Storage quantity tooltip

[Storage quantity tooltip]

Erm, maybe one thing fixed, but another problem introduced: screeny

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

[Neighbouring rooms on inside maps]

EDIT: ehm...not trying to invalidate the point, but the other side of a maze would still be connected by the height map, no? So it would still belong to the same cluster.

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? )

[Neighbouring rooms on inside maps]

I wonder if we should fix the maps, or if I should simply test for black tiles as well.

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...

[Storage quantity tooltip]

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

[Possible fix for mouse click away bug]

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

[Neighbouring rooms on inside maps]

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?

[Storage quantity tooltip]

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.

[Account Sitting]

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.

[Suggestion for Summoning Stones]

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

[Animation Blending]

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

[Advanced Broker-Bot]

... and don't forget to list others that were in favour, in addition to Ent, e.g. Annatira, jamincollins/blackthorn (on condition that the bot was made public), sithicus (ditto), lord_jag, and others who PMed me their support instead of going to the forums...

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.

it was not counted in the ignore list because Vakana never was in Rraisa lists to start with. Rraisa has never polled Vakana. That, and the vague terms you used above, is the reason why I haven't removed Vakana from any list -- it never was there.

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?)

Your opinion is that bots should never reply to other bots. You make that into an absolute truth, and derive all sorts of terrible consequences from it. My opinion is that there are useful scenarios where bots could cooperate nicely, and Rraisa is an example of that.

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 have both LabRat and ttlanhil in sufficiently high esteem -- technically speaking -- that I reckon you can see the difference. So, who exactly are you trying to impress with all this smoke?

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.

If the issue is really that you are afraid that a price war may ensure, then you should propose that bots be removed from ch 3 altogether (after all, they advertise their prices there, and people could even compare them -- God forbid!). All the issues about providing different prices to different people also apply to the market channel: I have never seen bots advertising multiple prices there.

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 you are so sure the service is useless, please let it fail and be forgotten. We have all stated our points of view clearly (we already had in the bot owner forum, as well -- this is just repeating it all for the benefit of the onlookers, isn't it?).

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.

And... I think I do understand your position. Nevertheless, I don't agree with you. Am I still free to have a different opinion?

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".

[Advanced Broker-Bot]

Nicky, if you were in the bot owners private forum, you would know that this has already been discussed months ago (also see the numbers below).

Right, and some people were strongly against it (ent's for it, learner, labrat, myself, and others are against it, among others).

Of course, whoever does not want to be indexed can simply state so, and that bot would be removed from Rraisa listings. A total of 2 tradebots, both owned by the same person, have in fact been removed upon request.

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:

Back to the general issue: I have received a number of requests to be included in the service by bot owners, a few explicit don't cares, and to date only one request to be removed from the listing (from LabRat).

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.

Entropy stated quite clearly that by default it is acceptable that a bot asks another bot for its INV and WANTED, but of course bots are free to ignore requests as they wish. Rraisa has been running for 6 months now, it's not that the matter hasn't been thoroughly discussed and tested.

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 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).

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.

There is no claim that results will be accurate, or whatever. Of course tradebots can cheat to Rraisa, and then maybe offer a worse price to a player. That's why I normally use Rraisa to get a list of bots carrying some item, and then INV them directly before going half a continent to do my shopping. Notice that I'm avoiding PMing dozens of bots that DON't carry what I want, saving time for myself and bandwidth on the server.

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 far, I have had:

1 tradebot owner explicitly asked to be removed from the listing

3 tradebot owners explicitly asked to be added to the listing (I had missed them initially)

all the rest were happy to be included, and some of them opted to ban Rraisa for the time being, in particular:

6 bots are ignoring Rraisa (some of them are ignoring all bots, regardless of the purpose)

40 bots are replying to Rraisa requests

10 bots are off-line right now and I can't tell wheter they would accept or reject requests

in addition, several of the newer bots are not yet listed.

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.

 

Peace?

Understanding?

[Minimizing error report]

Out of curiosity, do you have an onboard Intel graphics card in the i810 family? I used to have an i845, and it would often crash if I didn't go into the console before minimizing, due to some error in their drivers.

No I have a Intel®82845/GL/GE/PL/GV Graphics Controller (also graphic card) Or just a Pentium 3

So yeah, I'd say that's a match

I have a problem liek this when i m on el i and i go to miniiz and then load back up after that it is a blank screen and leaves the blue tool bar and then just makes my computer stop working.

