ttlanhil

Perhaps. But consider where that list came from... I posted on the forums for discussion and opt-in. It's fair and people know what's happening (had Usl done that from the start, the grumblings that some of us have might not have even made it to the forums. I think a dislike for his way of doing things is a part of the problem). Also himself and his guild (and his isn't the only bot I've seen trying tog et prices from vakana, some of them even less willing to admit to what they're doing, so there's one point for him), but yes. Although I believe what he's doing is a bad idea, and I think he should have discussed it openly, I don't and didn't think anything was done with malice or ill-intent. One could also suggest that the channels in EL are getting overcrowded, and would do so without any bots on them at all. EL's chat system worked well at the start, but I don't think it's scalable enough. At some stage, we may have to split some things up; have channels that are officially listed as, for example, Seridian or Irilion market (and keep one Draian one for the really big trades for when people are willing to travel a long way). This has, to some extent, happened already unofficially, although many players simply don't know about it.Yes, we do need other approaches... But some have been developing already. EternalBroker is an example where people can get involved in trades without botspam (if more people did that, checked what was available or wanted, and gave realistic prices, it might help). I suggested adding a location list to vakana's bot list (so she'd be able to tell you which bots traded in PL and wished to be listed, and you then checked prices, exact location, any other relevant details then), but I only had one person (IIRC) contact me wanting to add a location entry. We do need to work on this problem. But increasing price-competition at the same time is, to me, not a good thing. Developing it in private without anyone but Ent knowing about it, and bot owners seeing what looks very suspicious (even Ent said it was to be public, but we see bots talking to our bots in PM without knowing what's going on... I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be suspicious), and slows down development (heck, if the bot owners, as a group, went for an idea of bot-listing, it could be done so much faster and easier...).

I tend to agree, but the minimap may supply that sense of knowing what's going on around you. *shrug* This has been a problem ever since perspective was added to the client (before that it was only modded clients (or perhaps rare cases with height differences)). It's just a lot more obvious in FPV. The problem is that you can see a long way, perhaps as far across as Whitestone City is, before LOD cuts too much out... Now, some people's computers won't be able to handle many maps in FPV, but some will... The increase in bandwidth needed, on the other hand, will be significant, especially in populous (not just people, but also critters) areas. I don't know how much of a problem dial-up would be today, but if the view range for actors went up that much, it'd be a lot worse (plus, how do we deal with the perception-difference? just crank that up at the same scale? People will see each other from so far away anyone has time to check stats before fighting?). It seems like there's some serious design issues to be considered Yeah, it seems like we have an uncorrected sphere instead of a corrected one or a skyplane... Unfortunately, I don't know if I have the technical ability to fix it (I could probably add another layer of clouds that'd be seen as higher, but adjusting what sort of sky rendering view is used is trickier). Plus the amount of time that would be needed... Between university, all the other things on my TODO list for EL, work on related projects like my bot or movie-server, time off when people in-game make me wonder why I bother putting in all this work, etc, I don't think I have time to do more than fix the bugs and adjust some of the less tricky things. I'm hoping someone with OpenGL experience will be able to help out, but the two people I know who have experience also have their own projects taking up time No, given how fast you can pan the camera (and although in mouse-grab mode the client auto-turns the character, it's still way too slow). You'd need at least 120 degrees to be able to deal with only minor turns of the head, and turning your head (IRL) side to side means you have a range of vision of something like 270 degrees within part of a second (certainly less than some people's ping time on EL). Plus calculating the different ranges and angles may be more CPU intensive than just a circle.It's an interesting idea (and certainly, come up with more ) but I don't think it will work out as well as we need.

