Posts Tagged ‘pit’

Moving shop

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

So it would seem that Shindo and I are the only ones who have noticed that floydwing.com is back.  The move was successful, if slightly delayed because of my oversight.  Stupid me didn’t realize that I needed to adjust the DNS servers for the site.  I assumed that having the site moved from one host to another would have that stuff updated.  Luckily, my new host has been very patient with and also a ton of help.  Thanks Dave!

Having root access is pretty cool and makes it a whole lot easier than using file managers.  Best of all, I can SSH in from the command line of my new work laptop.

I now have source control on more than just my local machine.  I’ve uploaded one of the projects I’ve been toying around with.  At some point I need to upload Pit.  Unfortunately my early attempts to convert my Visual Studio C++ project into a usable Eclipse CDT or Mono project hasn’t found must success.  I’ve been out of the C++ loop for a years, so I’m having a heck of time figuring out why these things are throwing strange errors.  Somewhere along the way, either in a past VS upgrade or my own insanity, I ended up with includes that weren’t the same case as the actual files (VS must have allowed that) and a very inconsistent file naming convention.  I’m a bit clueless how this came to be.  I know my coding was somewhat abysmal back then (maybe now?) but some of these things I just couldn’t see me doing.  VS seems to have been a bit too lax in what it allowed or how it upgraded.

So unless I can figure it out, I may be installing VS into my Win7 virtual machine.  YUCK!

On this day…

  • 2008: No mash or junk — In sad news, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to make it to CodeMash this year.  This was a great [...]
  • 2005: Tis the Season — Had one of them there doctor checkups today. The old blood pressure is continuing to be nicely controlled. [...]

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PitCon ‘09: Success

Monday, September 7th, 2009

After a two year hiatus, a Pit gathering was held.  Stablemasters of The Toolbox, Clan Bloodwode, and Knightblades (former,current, future?) made the trek up to the great white north.

While plans included playing Warrior Knights, it was shelved in the too involved bin.  This game has a lot of interesting and cool mechanics, but as a quick casual game, it’s not going to work.  Shindo, #4, and myself played this years ago, and while fun, you need to be dedicated to play it.  We didn’t want to spend the whole night refiguring and teaching one game.

We started off with Munchkin.  We were all familiar with it so it just required some quick lookups here and there.  ClanB got off to a fast start, getting up to level 6 and making a lot of enemies, before he was blasted back to the lowest level character (which was still 1) by a monster.  After playing this for over an hour with no one close, we agreed to lower the target level to 5 from 10.  I was able to kill two monsters in one combat to take the win.

On to Modern Art.  I really find enjoyment in this game.  The first two seasons saw the same three artists grab the same positions.  I didn’t seem to be having good paintings to coincide with them.  Season 3 mixed things up a little bit.  Going into season 4, I felt like I really needed to make a move if I was going to have a chance.  I was dead wrong.  I tried to artificially pump up an unknown artist, having purchased three of his paintings.  But my other dealers didn’t feel as strongly and the season ended before another painting of his could get out.  My painter lost the tie breaker and all three were worthless.  Final tally saw Clan Bloodwode win with $375,000.  Surprisingly, I finished second at $345,000.  If I would have not bought anything in that last season, I may have won.

Next up was Citadels.  Another fun game that we haven’t played much of.  I love the shifting roles and the assassin and thief really keep everyone on their toes.  Knightblades and I took a dislike to each other from the get go, with him stealing my starting money on the first round, and me assassinated him on the second.  From there it seemed like the poor merchant could never do anything, always being a target.  Clan Bloodwode started off with a lot of nice buildings, before I took the warlord and destroyed his big money university.  I ended up completing my 8th building and destroying another Clan building for good measure and finished with the most value for the win.

To finish up the night, we had a go at Betrayal at House on the Hill.  Our four brave characters explored much of the house for a while.  I seemed to be the only one having to draw omen cards.  The omens turned out to good things for me and I was able to successfully make the required roll to avoid the traitor event happening.  I had a dog and a girl following me, and had a few items that I could use in a pinch.  I kept getting sanity boosts and was nearly off the chart.  Clan Bloodwode started with the scientist and kept getting knowldge boosts.  Eventually I failed an omen roll, I think I had drawn like 5 and one other player 1.  The betrayal turned out to be the Dark Fiddler playing music in ballroom, beckoning us to come to him.  No one started out as the betrayor.  Every turn we had to make a sanity check.  If we failed we had to move by the shortest route and at max speed to the ballroom.  To win, I had to take some item to a certain room and then make me and anybody else there had to make a combined four successful checks against something.  I was able to get there on the same turn the betrayal happened, getting lucky to get through two rooms that required me to do some check to exit.

