yes indeed, I'm still at it, game projects seem to be my only bright light at the end of the tunnel of being over worked for chump change. I mean, there is physics and technology, I could do something with that, but, I have no freedom. I can;t just buy parts I need and makes stuff, I have to negotiate for money from the person that owns me. every once in a while I get my hands on some sort of fridge magnet and get all giddy but fridge magnets can be odd unusable multi-polar shapes. meh here I am blathering on.

Games like this MMO are the only thing I can consistently work on towards a better life.

today as talked about in FHchat I will work on the MMOchat client.

now lets see where I am. been so long I forgot.

Ah yes, message Line Counting, I seem to remember doing a test file for this. I think I did it at work on another computer and emailed it to myself. after line counting comes the scroll bar. then message sorting. then done? no then making online instead of loading the message from .txt files.

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started programming and planning out the scroll bar, the actual chat offset by line still needs to be programmed to complete it.

I'm thinking of splitting the chat into 2 overlay scenes. one for the typing portion and one for the actual messages., could do one scene per chat tab too, that would be great.

I will have to have one Scene for dungeons/missions, thinking ahead as I always do, that means solving an issue that I need to solve anyways; I need to be able to spawn more than just an object's appearance, also it's physics boundary and settings. I think it is possible and I just haven't been using that option.

I'll edit the spawner test file.

spawner test file is clear. no problems.

now to test layer transparency issues.

gears are now grinding, If I want to make the overlay scenes the content of a moveable window I'll Have to render the chat to a texture. which is what I wanted to avoid. .... well so much for that idea. "that would be great" becomes "well so much for that".

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worked on the stat system again, because I had some free time. finally.

also remembered the tune to the theme I heard in the golden city which makes the zombies dance. I'll probably forget it again soon, if I remember it again or still remember it by the time someone replies to this; Should I record it?

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Duh.

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very well. it's one of the few psychotropic themes I know. however, I have indeed forgotten it again. I will have to record it next time.

it's hard to remember psychotropic music, because it fucks with your head.

all I know is it's best played on a bone xylophone, has 4 or 5 subthemes and makes zombies dance around the perimeter all sentry-like.

oh the places I've been..

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I made an elementary mistake, Not all effects are calculated equally!

I'm adding special rules to each type that will determine their unique 'purchase penalties'

sadly that raises things to over 70 calc sets to do.

for that reason I've decided to write a program to do it.

a simple program, plug in the numbers, and it gives you the outcome.

for ease, I'll plug in the numbers via text file so theres less work load and the calcs can be done in a batch, then output to a text file. line by line.

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Custom Batch calculator and output file generator == COMPLETE and Fully Functional.

now all I need to do is feed it a document full of lines of stat data and it'll do the rest.

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to watch them all be done instantaneously and have the program quit when finished was epic.

it did 55 stat calcs in under 2 seconds. saves me spending 10 minutes on each lol.

well the stat tables are largely done, I didn't do them all because I may have to rethink the special effects like hold and immobilize and didn't want to take the time to do that today.

also need to do some more Ranged AoE buff/debuff calcs. but otherwise than that, I'm now done with a project that might have taken weeks if I hadn't done this. the plus side is if I need to do any more calcs like this (which I will) then I can just load them into input file and run the program and it'll automatically add them to the end of the file.

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OK, a whole bunch of calculative work is done!

now the next order of business is to use that system to make and test Power Sets.

I will need to recover some other dev utilities today from my offline computer.

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Files recovered from the other computer.

decided power sets are really easy to define, will go do them later. decided to work on Message Encryption, because people don't want their accounts stolen & shit.

So I lost my files on my encryption method. but I still remember the basic rules. the goal of a decent encryption method is to keep listeners unaware of whats going on.

sounds easy right? except it's not easy because this client will be released in source so people would be able to modify the client as a heuristics decoder IF the client actually knows any keys or how to decode or use keys, so in essence the client here needs to be completely blind and guessing.

What I'm looking at now is a method I just wrote out that manages to do this, it uses some randomization but the server will always know whats gone on with the returned message because it and only it will know the original key.

the client will never store the original key in fact it will never actually get a confirmation of it nor will it know what the key is/was. It will require a lot of trial and error before the connection can be authenticated but once done it will be nigh impossible to crack. if I were to add one more step of randomization to the mix it'd be impossible to crack unless you know the original key. I thought about adding a 'Per Try Randomizer' which deletes encrypted keys which the client guessed wrong and replaces them, the only downside is then I'd have to communicate which phrase was a dud to the server in the open which would void the system.

but for now it seems good enough for an online game. it'll re-authorize the connection on stuff like character edits, trades and purchases anyways and require a special captcha to prevent bots from doing these actions.

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sortables captcha?

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a moving multi-option captcha, gotta put the green key in the green lock. but both are moving.

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Wonder if you can switch logic modes.
"Green key goes in Blue lock."

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the point is to use it to catch bots attempting to do the captcha, green key in blue lock would be a failure for that very reason, because bots don't wait for the right timing they would just click and then drag to a position hitting other locks in the process.

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Oh, I'm also a bum now. I am officially jobless (not counting small part-time jobs).

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