Please don't use terms you don't understand. The basis of capitalism is exploiting everyone else for your personal benefit. The community in EL suffers enough attacks as it is without the hype on price. Don't be silly. Capitalism benefits the haves and penalises the have-nots. Bot owners will often be the haves, and their customers from the full range.In a hyper-capitalist society, the few haves control nearly all the wealth, and the have-nots have trouble, not only competing, but even having enough money to be customers... You don't have to do much study to realise that if the few wealthy people exploit everyone else they will slowly destroy the market for many items (basics like food will always be needed, of course, although IRL people can and will grow their own... without employees getting good wages, they can't afford to buy the non-necesities companies are putting out... Now, who's going to point out that this won't happen to this extreme in EL? Heck, I will. Because comparing RL and EL without a strong enough understanding of what you're talking about is stupid. But there's enough similarity to see that, like IRL, an overly capitalist market is not good in the long term (IMO, hyper-socialism is a bit nicer, although the lack of goal from striving to be the best means most people will slack off and society and the economy stagnates through lack of innovation and work, rather than lack of money and exploitation... But lets not get too political)) The difference is that people will rely on the prices from a central register, and that information will be wrong, not just on prices, but also quantities/availability. And if a bunch of bots have a hundred or more people who get better prices (and with some of the larger guilds in-game, you should believe that it's feasible), many people will get better prices from some bots.What if there's a list with locations that people can check? They then check those bots. If they don't already have their own list of bots they normally deal with (and many people do). What if the central registry gives false information, the person running it doesn't consider courtesy or make concessions that cause half the bot-running market to block them; and then spins their posts to make it sound like less people had a problem? Real issues of distrust, frustration, and dislike. It doesn't necessarily take a lot of RL money, you can also invest a lot of time, and working smarter can help... But that takes a lot of investment in research, planning, etc... That's not what a game should really be about, IMO. Other than that, I agree except that you missed that people will make stuff in the hopes of getting rare items (like the great swords) and then dump, below-cost, the normal version to recover most of the costs. Vakana offers a lot of services to the players of EL (possibly too many, since some people find the list of commands a bit overwhelming at times, but oh well). Notice, services to players. Not bots. Control of the powerful, gee, that goes so well with exploitation of the masses... Nothing like bringing up visions of explosions and violence to put across your point, eh? Well, it's not at me, but I'm at university, I've studied economics, marketting, and a heck of a lot of other stuff... I've been given awards for acheivement, they've been chasing me to do further study, etc... I have some idea what I'm talking about. It's time you learn something. The best service or product is not what succeeds. The public, as a group, are stupid (people individually are often, though not always, clever. Groups are often stupid. Many things people would never do alone, they'll do in a group. Peer pressure, wanting to show off, trying to demonstrate social dominance, laziness because the issue doesn't affect just them, so obviously someone else will think for them, etc) Well, if it were even true information... Did you not read the market/economic analysis about what happens when you increase the importance of price as a competition point? Prices dropping from bots does not help the (low level) players who try to compete. Bot owners like myself who have the levels to make nearly everything in-game with a decent to high success rate can afford to sell things like HE for a lot less than a low level player who fails regularly. Unlike IRL, there's no labels (and hence social status) or quality issues, so we don't really have a reason to sell for more just because we can (and hence allow the lower level players to compete... Which, BTW, is a socialist action, allowing competition and a wider marketplace, the capitalist approach would be to kill any competition any way possible, including selling below cost in order to drive out the smaller competition... Big business does that IRL too). As for banning guilds because of the actions of one player, I don't agree with that... On the other hand, I did see Usl scanning vakana's list of bots, and I considered a ban there... But then, unlike IRL, it's harder to spot people who hide behind false names to get around any block I put in place, and he'd be able to misuse the list of bots eventually anyway (on the other hand, they're also all in the relevant forum post, it's not that private). And yes, misuse, since it's provided mainly so people can find contacts if there's a problem with a bot (which is an issue, as AFAIK not even the mods know the contact details for all bots).