Things were going well at first.  We had one check down, and another of my compatriats had arrived.  But then Knightblades was compelled to the ballroom (losing a check and moving there), and then failed his check in the ballroom, which turned him into a traitor.

I made one more check, failed one, and my other team member made one.  Putting us at three successful checks and needing one more.  Unfortunately, all Knightblades had to do to win was end his turn in a certain room, which he was able to do.

In three playings, I believe that’s the first time the traitor won.  I almost find more enjoyment before the traitor is revealed, because then it’s more about exploring and such.  Once the betrayal happens it seems like its a quick ride to the end.  Not a whole lot of player interaction in this one, but I still find it fun.

I just want to thank everyone again for attending and I hope they had as good a time as I did.

On this day…

  • 2008: Libation News — I haven’t gone hog wild with the newly found access to the ability to purchase micro-brew beers as you might [...]
  • 2007: The King of Sauces — So I ended up eating lunch today at Burger King. Friday is the only day I actually eat lunch [...]
  • 2005: Chiropractic care — Went to the chiropractor tonight for the first time in 4.5 years tonight. I just couldn’t hold out any [...]

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Mark your calendars: PitCon ‘09

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

It’s been something like 3 years since our last official Pit get-together.  And probably something like 18 months since an informal stablemaster gaming gathering took place.  Whispers have surfaced of a desire to relive the old times.  With the PitHQ move north, this becomes more problematic, but we’ll see if a once a year “day of gaming” can work.

Therefore, I’d like to announce a gaming day scheduled for Saturday September 5.  Festivities will start at 1pm.  We’ll play games as late as anybody wants to stay up.  You’re welcome to stay over night and leave in the morning when you wake up.  Just find an open spot on the floor unless you want to bring a tent (bring a sleeping bag or something).

Bring your own beverages (and cooler and ice) and some food to share.  I’ll plan on providing meatballs and maybe some other things.  I’ll put up a post in the old Pit forum (Other topic) that links to this post where people can post what food they plan on bringing so we don’t have duplicates.

This is open to all current and previous Pit stablemasters.  Please send me an email if you plan on coming and maybe post in the forum so your fellow gamers can bug you.  I can send you the PitHQ address if you’re coming.

On this day…

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What the Grand Am said to Ubuntu while coaching Pit…

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

After a brief respite, car trouble is back in the picture again.  We’re scrambling to figure out how much we can handle in another payment.  Tomorrow we’re checking out a buy 2 get 1 free deal at Kia.  I’m skeptical that you really get a “deal”, somehow they get ya coming or going, I’m just not sure how.  We’ll see.  Anybody ever hear anything about this deal, or Kia in general?

I haven’t been watching the “On this day” of past blog posts but when starting to write this I noticed that a year ago I was working feverishly on fixing a playoff bug in Pit that had delayed the start of the playoffs.  Ah, what a run it was.  I remember the day I fixed the bug, spending a hidden hour away in the little cafe of the student union.  I miss those hidden hours in the cafe, don’t miss the job.

I’ve been running Ubuntu for around 3 weeks or so.  I’m loving it.  I hope to post something about it and how I went about it, just haven’t had time to sit and write those long posts that you love.  I found some nice resources on the web that helped me install a variety of things.  Though “apt-get” makes things pretty easy as long as you know what you want to install.  I don’t have the skills currently to use apt to find the things I want.  I installed Subversion, Trac, and MySQL.  Eclipse was just a simple unzipping of the downloaded file.  Such a contrast to installing Visual Studio on Windows.

One thing I missed from when I had my Mac was being able to play songs from my iTunes library from my desktop on my Mac.  I could’ve had this ability on my laptop had I ever installed iTunes on it.  So I started looking at how I could recreate that on Linux.  I went through an elaborate install and patching of Wine with git.  Then installed iTunes.  It appears to run for the most part, but it won’t discover the library contained on my desktop.  I ran this ourTunes program and it saw the library but gave some sort of error.  So I’m guessing maybe Apple did something in iTunes 8 that causes issues for such things.  Why can’t they release a linux version?  I haven’t been able to find some other program that is supposed to be able to discover the library.  What’s it through, bonjour or something?

The time has come for signing up for Spring soccer coaching.  While I think I should probably avoid the stress that comes with the job, it looks like I’m going to sign up again.  The guy I coached with last Fall are going to try to link up again.  This will definitely be it for me.  If the eldest plays next season, she’ll be in the next age bracket.  I think she needs somebody who knows what they’re talking about to coach her if she continues with it.

On this day…

  • 2008: Pit Playoff Bug — So I spent the last two lunchtimes trying to figure out what was wrong in Pit playoff code that worked [...]

