Data's Neural Net

How it should've been done

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:02:16 GMT

:(
the new version of BYOND would've made this so much easier

My first scream!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:26:40 GMT

Inspired by this post, I thought I'd give this Mod Tracker thing a go.

Inspired by "Scream of the Stickster", I have attempted to make fitting intro / background music for such a game.

There are constant "footsteps" heard in the background of the song (two: one for the player, the other would be the critter chasing him). Meanwhile, on the foreground, I have attempted to recreate the feeling of suspense through sound.

Since I don't know what I'm doing, could anybody tell me if this sounds at all right, or if I messed it up and I'm the only one who likes it?

Download my_first_s3m.s3m

GIAD2009

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:17:05 GMT

Yep, I took part in it with a friend.

View our creation here.

You're doing it wrong: Moderation

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:02:52 GMT

You're doing it wrong: Moderation

Welcome to my first and hopefully not last edition of “you’re doing it wrong”. The subject of this edition is moderation.

We all come in contact with moderators every day. Perhaps it’s in a game you frequent; perhaps you’re on BYOND Staff’s Most Wanted list. Perhaps it’s the supervisor at your work, your teachers at school or the police officer that keeps writing you tickets.

The first question we have to ask ourselves is: what is a moderator?

1. What is a moderator?

This question seems simple enough to answer. Many of you consider a moderator to be a middleman, a person that sits above the players and below the developers/hosts. Moderators are there to keep the players in check, and get their orders from developers or hosts in the form of “rules”.

What I find odd is that a lot of people nowadays consider a moderator to be “above” a player. Players have to take orders from moderators, and they damn well comply with it lest they get the boot. This is not the case.

I think a proper definition of a moderator is “a person who mediates disputes and attempts to avoid violence”, as kindly given by Google when searched for the definition of one. This definition however does not seem to matter on BYOND; people still consider moderators to be above players, and moderators tend to rely on their powers more often than they should.

This brings us to our second question.

2. How should a moderator behave?

We’ve established that a moderator is there to avoid violence and acts a mediator between disputes, but what does this mean for us?

For a lot of people, this seems to mean that if a dispute of enough magnitude occurs, a moderator is free to mute the channel the argument occurs on or to simply mute both offenders if the argument is deemed to go “too far”.

However what people seem to be forgetting here is that they’re moderators. Anyone with a “mute” verb can resolve a dispute that way, but is it the proper course of action? I’ve found that not to be the case.

Generally if an argument is resolved through a mute, the result of this is that anyone who is affected by the mute tends to get pissed off through some degree. The ones that were participating in the argument – especially the ones that didn’t get their latest counter-argument through – tend to be so mad for the abruption that they seek other means of voicing their opinion. The result is that either they try to bypass the mute somehow, or they harass the local administrators until they’re banned or they can speak again. This may well lead into another argument, one with the administrators!

The best course of action during an argument is to sit back and watch as it develops. If you deem that it has gone too far, you should first ask for both parties to stop the discussion. This should be done in a polite manner. Not being polite could worsen things by bringing the moderator into the conflict, but you need to remain in the background.

Another mistake that is often made is by saying that the argument has to stop immediately, that is, that any future messages related to the argument will be punished by a mute. If you choose that, you’re just as worse off as a mute. Instead it is better to wait for the argument to die down, which should happen within a minute or two. If it doesn’t, only then should you turn over to your “mute” verb.

3. When should I use my verbs?

Another question that may pop up is one of verb usage. When should you use your verbs? To tell you the truth, you should try to make sure you never have to use them. Unfortunately, things don’t tend to always swing in your way.

One of the things a moderator must be good at is to alter the behavior of players through words alone. A moderator should be respected enough that players will stop their bad behavior even if the moderator only types “stop” in the chat.

Although some players will not listen to moderators’ requests to stop, it is always important to state them in the off-chance that the recipient does not belong in that group. A moderator should always take the opportunity not to waste a verb on someone, no matter what they may have done in the past to deserve it.

