Archive for September, 2003
What an interesting 24hrs.
I got involved in this Temple of Elemental Evil modding group. Basically the idea is to go through and fix all the bugs that Troika didn’t have time/weren’t allowed to fix… a good idea and something that attracted some highly motived, highly skilled people.
The problem is that the group’s efforts were in such demand, and so many people wanted to help and contribute, that the team kept going through servers. The server they were using three days or so ago, http://ussbrowarek.org/~ausir/toee/forum/ hit critical mass and promptly fell over. The problem appeared to be to do with the database, not the bandwidth, I had a database and unlimited bandwidth, right? So yesterday at 1pm I opened my temporary messageboard to the group.
24 hrs later I pulled the plug, made the directory unviewable and sent a mass email to the users of the board. In the 24 hrs the following happened…
1) The host let me know that they had changed the structure of their accounts. I gain 998 MySQL accounts, and lost the unlimited bandwidth.
2) 311 people registered.
3) 427 articles were posted.
4) The showthread.php file of the boards was accessed 7253 times.
5) The total traffic to the same file, was 274MB
6) In total the page generated over 800MB in data.
This of course, took me slightly over my limit, but was threatening to hit about 100MB per hour at about midday today. Which is why it got shut down.
A slightly different day for me in any case…
September 30th, 2003
Wow.. Dont know what happened here, maybe I started posting pictures or something? yeah, that’s probably it.. and people started visiting this page as well!
My total bandwidth usage for July 2003 was 35MB. Which is really not a lot at all..
My total bandwidth usage for September 2003 so far is 130MB… dayam!!
An average of 377 hits per day, with a maximum of 1439. Hits of course being pages loaded and not unique visitors or visits. Total of 723 visits so far this month.
From what countries you ask?
Australia, United States, Canada, France, Netherlands, Austria, Brazil, Poland, Italy, Belgium, Dengmark, Finlank, United Kindom, Israel, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Estonia, Greece, Singapore, Romania, Japan and Hungary…
So which one of you guys has been masquerading as a global jetsetter?
September 26th, 2003
I will listen to Murlainn.
I will trust in his opinion.
I will not ignore his words.
I will not buy into the hype….
….much.
Temple of Elemental Evil has been released over in the US. Not released here though, apparently it takes at least a month to ship across a PC game and we cant get it cut here, because that’s.. I dont know…a good idea?
The official messageboards over at www.Ataricommunity.com are being absolutely hammered with complaints and problems and pissed off customers. The usual fanboy stance of ‘Developer X can do no wrong’,'You dont like the game, you are dumb’,'It wont install on your computer, you are dumb’,'Blame everything on the publisher’,'You are dumb’ seems to thoroughly aired out by now.
In defense of the fans, the majority of issues with the game appear to stem from two choices that were made be people other than the developer.
a) The game was packaged with SecuROM software, which is supposed to be a copy-protection system for commercially released software. What is -actually- ends up being is an annoyance for people who have the wrong cd-rom ( seemingly randomly chosen ). This problem is normally fixed by a patch ( still no word on who is actually supporting the game, if anyone ) or a no-cd crack which is generally used for pirate versions of the game. Arggh!
b)For some reason Atari and/or Hasbro have chosen to remove all child 3d-models from the game, but not remove all references to them. So apaprently when playing you will have numerous dialogue options that mention a hoard of children getting underfoot, that are now invisible. It is said that this was done because all characters in the game are destructable, and children getting mindlessly slaughtered is apparently worse than anyone else getting mindlessly slaughtered.. keep in mind this is a computer game..
So yes, while I am still looking forward to the game, I shall now spend 15minutes each day reflecting in the words of Murlainn and the truth found within.
September 17th, 2003
Pirates of the Caribbean = Good!!
Freelancer = Good!!
Computers = Bad!!
You’re now caught up on my week.
September 11th, 2003
So there is no work for me at the moment. Not just only a little like last week ( 6 hrs all up ), I’m talking about Zero work. My workload is actually approaching a negative value, I’m being booked work and then having it cancelled more often than I’m actually getting to the job.
So while I’m catching up on sleep after a weekend away, I’m also not getting paid… …which is not good.
On the other hand, Temple of Elemental Evil has gone gold and is due to be released before the end of September, which means I’ll have a few workless weeks to think up the ultimate 3.5ED 5 character party and then some quite time where I can put them to work..
If you havn’t looked already, please look at either Eye-On-Troika or Greyhawkgame for details on this very cool looking game, which I might add, appears to be WineX compatible from the box…
http://www.greyhawkgame.com/
http://www.eye-on-troika.net/
September 7th, 2003