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Leaves of Wonder

Monday, November 24th, 2008

So it would appear that those few Wolverine fans that frequent this blog from time to time were too embarrassed to even declare their allegiance. So this first installment of the FloydWing Big Game Fan Poll goes to the Buckeye Fans 2-0.  I’m bummed I didn’t even get to cast a tie breaking vote.

So I spent the weekend finally working on the last dump of leaves in the yard.  Rain, sickness, rain, and time change conspired to put me way behind.  I had been caught up before that.  I got a little over half of the back yard piled and had bagged 9 big bags of the stuff, hardly making a dent from the pile.  The rest of the backyard and front still waited to be piled up.  A neighbor stopped by and talked me into just having one of the local yard services come and pile and remove the leaves.  He had used to do it, but since decided it’s just not worth it anymore, and pretty much the rest of the neighborhood has converted to that also.  Hopefully, this late in the season, I can find a discount from someone looking for a little extra Christmas money.

I’m hoping to start some more posts in the same vein as my Part-Time Developer series over the next couple of months.  No, this doesn’t mean I’m looking for another job, it’s just that I’m starting to equip my laptop and desktop with the newest Java development tools.  I hope to start a new tinkering project and hope to be able to involve you readers with next to no time commitment.  I should go back over those old posts and see if I can properly format the code, especially since I just upgraded.

I don’t know if I should keep the same name or come up with something new.  I am a full time developer now, so perhaps the part time title could refer to my hobbyist pursuits.  If anybody has any thoughts, please post them.  Hopefully, in the next couple weeks I can make an initial post talking about the tools I’m going to use for my tinkering and take any suggestions of other good tools to play around with.

I’ve still found nothing about the “accented A” problem, so it’s looking like that will just be a crappy artifact.  I don’t think I’m keen to sit and manually edit every post.

Good news for Pit.  I have a copy of Visual Studio 2005 so I should be able to install that and work with the current codebase.  However, the bad news is I don’t know where my CDs are that I copied everything off to are.  I copied the Pit codebase, site backup, and everything to a CD or two and I don’t know where they are.  I believe I also have the important stuff on a USB key so disaster isn’t yet imminent.  As far as when season 8 will start, that’s still up in the air.  We’ll have a few things to sort out.  I’ll make a post here when it’s time to start paying attention to the forums.

I miss my MacBook Pro something fierce.  My old HP just isn’t doing it for me.  It seems so blocky, nothing like the sleekness of my Mac.  Development was such a joy, being able to drop to the command line at a moments notice.  I feel so hampered by Windows.  One of the biggest things I miss, is being able to have multiple desktop windows set up (I would have 4), and being able to put running apps in different ones.  So I could have my email and browser in one, Eclipse in another, command line access in a different one, and the fourth for whatever else.  Plus doing the cube rotation switch between them was always so elegant.  I figure it’s been a while since I gave Sixftunda something to razz me about, so this paragraph is dedicated to him.  :)

On this day…

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To Pit or not to Pit

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, ever since a fight or two past the mid-way point of the season when I became aware of the real possibility I could go the entire season undefeated. It was at that point that I thought it might be a good idea if this was my last season as a Pit player.

First a little history. I created Pit and was quite content to watch the action and dealings from the strict game master role. I thoroughly enjoyed knowing what was going on behind the scenes as stables negotiated and plotted with one another. As the rudderless factor began to creep into the hearts of many stables, the regular players began calling for me to join in the fun. Maybe against my better judgment, I took over the worst ownerless stable in the league. I figured maybe looking at things from the player side would give me insight on additions the game would benefit from. I made it strict practice that when I scheduled the goings on in my stable that I would only use the tools available to the other stablemasters: news, past fight broadcasts, the roster page, etc. I never looked at any secret pages, other than my own, when trying to figure out who to schedule. The only time I would look at other’s secret pages was when looking into bugs, confirming a default fighter, etc, and trust me, I can’t hardly remember my own fighter stats so I’m pretty unaffected by the background knowledge. Of course, having written the formulas in the game, even ones I haven’t touched for years, probably does give a bit of advantage. But I’ve minimized as much as possible.

That first season, Zion’s Hope managed only 3 wins. My biggest shame was losing to Rasoli in both our fights! I stunk. My money situation made it very hard to improve my fighters when training was available. I did have a pretty kicking Farm club that won the Farm playoffs.

My second season started out much the same, losing my first 3 fights out of the gate, starting 1-7 before things started clicking, finally beating Rasoli once, and narrowly missing the playoffs with a 9-9 record. The Farm continued to be strong, convincingly sweeping the Farm playoffs.

