Quote from mcintyrej :

...but do you seriously think they're ever going to release development information/deadlines again after how the idiots of the community reacted to this occasion?

I think not.

If that is the case then it's their loss I guess. A good community relationship will keep more than just the die hards hanging on for an update which means more referrals through word of mouth, more exposure, more loyalty and better reputation which cumulatively will lead to higher sales and the potential to recruit more people to make games the way Scavier think they should be made. Personally, as good as LFS is, I'd like to see some more quality games come from Scavier labs.

Anyway, I'm not here to argue the toss. I'm sure the guys have heard the tosh I'm spouting before.

Quote from mcintyrej :

The developers aren't purposely trying to frustrate people by not releasing regular updates on the progress they are making - they never have done and I don't think they ever will, that's just the way they work.

Remember, the more time spent managing the community with updates and screen shots, is less time spent developing their game.

I did not state nor imply they ever did it on purpose; I have more respect for Scavier than that. However, I sincerely doubt that half an hour every two weeks would impede development in any way at all.

Quote from SamH :

... If you want to confirm that sharing information about what's coming in LFS before it's finished and ready to release is a mistake, just go back to page 1 and start reading.

IMO that is where you're wrong. The sharing of that information was just done at the wrong time in the wrong way. Yeah you'll always get some asshat bitching but that's the way things go. I don't think everyone that has bitched is necessarily an asshat; some of them are just frustrated.

Quote from SamH :

I think, respectfully, that we can leave the decisions about revenue stream, working from home, paying bills, choosing which pram to buy, where to buy their computer or kitchen.. to the devs. They don't need us to hand-hold them while they make decisions about ANY of their personal financial affairs, including how they should best manage their business strategy. I certainly wouldn't presume to know better than them on such matters. Yanno?

Respectfully, my point was that I've not encountered any industry where frustrating (potential) customers to the point of them getting pissed off is a good strategy. 'Cept maybe arms dealers

I'm not a business guru though, I'll not pretend to know about these things.

Quote from SamH :

LFS don't do marketing. I'm not sure if you're aware of that, Anarchi-H. PR is an integral portion of marketing...

Perhaps PR was the wrong term. They need someone to manage communication between them and the world (which to me is PR).

At the moment this is handled by posts to lfs.net and the occasional forum post but they do do it.

They should still do the later because that is an important part of LFS but managing expectations should be handled by the PR manager.

By "paying the bills" I was referring to income for the devs. While I'm sure it's cool working at home on a project you want to work on, bills still need paying. LFS is a revenue stream to pay those bills, even if they have other things going on.

I'm not even that bothered about the Scirocco tbh. It's just a shame to see the devs get bashings in threads like this when it could have been avoided by properly managing communication.

The devs need a PR manager.

The whole Scirocco thing has been a farce but even beyond that, in general the devs suck at PR.

I know all about the "done when its done" mantra and as a developer I get where they're coming from but if you're going down that road you need to manage expectations of both your clients and of your business partners. Failure to do so may put potential future business partners off, especially if they are lending their name to LFS; it'll be their reputation as well.

It's also not a wise business move to keep the people paying the bills in the dark. At the moment, development on LFS looks stagnant. I'm sure the guys are chipping their way towards the next release but would a bi-weekly development log be much effort? Nothing detailed, no dates mentioned and anything to be kept a surprise does not have to be mentioned. I'm pretty sure you could manage two paragraphs on what happened over the last two weeks without revealing anything epic.

Do big game houses do this? Bet your ass the don't but then they set deadlines and release dates.

IMO this is a chunk the guys missed from the "done when its done" dev model they've adopted.

Using the wysiwyg editor when I have JS disabled does this to me.

Quote from Krammeh :

I agree.

Thats why I'd never use a "lib" for the insim protocol!

making it yourself, gives you a much higher understanding of things!

Understanding is great, but there comes a point that it is superfluous to the task at hand.
For instance, if you were writing a music player, would you write all of the codecs from scratch?
If you are writing a game, would you rewrite OpenGL or the graphics card drivers?

Unless you are a nutjob, no.

The only reason people start from scratch with simpler things like Insim or a webapp is because they can.

I've started from scratch one (or three) too many times and can now see the futility in it.

Guys; have you considered that these peeps aren't coders or software analysts and might not know what a spec should contain?

@BarretOocR

To put an analogy on it, you are asking the equivalent of the following...

You get the idea.
I don't have the time personally to fulfil any requests outside of work, but here is some stuff you should go through when building up a basic spec.

Start off with a list of what you want it to do. You mentioned some things above.
Now take this list and elaborate on each one... for instance.

Penalites... What penalties? For each penalty consider

• What is the penalty to be called?
  
• What should be the punishment?
  
• What conditions would cause a driver to be penalised by this penalty?
  
• Are there any exemptions?
  

You continue like this through all of the things you want your program to do.
After this, you will have some measure of detail such that you could go to a programmer and say "I want this".

The programmer will either say there isn't enough detail or they will try assess the work, implementation and possible technical issues that might arise from the features you have requested.

Some things you want might not be within the limitations of the system so you might have to go back to your spec and adjust some stuff.

Try it; It isn't that difficult, and it doesn't matter even if your english isn't the best as long as you get the rough idea across.

That'd be it then :-)

Some more recent debug entries show the dns has updated now and haven't had any obscurities beyond my own code since.

Something has changed... First instance I see is today from AS2F was @ 06:52:23 (GMT)
I've trimmed some of the gumph.