Well, it's been a while, so time to update, I guess... That's pretty much how it is in CVS now (zoom is the same with or without ext-cam, do you want that adjusted?), although it's likely the changes I made allow the non-ext-camera to move another degree up/down, etc... Ext-cam now allows you to go almost straight up/down (I don't like straight up/down, as that looks perculiar when you pan, but I can add another 5-10 degrees if needed) Grum's done this I took a few screenies wandering around in VotD today... FPV isn't that great for playing, but it's good for looking around http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b62/ttlanhil/FPV/ Bugs/TODOs/related issues: - ctrl+o descriptions - the lightning is seen on clouds (at least in -DNEW_WEATHER, where the flash is more noticeable), which isn't really going to be correct. - fix follow cam in FPV - the shadow system in EL only works for a certain distance; after that the shadows look funky. The new view here will make players more likely to be looking long distances, so it is becoming more of a problem. - actor animations, when viewed from a low angle (such as horizontal) seem a lot more robotic, no bounce, etc. Note: in FPV, head bobbing will be visible to the player as the screen moves, so while it would look okay to increase a little, it shouldn't be too much - again with being able to see further, you can see when actors disappear. It might work okay if we alpha blend people in/out at a certain distance, because currently they just pop in/out on actor add/remove from the server. - shaders don't seem to work - clouds, stars & sun go from north to south when looking north or south; west to east when looking west or east. funky. - skybox and shadows roll when panning camera. - reflection of skybox is pass-through, not a proper reflection disable reflect_sky, and only on high angles is anything shown (is the horizon misplaced?) All 3 seem to indicate that something in the OpenGL code is wrong, a mis-translation or rotation or something... I just don't know what/where

So now I should point out how it's disgusting and I don't think it's at all appropriate for the forums of a game that families play?

At the risk of getting this thread even further off-topic (Maybe someone could move this thread to help-me or similar? preferably with a name change?), it also does the opposite. Network-hardware grade firewalls can do traffic management in both (or more than 2) directions, and firewalls on workstations can also manage outbound access. For example, I know zonealarm has the ability to allow/deny access from programs on your computer to the Internet. And if you have any dubious programs on your computer, that can be handy too. That said, firewalls generally serve as part of a proper defence, and while temporarily disabling them to test something is probably okay, removing/disabling for longer than necessary is not a good idea unless you really know what you're doing or are working with someone who does.

And we can summon them with 20 needles? (I've been wanting to do this for a long time, I've suggested it a few times before, I think it'd be funny )

Well, phooey, how did I not see that? Well, should be (re)fixed in CVS now, thanks for pointing it out

Oh, completely true. Didn't consider that. Although you can still lose 3D objects outside a room. Ooh, wait, I think I remember a case where you have to TPTR over an unwalkable area, not just blackmaze. I guess all maps where that's intended will have to have a single walkable tile every now and then, just frequently enough to keep the parts in the same cluster (Ugg, eh? )

Well, pretending black tiles are null would make it so you can't just click the other end of a blackmaze I'm not sure if making it so you can't see a room on the other end is a good thing or not... Heck, I'm not even sure if this change would make any objects in the blackmaze no longer be shown, since they're between rooms...

Well, I've found the problem, windows are allowed to be moved further than they get drawn. So the tooltips were actually in the correct place, the window was quietly moving itself (without fixing its location). Eeenteresting. I've fixed it in CVS now, thanks for letting us know

Well, since I haven't had any reports of it causing new problems, it's now in CVS. Hopefully it'll now be as good as we can get it

Well, I haven't given it an exhaustive test, but what I've tried says that it's accurate, but slow. How hard would it be to only calculate the cluster the player is in at first, and do the rest in the background?

Being hidden sounds odd; for me the tooltip is sitting just above the cursor, not at all hidden. Unfortunately, different size cursors are probably going to be in the next version of EL, so moving tooltips to below the cursor is trickier to calculate.

Okay, even assuming it's possible to do correctly, so you can't be scammed, which it isn't... The suggestion is basically to add a little control while you get someone else to play for you? No.

