Break out your Bow...

On my 3rd web host at this point. Somehow I always get mixed up with the shitty ones like 000webhost.com. Seriously, worst customer service I have ever dealt with.

Let's just say they pulled down my site, with no warning or explanation, and refuse to say anything but "TOS violation". Now being the sort of fellow that I am.. I read their TOS over 3 bloody times before I uploaded anything, much less pulled down the site from my previous host, so I knew there was nothing I did that would violate TOS.

Anyway, New host, playing at being a bit less open about things now too. I think I'm gonna keep this a private party, so I know who's interested and who's involved. Anyway, map's back up I'm working on forums, and going to be saving ALL information as text documents now(000 Screwed me out of roughly a years worth of writing and planning).

I've gotten in a tentative Arcane Archer imbuing system, and Probably gonna try and knock out Archer, and AA classes for the next test build.

Archer will be just that, Any race, Any class, 2 or 3 BAB and a bow focus feat needed I think.
Will gain the +1AB/dam that AA use to, as well as Seeker arrow(Minus the idiotic spiral), and hail of arrows, both of which will be on a recharge timer.
Additionally, it'll get "fletching" which boils down to some math details. Any arrows that have a gold cost below a threshold value(calculated off of class level) Won't run out. Simple as that.

Arcane Archer, will better live up to its name. It will gain +1 magical damage(per 2 class levels) to any equipped arrow. The ability to imbue several combat spells onto arrows, and a caster level increase.
This boils down to say.. an 8 wizard, 12 AA
Having 4 caster levels from wizard(normal)
And 3 caster level's from AA(4 class levels = 1 caster level).

That's 7 caster levels, where a pure wizard would have 10. Weaker caster than a pure caster, Weaker BAB than a pure warrior. But a nifty mix of the two.

Additionally, I've got a new notion in mind. Archer, AA, and Ranger(I think), and possibly Jester(harper scout) will get access to a pair of new feats related to entrenching a position.

Right now, Entrench will take 1+1d2 rounds, and create a barricade in front of the user(I'll probably make it target able later) To keep this useful, my plan is to allow for 1 barricade per 4 levels. At max level you can throw down 10 in 20-30 rounds(2-3 minutes real time) and build yourself a nice little fort. Of course the barriers can be bashed down, and any player who can put 'em up, can take 'em down. Take them down instantly in fact.

Let's face it, range units in NWN get screw in about every way possible. You can't run and shoot easily, you run out of arrows constantly, Heck with it! I want to give rage shooters, and rangers some love back, and allow them to control the combat area some. We'll see how it plays out, but its a novel idea, and I really think its a good one.

After all, any idiot in the woods can drag some fallen tree limbs and rig up a place where its hard to be flanked. I know, I'm just such an idiot.

Still working with NWN1

Someone asked me the other day, why I was still working with NWN1. I confess, I sat there, and tilted my head like a dog trying to put its ear in position to listen better.

It took a second to put the question into terms that made sense to whit: "Why haven't you moved onto a newer game?" That one, I could answer. The difference lies in the spectrum of answer. Dane Cook, I believe it is, has a joke in his stand up involving a some sort of sandwich.

Rarely ordering this kind, he had no idea what was on it by default, and started telling the waitress what he wanted on it. I understand that, simpler to list the 4 or 5 things you want on it. This being a joke and all, the waitress asked him to list the things he didn't want on it instead. "OK, I don't want a cat's paw on my sandwich. I don't want a sheriff's badge on my sandwich. I don't want motor oil on my sandwich."

Bass Ackwards way of stating what should be, and what shouldn't be on the sandwich 'eh? Anyway back to NWN.

"Why are you still working with NWN?" has so many answers that its nonsensical to even try and answer. "Because I can't make classes for Pacman. Because I dislike like no clerics in Dragon Age. Because I had a dream where merlin told me to. Because the Halo toolset sucks(and it doesn't have classes)."

"Why haven't you moved onto a newer game?" Oh, ok, that's better, and simpler. "Because after all these years of experience, I can make NWN sing A Capella, Oh and NWN has a massive range of CC, and still gets more added on a regular basis. That, and the little fact that all its graphical shiney's don't push graphics cards and the like."

I mean, not to be unkind, but I have played 5 FPS halo games now, and not once did I pay any particular attention to the water. Meanwhile, Mass Effects Hammerhead hover-tank had be constantly paying attention to Lava, and acid and the like. I think you could honestly remove half the VFX from NWN, and I wouldn't mind.

True, graphics are damned nice, but no matter the level of detail, so long as I'm looking at a screen, I won't be immersed. When we have 3d holography draping the area around us when we're playing.. that's when I'll care if the bloom, and source lights and all look perfect.