A typical moderators’ arsenal consists of the following verbs:

Kick
Ban
Mute
Jail
Warn

The “warn” verb should – though not present in many games – send a “formal warning” to a player. It doesn’t necessarily need to exist, since you can warn players over the chat. However in some cases it may be helpful to use a different font color to send out warnings. The “warn” verb, even if it’s just a request on a chat channel, should be heeded by players. You should always try to warn a player first before moving over to any other action.
Note that there is a difference between a warn verb and a warning over the chat channel. With a warn verb, there would be a special font and there may be a record of the warning. You should always try to warn over the chat channel before sending out an official warning using the “warn” verb.

The “kick” verb forcibly ejects a player from the server. The player can return, but being removed sends them a clear message that they should stop.
You should use the “kick” verb only when you want to send a serious warning to a player who is being unresponsive to your “stop” requests and warns.
This verb is probably one of the most abused. You want to send a clear message to a player, but you don’t have a special font in your game or a “warn” verb. So what do you do? You kick them. If not used properly or on the wrong people, this verb can have an adverse effect, causing the recipient to instead get more troublesome for you to handle.

The “jail” verb is used to remove a player from the game. The player may still have the ability to chat, but they can no longer interact with the game. The last thing you’ll want to use is a verb like this, since it prevents a player from playing and encourages arguments. In some cases, it may be handy to use this, for instance when a player is abusing a bug or harassing a player.
Over-usage of this verb could lead to players starting a lot of arguments over the global chat channel, and could cause players to leave your game forever.

The “mute” verb is used to prevent a player from having arguments with one another. This command is primarily used to stop arguments going on over the global chat channel, but a lot of people forget the power of a simple “mute” verb: it not only blocks people from the global channel, but from any local channels as well.
The mute verb should not be taken lightly. If possible, developers should add the option to mute players only on specific channels (i.e. mute them on the “ooc” channel but allow them to use the “say” verb to chat in IC).
Over-usage of the mute verb can lead to disastrous results. Players are not only prone to leave, but a lot of players may resort to taking their matters out within the game itself. If you fully mute a player on both the global and local channels, the result of the mute might be that the player starts to grief other players for the sake of getting enough attention.

Finally, there is the “ban” verb. In some games, it essentially jails you and prevents you from talking. In most, it prevents you from joining the server altogether. This is your most powerful tool, and it should not be abused. The ban verb should only be used if a player is so excessively uncontrollable that there is no reason to keep them around. If a player is banned they will almost definitely leave your game, or they will try to bypass the ban using whichever methods are available. In the latter case, be prepared to look for players with a similar behavior to the player you banned, but don’t chase that thought around too much or you might end up banning valid players.

4. Conclusion

The conclusion we can make from all of this is that a moderator is not there simply to enforce the game rules, but has a much bigger role: the moderator should stay in the background if a discussion arises (if there are multiple moderators, at least one of them should take a back seat in order to do their job), they should use their verbs sparingly and rely mostly on words, but especially a moderator should steer the behavior of the users they’re moderating so that problems are avoided.

A game with poor moderators usually has a very large ban list, and you will often see players getting punished for things. Good moderation can make your game much better, and will help you so much more since the ban list will be virtually empty (and so will the amount of people you have to watch if they try to bypass a ban).

I hope that this article has helped you to realize your job as a developer to pick the right moderators, and your job as a moderator in overall. But I hope most of all that this article will cause me to see better moderators in games, which see their jobs as how they should be, and not as some kind of elevated privilege or rogue cop.

So, I just read that The Sims 3 got leaked...

Mon, 18 May 2009 22:13:21 GMT

But what's the big deal all about? Why are people complaining so much about it?

A lot of people complain that the game shouldn't get leaked because they removed the DRM, whereas others are saying it should be leaked anyway just cause' they're EA.

From what I can see, the leak might very well be authorized by Rod Humble himself; the leak has caused nothing but publicity for this game, as well as giving piracy a bad rep.

The people that like the game are going to buy it eventually, because otherwise they'd feel guilty. Meanwhile, people get to enjoy the game two weeks before it's scheduled release.

Also, there's this DRM thing. EA messed up with DRM in the past, so now they've gone back to basics with The Sims 3, and now some people are pissed at the pirates for leaking the game out like this, because EA was setting an example for other developers.

One fact is absent from all this: the pirates don't care about DRM. From what I've seen, they'll break through DRM, and then release the game. In the long run, the only ones who have trouble with DRM are legit customers who are just trying to reinstall their game for the fifth time.