Last season, Zion’s Hope finally started getting noticed. Unfortunately, we dropped from the 2nd seed to the 4th on the last day, but we did advance to the Finals. If Overlord could have beat Unibrow once (which I know he could’ve, contrary to common belief) or I would have had the “ca hones” to trade for Unibrow earlier, the championship would have been mine.

Going into this season I felt I had a legitimate shot at winning it all.  At that time, I figured that if I did, I would retire from being a player.  Over the course of this season, I’ve started to notice stables scheduling around me.  This is something I made heavy use of in previous seasons, trying to avoid scheduling my best against stables that could hurt me, basically conceding defeat.  It was eye opening.

So now I’m thinking I should retire from being a player regardless of what happens in the playoffs, win or lose.  I feel that the season I had can’t help but make people wonder.  I know that everything was done above board, season schedule randomly created, fights impartially ran, etc.  But I don’t want my integrity to be questioned.  I know this is just a crappy little game, but I don’t cheat in anything, and I don’t want anyone to wonder.

Of course, if I do drop out, it may put future Pit seasons in doubt.  We’re pretty low on live players that pay attention so any drop could lower the fun and competition level.  So I don’t know what to do.  I’d miss my little stable that could.

But then again, maybe I’ve proven Pit to be a solved game, since I went undefeated.  What more can I do?  (Sorry, just had to brag a little. :)   I will be rubbing the nephews’ noses in this.)

I’ve got some ideas to put a different spin on Pit if it even continues.  Most changes any more are dependent on how much programming is required.  I’ve had my hands in so many other things that I haven’t had the time to really dig into the old Pit code for in depth changes.  I’d like to keep Pit alive.  It still gives the stat-whore in me some joy.  One thing I’d like to do is program a strength of schedule type statistic that I’ve been tumbling around in my head.  Just to see some comparisons between the stables during this season.

On this day…

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Pit Playoff Bug

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

So I spent the last two lunchtimes trying to figure out what was wrong in Pit playoff code that worked in season’s past. This really irks me because I had Part-Time Developer plans in mind. I believe I’ve found the problem and should be able to run the first round of the vaunted Pit playoffs tonight, and get everything back on track.

The problem occurred when I was running the main Pit playoffs. It found the first series, ran the fight, then prompted me to input the fighters for the next fight of the same series. It was only supposed to run the first fight in the series then go to the next series.

I beat my head against the wall most of Sunday night trying to figure it out.  Then Monday over my lunch I pretty much nailed down the problem, and then today over lunch I put in the fix and tested it.  I think it’s got a clean bill of health now, at least hopefully through the rest of the playoffs.

The problem turned out to be a very rookie mistake on my part.  Somehow it had worked through the first 6 seasons of playoffs.  I attribute this surfacing due to switching from VS2003 to VS2005 at the beginning of this season.   When I made the switch I had to change includes such as “include fstream.h” to “include <fstream>”.  I’m guessing something with the basic C++ includes changed as to why I had to change my includes.  I hadn’t kept up with the language enough to understand why I had to change things.  So it would seem the old fstream library somehow hid my boneheaded programming bug.  How I don’t know.  It seems to defy the way it should’ve behaved.

The problem was in the way I was using my file handler class that I use for the binary flat files that hold the Pit data.  (Binary flat files?  It seemed like a good idea at the time.)  I had a file handler for my playoff series file (basically a summary file).  I was looping through the file looking for a series that matched the season and playoff round I was in as well as not being already completed.  Once I found a series that wasn’t done, I would loop through my playoff games file (basically a detail file) with another file hander.  When it found the next game it would run it.  Once done I would need to update the playoff series file, which keeps track of the current win/loss situation.  However, I used the same file handler that I was using to loop through the same file.  After the update, it threw my location earlier in the file for some reason.  (I believe that the position pointer is undefined at this point and can’t be relied upon.)  Logically I would think it would put the position to the end of the record it wrote leaving me where I want to be to loop on, but from experience I know you can’t count on this.  It was throwing it much earlier in the file, which caused it to loop and eventually find the same playoff series again.  Something really got hosed though, because even when I would cancel, supposedly continuing the loop it would jump back again, continually finding that first series.  And it just got worse from there, duplicating records and caused the file to double in size with duplicate records.  Not quite sure where that came from, but I understand the base problem.

So I now have a different file handler doing the update and we’re now happy.  I could give the excuse that I wasn’t super familiar with serial filestream io at that time of the original coding, but I had been doing DEC Fortran with flat files for a few years at that time and you always had to be aware of that sort of problem.

If my reasoning on this is way off, please let me know so I can fix my understanding of the problem.

On this day…

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