A/D is easy to make money in from when rabbits are easy to kill onwards. But the thing is you normally have to decide if you want to maximise your profits, or your exp (sorta the same as other skills; the things that bring cash and the things that get XP often don't match up). If you just want the profits, you kill well below your level (not always, of course, sometimes what's at or a little above your level will be worth killing, but usually). But to the original issue... Why not have charm give a chance to make an extra stone, rather than an enriched one? It'd probably be simpler to code

I've just tested this. If you fight something while it's eating, it looks a little funny to see its head move up as you attack, but it looks a lot smoother than before. The code changes were not that large, so although I'm not an expert in the actor code, I believe it's safe. As such, it's now in CVS; thanks Onyxa

I'm not forgetting them. I know there are people with opinions on each side of the issue.I know what Ent said. And while I'm happy to say he's a good coder, and his work on EL usually works out okay, that doesn't make all his decisions correct. And assuming he was right, that doesn't address all the problems. As for vakana, yes, apart from the spam (because it's ignored) it doesn't matter so much, because she'll ignore it. But you said "All the rest were happy to be included" which is false. Actually, this brings up another point. You add some bots yourself, but the others have to be by request? That only exacerbates the issue of incomplete listings (and heck, if you didn't tell the bot owners about polling their bots, because you didn't think you had to, or didn't consider it polite, whatever the reason, why not assume other bot owners will assume their bot will be indexed?) Re-read what I said. I said there are exceptions, but apart from specific exceptions (which should be added as needed, rather than leave a problem there in case it's useful) bots should not respond to bots.On this, we almost agree. That there are cases where bots talking to bots is good we agree on. That bots should, by default, not respond to other bots (until the bot owner/manager sees reason to set that up) we seem to disagree on. We also disagree on whether a price indexing bot is a good idea (I'm all in favour of listing bots with purpose, contact details, and map. I don't see a problem with a list of trade bots in Whitestone, for example. But I don't like that another bot is providing price comparison, or that some bots have to opt-in while others have to opt-out (which is why vakana's bot list is completely opt-in)) I'm sure you could add Learner to that list But who? I want to make my reasons for opposition clear, in hopes that it will limit damage to EL's economy by stopping sooner. Vakana used to post prices in her ads, but I changed that long ago. Yes, I'd agree with removing prices from the bot ads on @@3, and limit it to "Here I am, this is what I trade in, contact me for more info" every hour or whatever (I know it's 15-min currently, but vakana and others advertise once an hour or longer, and mandating it to be an hour will help the botspam, at least for a while).And of course bots don't list different prices on @@3 (except when their public price changes). The problem that I'm talking about is not the public price. Okay, maybe an example will help illustrate. Vakana has 2 sets of prices. One is the public price, that's what most people get. She also has a discount per item that's given to guild-members, people I list as friends, and people who pay for premium access (better prices, more commands, gambling, etc. A few people have signed up for that). Vakana currently has a price of 1gc on cinnabar to the public. She will sell to preferred customers for 0gc. Or, she pays 6300 for binding stone from the public, or pays 6400 for a bind stone from a preferred customer. This is an example of the different prices that bots may have. You may disagree with the practice, but I doubt it's uncommon. Your bot, if I allowed it to contact vakana, would get the public prices. However there are about a hundred people (rough estimate, but I think it's within 10%) would could get a better price on most of her items. I know other bots have prices for at least some items that are different for at least some people. Anyone who gets better prices on any of the items they check for will get incorrect data about the bots they get better prices from, when checking the results from your bot. If I thought it would be ignored, then I'd ignore it. But I suspect it could do harm to the economy.A lot of what's said here is repeating what was said in semi-private, but it's also adding more opinions and information. Certainly. I respect your right to disagree, even if I think you are wrong. But at the same time, I dislike people giving others incorrect information, such as saying that I support this (which I don't) by claiming that "All the rest were happy to be included".

