getting use to the game again after not playing for a few weeks isn't easy), so I'll probably make another Battle.net name. So look for the name Daiden if your ever online, I think it'd be fun to play either with you or against you, heh. :)