There are plenty more instances of this if you need.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Fri, 18 May 2007 17:18.

Quote from Victor :

Anarchi-H - what OS are you running that db on?

Debian etch
Machine is a Dell Poweredge 2950 IIRC

We have a similar issue where I work.

Which MySQL client version are you using (i.e. the PHP side)? And which version of the Server? Have you checked for known bugs?
We are using 3.2x something. A recent visit from a MySQL consultant suggested this may be one cause as it is notoriously buggy.

As a temp fix we increased the resiliency of teh DB layer by attempting multiple connects with increasing timeouts (up to a limit). If it fails every time something is obviosuly broke. We also logged every failed attempt with a timestamp so that we can correlate that back to the DB logs. Conclusion hasn't been reached on that yet cause the DB admins are busy with a MySQL upgrade.

This might be of use, though my personal opinion is that PHP is ill equipped to be implement a daemon efficiently.

http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1086

Bear in mind that if you want to keep listening to requests while you process ones that have just come in, you will need to invoke the request handler through CURL or some similar method.

Also, you should keep the daemon script as light as possible. PHP is a memory whore at the best of times with static scripts, never mind a daemon script.

See http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3330.txt Section 2 (Special-Use IPv4 Addresses)

One issue with no password from 127.* would be shared hosts. Hosts that have multiple instances of LFS running on different ports for reselling purposes specifically. User permissions (should) prevent users from reading each others password but unless each instance of LFS runs in its own chroot jail, they would share the loopback.

Every coder should write at least a couple of recursive functions in their life.

How would (semi) transparent surfaces be handled?

Can't leave 'em black / white for obvious reasons.
Treating them as if they weren't there is going to cause funniness in reflections.
Treating them as solid surfaces is going to cause funniness in the scenery behind.

*edit*
Definitely possible for D3D to automatically create depth maps through HLSL ... whether shaders can be applied through a proxy dll is beyond my knowledge tho.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:39.

If it is an LR/CF issue, try setting a binary flag in the transfer mode. I won't pretend to know even the faintest about Tcl but I know that PHP on Windows can have similar issues if you don't tell the fopen call that the data should be treated as binary.

This bit of SQL voodoo queries my DB which holds (at present 3447) host records retrieved in the last 24 hours to try and find ones where the NORACERS is different to the actual racer count. There are that many because the table is simply appended to everytime a host changes.


And here is the result if I invert the last check


As Vic said, check your code.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:08.

I think what is most stupid about the whole thing is not so much the fact that they are using a semi naked dude in a cowboy hat and tight jeans, but in the way he is dancing....

I mean seriously, if that dude were to go to a club and start dancing like that anywhere near any other blokes, he would have his ass handed to him. If he were to do it near any women, they'd probably just assume him gay.

I've seen little girls in tutus dance in a more manly fashion.

Quote from CodieMorgan :

uhhh.. before I try this....

the script URL...

Should I <?PHP Require_once '<url>'; ?>

Um ... no. Remote inclusion is bad m'kay? If you make frequent (or any) use of it you should be severely beaten with teaspoons.

See http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=13328 for some code that will do it for you. If you want to write your own, you could always just look at the code presented there to see how you may go about it.

Victor;
Do you think there would be any sense in adding a 'since' parameter that takes a timestamp and returns results for the given pubstat since that timestamp?

I suggest this because for things like pbs, hls and hostlist we are requesting all of the data time and time again when in fact the vast majority of it has not changed. Kinda redundant.

Obviously, this would depend on how your schema is laid out and whether you store a timestamp for the relevant data (which if you dont at present, you should look in to for optimal replication in the future).

As long as you have an index on the timestamp this would reduce database load, web server bandwidth (on both sides) and computational cost (again, on both sides).

Just a thought

Quote from the_angry_angel :

I've personally found the Zend framework to be the least bloated so far (I personally don't like Solar, Cakephp, etc.), but it's horrifically slow, not to mention written in collaboration with Zend.

Ever looked in to CodeIgniter? I've not used it much due to lack of time and experimenting with other areas -- PHP to Java and back through ebXML & JBOSS based web services anyone? -- but it looks like it will do everything I'd need to do without too much guff. And you can easily override core functionality without having to patch the changes in everytime you upgrade CI.

To the original question; It depends on the app. If another pattern would fit the goal better then I'll use that.

For the most part though, MVC serves my needs just fine for creating typical interactive apps.

Quote from scoobyrbac :

Can anyone tell me if its possible to splice the PS2 wires and hook them together with a USB cord?

No.
AFAIK You could hook up a PS1 pad to parallel with a bit of hackery but I can't guarantee it'll work for PS2 pads.

http://www.emulatronia.com/rep ... irectpad/psxeng/print.htm

I too am getting timeouts >_<

It appears to be a telewest issue though as all of my timeouts occur once I've hit two or three blueyonder routers.

Their status page ( http://www.blueyonder.co.uk/status/summary.do ) doesn't show any current problems, but an issue that was supposedly resolved on the 31/12 "Slow connections nationally" appears to have either come back or not been fixed at all because I am getting really slow pings 500ms +

How long does LFS wait before a timeout?

(PS, I'm on Telewest)

Quote from the_angry_angel :

There's been a few general problems with several routes between parts of the UK and the rest of the world, so it could be that any one outside is still experiencing problems. I would've thought that the new paths would've propagated by now though.

I'd imagine if it was a routing issue, a) it wouldnt have lasted a week (chap in the other thread), and b) The whole net would be pretty borked, not just LFS?