I'm wondering what the BYOND community thinks about all of this. Surely you must've heard of the leak by now.

Data's totally unbiased review of Windows Vista

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:29:19 GMT

Windows Vista. If it weren't for the fact that I only had to pay â‚¬17 to get it (and that Windows XP was being sold for the exact same price), I probably never would've gotten around to installing it.

You see, Vista has had its share of bad reviews. No matter where I looked or turned, people were complaining about Vista. Perhaps that's just the environment I live in, but I digress.

Windows Vista is, on first appearance, a stunning new operating system from Microsoft. Despite what others might say, I can just 'feel' that a lot of the insides have indeed been changed, rewritten to suit a new age.

Unfortunately, that just happens to be just what it is: a first appearance. Indeed, the installation of Vista itself couldn't be more annoying from the start. You would expect to see a loading bar or something to show up when you boot up the DVD, but apart from the initial 'loading' progress bar, you can't see that anything is going on.

One of the things I hate about computers nowadays is that people design their operating systems/software to be as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately, this kills the "power users" (read: anybody who uses computers on a regular basis) like myself. A screen saying "loading" is nice, but a screen specifying exactly what it just happens to be loading would be a very helpful thing for pretty much anybody. And not showing that you're loading at all -- like the Vista setup initially does -- is the worst way to go about it.

Fortunately, the bad sides ended there, and I soon saw the good sides of Vista. It started with the DVD which asked me to input my serial key before I reformatted my hard drive and installed the operating system. Previous versions of Windows would first install the operating system and then proceed to query me about the serial key. If I just happen to have lost the serial key somehow, or for some other reason I am unable to input it into the computer, I'm stuck with an operating system which has already installed itself and a now unusable computer. Granted, I don't reckon this happens that much, but it's at least comforting to know that if you do get into trouble with your serial key, you can always use the operating system that was previously installed.

A great feature about Vista is it's ability to shrink hard drives. If you have a 40 GB partition, you can now shrink it down to 30 GB, and use the 10 GB remaining to form another partition. In some cases, this can be very handy. Unfortunately, the Vista Setup does not contain this feature built-in; one has to actually have Vista installed to make use of it.

After the installation of Vista, I was greeted with a brand new login screen. It looks shiny, but there's a problem with that: I don't particularly like shiny operating systems, and there doesn't seem to be a way to easily switch back to the classic login box.

But fine, maybe I'm digging too much into this. At least Vista still has support for the old 'classic skin', so I could turn Windows Aero off and pretty much "disable everything that makes Vista, Vista", according to some of my classmates.

I must say that I like a lot of new features I have seen in Vista. For example, it is now possible to alter the volume on a per-application basis. This can come in handy, especially when dealing with BYOND. Sometimes I may want to mute or lower the volume of a particular BYOND game, but I find that the game doesn't have a volume control because of the ~~ineptitude~~ ignorance of developers. Vista makes altering the volume or completely muting the sound for an application a peach.

And the volume controls also work great in my setup. I have headphones and I have speakers, and Vista has built-in support to allow me to switch between them at will. Hats off for Vista for this wonderful feature!

Of course, all things have their downsides. For instance, it's not possible for me to set my "Stereo Mix" to use the headphones instead of my speakers, so I was forced to turn the speakers on just to hear what I had been broadcasting over Skype. Neither it is possible to enable two audio devices at the same time, so I could enable both the speakers and the headphones at the same time.

One particular new feature of Vista is the User Account Control (UAC). This feature attempts to prevent applications from making changes to your system and prevents the user from making accidental changes to the system by displaying a warning every time something is about to happen. I had to quickly turn this off just because it was getting annoying. Luckily, I heard that Windows 7 has a more improved version of this, where it's possible to set it up so that it will only query the user when an application tries to change things, and not if the user tries to.

But of course, a lot more has to be going wrong with Vista, as I'm back on XP now. It all started when my hard drive suddenly failed.

You see, the graphics card I'm using (an Nvidia GeForce 8600GT) happens to have a passive heat sink in favor of a fan, to keep the computer silent. This is nice, however the temperatures were apparently increasing up to 80 degrees Celcius, which is NOT good for the rest of the equipment.

I noticed this earlier on and talked to the company I bought the computer from about it, and they told me that it was a glitch in the sensors. I shrugged it off, and trusted their word for it. Bad move.