Right, and some people were strongly against it (ent's for it, learner, labrat, myself, and others are against it, among others). So do you ignore requests from other people, or do you just not look at them? There's a lot of stuff in the private forum about this that's relevant, but I don't want to take too much without permission, so I'll limit it to: you could consider vakana on that list, but since she's defensively coded, it doesn't matter (defensively as in trying to avoid problems. sending a PM to another bot is likely to result in a big problem, if neither are going to ignore messages from bots). I'm a bit concerned that other bots aren't designed that way, at least, they probably aren't if your bot can poll them. Ent says it's allowed. So? Another point in the private forum was that if you don't have the courtesy to even let the bot owners know you're gonna start PMing other bots, why should we trust you to provide correct lists? This is in fact like saying that there is no reason why a web site should respond to Google's requests. Why there is so much talk about botspam, I can't quite understand: Rraisa just sends an INV or WANTED command every 1 and 1/2 hour, which should not be a burden to anyone. These PMs go directly to a single bot, not to a channel where they could constitute spam. Globally, it would hugely reduce the total number of tradebot-related PMs in the system. If you have n players and m tradebots, for every player to get a complete picture of the market would require O(n*m) messages (a message from each player to each bot). With a broker, you only need O(n+m) messages (n messages from player to broker, plus m messages from broker to bots).First off, any correctly coded bot will ignore PMs from other bots (apart from the specific exceptions, which trade should not be part of). Therefor, not a single one of those PMs should ever get a response. They should all be silently ignored. Therefore any PM your bot sends to another bot is spam. Of course, I know not all bots are defensively coded, and they'll be quite happy to engage in a spamwar with any bot that makes contact, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable practice. Maybe one day they'll all be like that. But do we really want a game where it's the bots that do all the trading, and players don't even engage in marketting anymore, they just contact the nearest bot list bot?Because, no, it's not a single bot. Vakana has a list of bots that bot-owners have to opt-in to get on, and it's not trade specific, it's designed to give contact names and the like. (I've had requests for an indexing service based on this, I've stated why I'm against the idea, but I think ensuring contact details are available is a Good Thing) And other bots have done trade indexing, or whatever else, we can hardly assume your bot will be the only one to start trade-spam. As for checking every bot... Where do you get the idea that every player will check every bot? That's silly. Players will #ignore some/many/all tradebots on @@3 and contact those they've dealt with in the past, have heard about from a friend, or is nearby. Price is an aspect, but I strongly believe it should not be made the primary point of competition, like in a trade-index bot. Even assuming that the list is correct, which it may not be with any bot that has access levels (such as public and guild-mate; which may allow not just different prices, but also different items), you're saying you want to go huge distances for the best price? And you don't see the problem there?For anyone who doesn't, let me put it this way. Low-level players can make items to sell on the market. They need a profit per-item to cover the losses. The lower the level, the more profit on successes they need. High level players generally can't get by only on high-level work, they have to compete on the low-level (bulk) items as well. They can afford to have a smaller profit margin, because the loss rate is low. Now, I'm reasonably high in most skills, so you can't really accuse me of self-interest here (if anything, I'd be at an advantage), but I see this as being damaging to the economy and community (new players find that "blue lupins are the best cash" becomes truer and truer, and eventually get bored with just the one thing to do, and leave (Note: lupins is the correct English spelling, so don't think that's a typo ). So it would be more correct to say between 3 and 7 are against, 3 are for the idea, and up to 54 have no idea you've even been doing this? And don't say that "all the rest were happy to be included" because that's either ignorance or a lie, neither of which is good (to be specific, Learner, LabRat, and myself all stated our disapproval in the private forums before anyone in that forum even know whose bot it was). Plus, of course, apart from those 3 who asked, you can't say that anyone is happy about being listed, not if you haven't talked to the bot owner/manager yourself.ed: Oh, and it looks like you may have to add Nicky's bots (yes, plural, and well known) to the exclude list. Heck, since the bot owners may explicitly block Raisa's PMs, you should assume any non-responce is a no-vote, not a yes-vote (since it's either that they don't like Raisa in particular, or the idea of bots PMing bots in general). And as a semi-side-note, since you didn't contact bot owners; theoretically you should get no responses at all, since those who want to participate should have to explicitly give an exception to ignoring all bots (well, gee, you mean if any of the owners of those up-to-6 bots that may actually be coded properly want to be on the list, they miss out? You're punishing people for being good programmers? Sarcasm aside, the courtesy of contacting bot owners first would have prevented this problem) Yes, saying you're either lying or not reading what has been said is harsh and perhaps mean. But I hope it underscores just how serious my concerns are; not just for the economy, but also for misrepresentation of bot-owner opinions to support your goal. LabRat's post shows why bots should (with exception) never respond to bots. I probably still have the logs for when vakana got spammed by ants (and then responded to them all, of course, which got a responce from them, etc) within an hour or two of first getting online (gee, learner, why didn't you do that to all the other bots, to encourage good programming? ) As for the private forum discussion... There are things that are good to be kept quiet. It makes sense to limit discussion of bot-spam to only those who have a reason to discuss it (really, any bot owner/manager should get in there), because it'll just get spammy otherwise. That's where the thread on Raisa started. It could have been reasonable to move the discussion about a bot-index bot to public forums once the thread turned to the pros-and-cons of that idea, sure, but it didn't happen until now. Unfortunately, Ent's support for the idea seems to mean that the concerns some of us share have not been fixed. Understanding?

