US Democracy Server: Patch Day

Version 44.0

President

• Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
• A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
• Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
• Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
• Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
• A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

Vice President

• The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
• No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
• The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
• Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
• Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
• A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.

Cabinet

• There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will continue to monitor the situation.

Judiciary

• Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule, and will require longer to address.
• A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged "ideological." We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this situation.

Homeland Security

• Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
• Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
• Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
• Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.

Economy

• Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help identifying and fixing bugs. We can’t make these fixes without your help.

PVP

• Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag.

Quests

• The” Desert Storm” quest chain was displaying an erroneous "Mission Accomplished" message near the beginning of the chain.
• The quest chain that begins with “There’s no Cake like Yellow Cake” and terminates  with “W-M-Denied” has been identified as uncompletable, and has been removed.

Reagents

• Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents. We hope to roll out even more sweeping changes in the next patch.

Events

• The “Axis of Evil” event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the “Rebuilding Bridges” event starting in January.

Note: Enjoyment of this content is covered by our Terms of Service

I read with great delight Kevin Kelly's recent post over at the Technium, "The Google Way of Science".

Mr. Kelly is a big fan of intellectual broadsides - technological Zen koans, and this one is a doozie.

The elevator pitch is this: As we accumulate more and more data, petabytes of the stuff, scientists can knock of the difficult and time consuming process of coming up with, then testing, peer reviewing, then repeatedly testing a hypothesis, and simply look with special tools (petascopes?) through these vast pools of data for previously undiscovered correlations, which with enough data points become as good as natural law.

Imagine you had a database with a vast number of entries detailing how long it took objects to fall to the ground from varying heights.

Using the field of Correlative Analytics, you could simple query the database asking how long it takes for an object to fall 25 meters. With enough data points, you could get answers as accurate as if you actually had a theory of gravitation, though the database and related search software have no implicit theory of gravity built in to them.

As it turns out, this is much the way Google language translation services work. They have no theory of French, English, or Chinese, the simply have very large amounts of bilingual translations they can use to look for correlations. It is science by Bayesian filter.

Except that it isn't.

Prototyping gameplay can be a quick and dirty* way of answering design questions. The big  ones, like: is it any fun?

Here's a Flash/ActionScript prototype I did for my last game, a Wii title called "Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed."

There's a more detailed discussion of it over here.

* If you do it right.

Here's a little verse I wrote years ago to settle an argument about non-euclidean geometry.

Yes, seriously. What?

Hey, Euclid!

Parallel lines in geometry
go side-by-side to infinity.

But any fool with his own two eyes on
know railroad tracks meet at the horizon.

Nothing too sexy here, unless you find Socket Servers sexy.

Don't go there. Thank you.

Scoot on over to the Downloads page, and you will find a new link for Palabre Modules.

Therein you will find modules for telling if certain entities like nicknames and room names exist on the server, and a very handy (at least until the next release) module for pre-processing messages sent to the server.

To all six of you who find this useful and exciting, hats off to you! (And see you on the forums).

For those of you who are a bit fuzzy on the whole 'socket server' thing, and read this with a kind of a 'who cares' vibe, Palabre is a open-source project that allows you to build multi-user or, dare I say, multi-player apps built in Flash.

Hah! It's only been nine months since my last post, so all of you who bet on a year between posts, pay up!

So much to talk about, but for now you'll have to live with this little teaser.

I'm building a multi-user Flash application, and having lots of fun doing it. The guts of the enterprise is a open source Flash Socket Server called Palabre, written and maintained by Conort Célio.

This has required a number of things of me, not the least of which is brushing up on my Object-Orient programming in both Python and Flash, and becoming my own little mini-ISP, of sorts, to run the socket server.

It also means I've started to extend the server software by writing add-on modules. At some point, there may be an archive for them, but for now, I post them here for your enjoyment.

existsQueries.zip

This module is exceedingly simple. The client sends a user nickname, or a room name, and the modules tells the client if it exists.

I'll be moving this site over to the new server soon. If all goes well, you won't feel a thing.

Wow. My friends are really kicking ass this week. Rich and Tina launched their new show, and now Gareth grabs a little national media attention.

You go!

I've talked about my friend Gareth Hinds here once before, when he signed a deal to publish with Candlewick Press. While King Lear is still working it's way to the shelves, Candlewick has released a magnificent hardcover edition of an earlier work, a graphic novel adaptation of the old English epic poem, Beowulf.

I was thrilled to hear from Gareth that Beowulf was getting a review in today's New York Times Sunday Book Review. The review compares three adaptations of the work, and they lead with Gareth's new edition.

While I am enough of a geek to cringe when they call a graphic novel a comic-book, I can't grouse too much, as they give the book a very nice review. Here's snippet:

It's a fantastic book, much (all?) of which was hand painted on wood, which gives a subtle and beautiful sense of weight and age. You really should go buy it right now.