NWN's graphics are adequate. Most all of the recent content pushes them from that threshold upto "Good", if not beyond.

Now with all that said, yes I am still working in NWN. Mostly on classes at the moment, and a bit on web stuff. I have my Knight base class, and my Warlock, and both handle about as I want them to. I won't share details here, not yet.. But I will share.. a world map. The set up for that was less than you think. A bit of writing PHP code to display it, and a nifty little app on the vault to generate up minimap's from existing area's.

Example:



That was done for a prefab with CTP babylon. But the point is, I can make changes to the maps, save module, Run App, upload images.. and the big world map, will adjust exactly that quick. Talk about awesome. Thus far, I lined up most of the edge borders and the like that way.

Anyway, enough babble for now.. More later perhaps.

Well, I got something done recently...

In addition to working on a quest system(remind me to come back to this) I dropped several years ago.. I also conned a new fellow into semi-active work. His name is Morim, and he's a tool. Alright, alright, maybe I shouldn't slander him on his first day...


Then again, I better get him use to it right?

So in addition to getting him to sell me his soul, I also(you may have noticed) moved to a different webhost a while ago, and as of yesterday.. I put up, and semi-organized a new and better forum system. Now to be fair.. runboard was fine, (and will continue to be up while I cull useful data off it) and its good for entry level putting up a free forum for your non-profit whatever, when you know absolutely nothing.

Its simple, easy, and more a less difficult to screw it up without actively trying. However the admin panel on that thing is simply atrocious, and that makes any changing to the actual board's setup, layout, and permissions, a chore and a half.

No thanks. However, I also has standards, so PHPBB can crawl in a hole, die, and reanimate as a zombie before I think its worth the effort to seriously examine, much less use. I went with SMF, they call it "Simple Machines Forums" but me being me.. I tend to think of it as "Smurf Made Forums".

That's because its a bit cartoony, but its also easy, clear, and simple. Runboard at its best, is simplistic. And I don't say that in a positive light. So now that I'm actively putting some occasional effort into this.. it seemed time to get a nicer forums set up, and get things kicking.

I'd give you an estimate when the runboard forum will no longer be linked, but as soon as I pick a date, I'm almost sure to miss it. We'll say "Pre-2010" ok?

Daily Debriefing

Download page updated

Struck full on by the brutal, methodical power of.......... Whimsy?

Minor site update, added music players on a fit of Whimsy. Home, Forums, Worldmap, and Blog are all effected. Also note, Bringing the world map in to any Quadrant will cause it to play tracks more fitting to Northern/Southern style.

Website Overhaul-age

Did some re-working of the main site. Not sure how much more I'll be doing total, but I think I'll be expanding the Worldmap and Paragons & Patrons sections with subsections as appropriate.

You can for example see several of the P&P upgrades

• The Celestial Hebdomad


• Talisad And The Five Companions


• The Court Of Stars(Not liking the way this one looks truth be told.)

Daily Debriefing

Alright, see the rant below, additionally, World map coding(with both South East, and South West maps added) is finished, although updating/finish maps is still on the 'todo' list, and cropping mini-maps to make web images will take some time and effort, but at least the structure behind it is all present.

You'll probably need to hit F5 to refresh the page(and your browser cache with it). Will probably be doing more later.

110MB Rant

Alright, this is done:
Module

(This will never change, once you have it.. you have it.)



Hak

(This will change frequently, usually with an annotation somewhere that something has changed. I will bump this topic when hak is updated.)

However in the doing of that, I required a beer. For those who don't know, I'm weird, I think drinking and smoking, and other such vices are simply a lack of willpower and a failure to exhibit adult behavior. Essentially, they are the recourse of those who have lead such a shitty life due to their own mismanaged choices that they require such things to continue, and/or experience a bout of happiness.

Be that as it may, 110MB.com made me drink today. To start with, I couldn't upload a .7z file. Understandable I guess, the listed reason is they don't want their site to become an alternative to yousendit.com. Again, understandable I suppose. Seems to me their deliberately avoiding a business opportunity, but that's not my problem.

What is my problem, is that I couldn't upload the 7zip, alright no big deal, I'll upload the 5.01MB file and let them deal with the increased space on their server. Oh Fracking well, they brought it upon themselves. As it completes uploading, I get this lovely little message in my FTP client.