So yeah, I'd say that's a match Unless it's exactly the same problem, or you have technical reasons to suspect it has the same cause, you should make a new thread for new problems

13kgc?

This is the part that really bothers me... That someone would need to do this. Not because someone's setting up botspam, but because I don't see much reason why bots should ever respond to other bots at all (there are certainly exceptions, like a guild that has several bots might share info between them, however those are limited and uncommon).When I was first bringing vakana online, I planned to add bot-ignore after a few days, once I had reading of the online_players list working. But I had a botspam attack in only an hour or three, and had to take vak offline for a few more hours while I cobbled all that together. Players can contact players. That's fine. Players can contact bots, that generally works fine as well. Bots should rarely contact players (unless the player signed up for notifications, or things like offline PMs/tells), and bots should contact bots even less (as above, there are a few exceptions, anything else should, IMO, be silently ignored. It's the best way to prevent a "Hello, my name is and I do X!" floodwar). That was pointed out before as well. But heck, lets be subtle. Occasionally the tradebot can report that it has more of something than it does, even if it doesn't have any.Players will find the bot doesn't have it, and may complain, and then "Oh, sorry, sold out already, you were too slow" or "No, that's old info, the indexbot isn't up-to-date". You need server access to be able to disprove this. And even server access doesn't guarantee things are accurate, because bots may sell more items for less to some people (not just better prices, some things will only be to some people). Something like this cannot be done correctly. To do it incorrectly means problems and more botspam. Oh, and one other problem I've pointed out in the private forum before... I've had people complain vakana was broken because they had her on #ignore and a friend told them to contact her. Fair enough, but that'll be a bigger problem if there's an indexing that doesn't take into account #ignore lists.

I think you missed where the parenthesis are; !(mouse or keyboard)Or was there something else I missed?

This is, IMO, an SDL bug (and hardly the first issue in SDL we've encountered). I can't seem to reproduce the problem, so could someone test the following? Index: events.c =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/elc/elc/events.c,v retrieving revision 1.141 diff -u -r1.141 events.c --- events.c 9 Jul 2007 15:11:05 -0000 1.141 +++ events.c 26 Jul 2007 05:06:53 -0000 @@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ case SDL_MOUSEBUTTONDOWN: case SDL_MOUSEBUTTONUP: // make sure the mouse button is our window, or else we ignore it - if(event->button.x >= window_width || event->button.y >= window_height || !(SDL_GetAppState() & SDL_APPMOUSEFOCUS)) + if(event->button.x >= window_width || event->button.y >= window_height || !((SDL_GetAppState() & SDL_APPMOUSEFOCUS)||(SDL_GetAppState() & SDL_APPINPUTFOCUS))) { break; } With this code, if we have the keyboard focus but not mouse focus (according to SDL) then we still allow it to go through, depending on the coords. This isn't really correct, but hopefully it'll fix this problem without causing others (allowing clicks outside the window to do stuff inside the window is the other side of the problem)

Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The things that we've thought of, we'll make threads about when we want player opinions (and even then we don't always get decent responses)... The rest, well, it's more for getting suggestions that we haven't thought of before. That's the problem. As for this idea, well, I don't recall it having come up much before, I just don't think it'll be as helpful as we'd like