It turns out that the hard drive was being cooked by the graphics card. You see, the CPU fan has a cap over it that blows all the air out of the computer before it has time to spread. Lacking any other form of coolers, the computer slowly began heating up, until eventually the hard drive had to pay the price.

Of course, the hard drive failing isn't a problem with Vista, and you may think I'm digressing again, but this is where it went wrong:

When I got a new hard drive, and reinstalled Vista, the old hard drive was sent back to the manufacturers for repair. Inbetween, I had already run Vista with both hard drives in it.

Turning my computer off using the power switch just causes Vista to switch to hibernation mode. Nothing wrong with that, as I like the mode -- it allows me to boot my computer up much faster than a full boot would, and my applications stay alive.

The big turn happened when I had removed both hard drives (don't ask) and plugged the new one back in, albeit in a different SATA slot. Vista started back up from hibernation mode, coughed, and promptly froze up. I rebooted the system... and all my files were suddenly gone!

For some reason unknown to me, Vista somehow messed with my Master File Table, causing all my files to disappear. I managed to use the Vista DVD to restore my files using the "CHKDSK" tool, however, Vista would refuse to start up. It would get stuck at a black screen, where only my mouse was visible.

This, along with the dozens of complaints from other people, the "apology from Microsoft about Vista" I kept hearing about, and my own experiences, have led me back to XP.

If anyone from Microsoft happens to be reading this, now or in the future (although I doubt even regular BYOND users would read it... maybe apart from you... :p), I have only a single suggestion to make: give your customers some kind of means to give proper feedback! Last I heard, the beta version of Windows 7 has a "give feedback" option; keep it in even outside of the beta release, and listen to your customers! It might save us all a lot of time.

-- Data
(Yes, I know I should probably have put images on here, along with this wall of text, but I can't really be bothered to find any good ones at the moment, and I'm dying to continue with what I have been trying to do all day: watch the latest episode of Monk!)

Finally took up the courage to see Star Trek: Nemesis

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:46:39 GMT

I feel awful. :(

Firefox.respect -= 10

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:31:32 GMT

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/

Firefox wrote:
> We don’t try to tackle the problem alone. An international community of security experts is working around the clock to make your web browsing safer (thanks to our open source way of doing things). It’s like having your neighborhood watch led by a group of highly trained ninjas.

Everybody knows that Firefox is run by pirates. Why this false advertising?

The logic I'm taking here is that ninjas prefer to be hidden (because they can't hope to win from us pirates!) whilst us pirates actively share booty with the community.

I say we boycott Mozilla. Whose with me?

Re: Science Explores Possibility of Future Prediction

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:07:39 GMT

I don't want to say much, but I've been thinking the exact same thing for a couple of years now. Ever since I experienced a vision of high school -- whilst I was still in primary school.

I thought I was nuts. So, uh, it's scientifically proven now? I can finally proclaim I am amongst the "gifted" without being regarded an idiot?

BYOND for educational use

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:15:18 GMT

School again today. This afternoon I had "Web T", which translates to writing basic (X)HTML pages for 20 minutes (tops) and spinning your chair around for the remainder of the three and a half hours.

To cut a very long day short: at the end of the classes the discussion about BYOND was brought up with the teacher.

I thought it'd be best to note his initial feelings of BYOND here so Tom may be able to answer some questions regarding BYOND and it's potential.

Primarily he doesn't see the DM language to be useful because it isn't a mainstream language and isn't connected to an existing framework. Therefore outside of BYOND the DM language would have no use.

Since it isn't a mainstream language, teaching it in class would involve more work which would only end up in teaching students a language they may very well never use anymore.

BYOND is good at making games, and he did mention creating educational programs, such as for example a simple 'physics engine' which allows students to see what happens if a variable is altered.

He also seemed disappointed when I mentioned BYOND couldn't do 3D.

I suggested it could be useful for things like MUDs in the workplace. This did seem to catch his attention.

So now I have the assignment to create a rather simple world with a couple of rooms in a graphical environment. Rooms should have doors which have markings on them for the different classes, and once a student walks his avatar into the door it will allow them to select assignments that have yet to be done.

Anyway, my reason for posting this was to announce this and to relay the questions to Tom, who may be able to answer them better than I could.