[R] TYPE I
[R] 200 TYPE is now 8-bit binary
[R] PASV
[R] 227 Entering Passive Mode (195,242,99,102,157,145)
[R] Opening data connection IP: 195.242.99.102 PORT: 40337
[R] STOR Black_Book Class Test.mod
[R] 150 Accepted data connection
[R] 550-File too big. Max allowed size is 5120 kb.
[R] 550 Black_Book Class Test.mod won't be saved.
[R] Transfer Failed!
[R] TYPE A
[R] 200 TYPE is now ASCII
[R] PASV
[R] 227 Entering Passive Mode (195,242,99,102,156,74)
[R] Opening data connection IP: 195.242.99.102 PORT: 40010
[R] LIST -al
[R] 150 Accepted data connection
[R] 226-Options: -a -l
[R] 226 4 matches total
[R] List Complete: 263 bytes in 0.47 seconds (0.5 KB/s)
Transfer queue completed
1 File failed to transfer

Ugh. 5120 kb? It was 5.01MB, or 5010kb What in fracking blazes? Vile bastards. Alright, I open it in the toolset, Gut it down, remove a worthless area and upload it again. No problem. 4.88mb is apparently less than 5120, while 5.01 mb is not. What-fracking-ever.

Thinking I had reached a mutually hostile truce with the software, I went to upload the hak BB_Top.hak knowing full damned well it was 1.28mb and would upload.

Ahh, the foolish pride of youth, you see I had forgotten it didn't like some file types, apparently .hak is one of them. I was half way to SevenZipping it when I remembered it didn't like 7zip either. I swore. and started to .Rar it, then I realized .rar also has a good file compression. I swore again, and decided to use .zip.

For those who aren't as technologically savvy as I am, I'll put it in perspective. 7Zip is like using K-Y Jelly when jerking off. Zip, being years older is like using Sandpaper instead.

Not so much in the fact that zip isn't even remotely designed to do the job, it was designed for compression, but in the age of E-tech its outdated by years and outshone by present alternatives. While there is a leisure(as well as a health) aspect of riding a bike when traveling distance, its rarely done with the intent to travel distances, or move cargo a distance with speed.

Those two goals are the core of compressing data. To move it quickly, and in large loads. .Zip is outclassed easily by .rar and .7z just runs circles around it.

Daily Debriefing

More mapping done: Results Here
Web map of course, updated to match.

Daily Debriefing

• Bit more mapping done in the module.


• North East section of the World Map created.


• World Map changed to point to this section as well.

Daily Debriefing

So, It seems I'm the only one working, or the only one posting updates.. No matter! I've been slacking somewhat lately, but some of my mapping work has been uploaded to the site, so while its still not nearly done.. you can take a look over here to see how the northern mountain range is coming.

On a related note, I may do up a NE section tonight too, and redo the linking for that part too. I also spent some time last night making Patrons and Paragons look a bit nicer. I'll still be kicking it all to Roen when finished so he can ply his hand at being editor, and more pointedly re-authoring it all into a more flowing script. Following that, I'll turn it into a real web page with better formatting and get the hell away from the inline frame its presently using.

I may just be old fashion, but it was pounded into my head when first learning HTML that Frames = BAD. However I confess this page is made possible by an inline frame, so maybe the more I play with it, the less I may cling to that belief. My initial concern lies mostly in targeting it.
{A href="Link_URL"}link{/a}
is how most links are written but the inline frame bit forces me to add another parameter, which I don't really like.

target="" It works, fairly well in fact, but its a pain to have to manually add it to all URL links when making a post.
{A href="Link_URL" target="_blank"}link{/a}

However, let's not forget before I used 3 links in this one post alone already.. Suffice to say, its a cumulative headache as more things need to be referenced.

Daily Debriefing

Trans completed:

• A Row
• B Row
• C Row
• D Row
• E Row
• F Row
• G Row
• H Row
• I Row
• J Row
• K Row
• L Row
• M Row

DONE!

On that note, I took a brief break and came up a fun trap script:

Random save, Random DC, Jumps PC to random location, and hides the map on them. Fun 'eh? I also worked up some AOE traps, but they work less well(there are still bugs, Note the plural form 'bugS'). Spell traps may be next.

I may even take tomorrow off, but eventually I'll clean up A-E and do the Mountains.


Edit: I also did a fair bit of web work today, check the main page.

Daily Debriefing

Trans:

• H Row
• I Row

Some web work completed, Roen also made his first post here, also note on the main page, he's introduced(you may need to F5 to refresh).

Daily Debriefing

Tonights accomplishments pretty much consist of this showing here As well as having cleaned up several other pages to likewise display relevant content on the page, rather than placeholders/forwarding setups.

• Forum
• FAQ's
• Story Outline
• Paragons and Patrons
• Blog
  

Doing a similar page for contact us, is also planned, but that's another day. I really didn't feel like tool-setting at all today, and have far to many IRL things to get done. For more of my IRL dysfunctions, feel free to visit my Personal Blog.

For those unfamiliar with the term Debriefing, click it.