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

[Storage Cleaning]

86 Bear Fur

15 Hawk Feather

215 Falcon Feather

40 Feran Horn

1 Racoon fur

18 Empty Vial

9 Needle

9 Thread

3 Gemstone hammer & chisel

18 Rose Quartz

1126 Coal

2723 Blue Quartz

330 Quartz

13 Ruby

122 Fire Essence

138 Earth Essence

1 Silver Bar

107 Water Essence

13kgc?

[Advanced Broker-Bot]

I predict a large number of bot owners eventually instructing thier bots to IGNORE this type of bot when it request prices.

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).

I've also considered some may send incorrect data to the bot, an INV from that bot would return EVERY item in the game available at WAY below market prices. Just to get the players who use that service to go to thier bot.

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.

[Possible fix for mouse click away bug]

I haven't tested this, but looking at it: doesn't this patch ignore all mouse events now when the window has keyboard focus?

I think you missed where the parenthesis are; !(mouse or keyboard)

Or was there something else I missed?

[Possible fix for mouse click away bug]

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)

[Something to tell us what is needed to have suggestions made on them(if that makes any sense)]

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

[Advanced Broker-Bot]

Nobody should be dictating prices - people will figure out how low they are willing to go and a floor will form on prices - just like in real life.

Whoops, missed this the first time around.

I want you to sit back in your chair, and think about why this is so wrong. Give up? Because comparing to RL doesn't work in many cases.

The following is somewhat of a generalisation, but it's mostly true.

In RL, people's livelyhood depends on making money, it has a lot more meaning than in EL (where it only means new toys, as opposed to living and eating and having clothing and shelter). People care a lot more about earning money. People will often take the time to get a good price. Resources are limited, and you generally can't get all the resources yourself. People aren't willing to lose money just for experience (well, not usually). People can't do all things themselves, they're forced to interact. I could go on with the examples, but I don't think I need to.

[Advanced Broker-Bot]

Competition isn't MEANT to be fair - it is meant to lead to more efficient prices.

Right, and it's that sort of thinking that allows big businesses IRL to squeeze out the smaller operators, so that they get the sales later.

And I'm not too concerned with level-95 alchemists cornering the FE market - I'm sure they have better things to do than to click on mix all day for 10 exp each.

If that's where the money is, then they will. If that's what they need for their own or guild projects, they will. Some things, like FEs and HEs will be mass-produced for sale, since they actually have a market (as opposed to many other items that are harder to sell).

As others have pointed out - not listing the prices won't change anything, but it will result in everybody having to send 100 PMs to each bot to get the current prices.

Nope. They'll send to a few close ones. Part of the listing of bots that I agreed to was the location thing. You can list the trade bots in Portland, say, but not get prices until you actually contact them to get correct prices (and availability, which is possibly even more important).

Plus, what makes you think people will PM all the bots? Right now, people already would have a small list of bots they check... If you have a bot-search that also does locations, they can also check the nearby bots... And it doesn't make price competition the main point.

And personally, I think for the odd trade (as opposed to the trades with the bots one normally trades with), location is going to be more important than price anyway.

[Advanced Broker-Bot]

Well, this bot would still be good for availability checks.

It's not just prices that can change based on who asks, some bots will buy/sell some items only from/to certain people (eg guildies).

Any indexing service will not be accurate, and will place a higher level of price competition on the bots. That's not good for the economy (many bots are already selling for around market price just to get sales... What happens if they start selling for bare minimum cost for a high level player to make? low level players can't afford to absorb losses at those prices).

[Close all windows key]

Ctrl+h -> shortcut keys -> page 2

 

Really, the in-game help may not be the easiest thing in the world to use, but it has a lot of info

[a way to make a storyline interesting]

We have a lot of storyline. It's not designed and integrated very well (there are some brilliant stories, but it's not tied together or, as a whole, at all beleivable), but it's there.

As for cutscenes, what purpose would they have? Is there anything they can do that fanflicks can't do?

[Bot's]

Sigh. That discussion has happened a number of times before. Bringing up the idea of centralised data here will derail the thread, because there are people who are strong in their opinions on each side.

[Robinson Crusoe]

Just as a note, last I knew some of the maps included with the client are unused but active; this idea does seem interesting, so perhaps the admin would be willing to allow the use of one of those maps for an event like this (we can hope, eh?).

There are no NPCs on these maps AFAIK, and possibly no harvestables either, but those can be added with a sever update, no need for a client update...

It'd take a lot of accounts, but I'd be able to set up camera bots so people can see all the action if that's also approved by admin for an event like this.

You've piqued my interest, I hope this idea takes off