If you've ever tried to get attention in the gaming world, you know how well-neigh impossible it is. There are literally tens of thousands of game developers of every budget category, from the smallest single-person outfits to kings like Blizzard and CCP. Even getting someone to review your game can sometimes be a lost cause.
With that as a backdrop, Alter Aeon this weekend got a spontaneous review on the GamingHUD web site. This is a pretty big website that reviews a lot of mainstream games. For AA to even be seen by fish of this size is pretty amazing.
The review also isn't some slapdash piece of filler material. The reviewer spent a lot of time on the game and even emailed me for additional information. The final article came out very positive and very long.
The link is:
Alter Aeon MUD - A World of Infinite Possibilities
Feel free to check it out and maybe drop a thank you to the author for their hard work.
Showing posts with label articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label articles. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Thursday, October 21, 2010
We're Famous!
Ok, not entirely famous, but it's a start. We have our first reviewed and edited article on an external web site:
Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon
The site BrightHub is a large site with articles about nearly everything, and people who act as dedicated editors to make sure that articles pass a minimum sanity check before being posted.
This is important because articles like this can be used to bolster notability in Wikipedia, and get AA out there to a much larger audience. Stop by and take a look, and spread the word if you've got any friends that might be interested!
Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon
The site BrightHub is a large site with articles about nearly everything, and people who act as dedicated editors to make sure that articles pass a minimum sanity check before being posted.
This is important because articles like this can be used to bolster notability in Wikipedia, and get AA out there to a much larger audience. Stop by and take a look, and spread the word if you've got any friends that might be interested!
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Potions and Herbs and Spells oh my
After what feels like more than a decade, we've finally updated the system for brewing potions. The old system was pretty hard to deal with from a code standpoint, and didn't give builders a lot of options. From a player standpoint, the old system didn't really allow for invention or thinking about your potions.
The new system changes that by adding affinities for ingredients, where different spell components are more likely to brew particular spells or spell groups. Players get the ability to actually influence what comes out of the brew, as do builders who can set those affinities if they want.
The new code also uses a staged algorithm for the PRNG such that I can add and remove things chunks of the algorithm without causing major damage. We can also tweak the probabilities on specific brews and components now if necessary.
As with any change, there's been some complaining about this, but it's largely been well received. It helps that there's information about how the new system works; I updated the brewing article on the AA articles page with a bunch of new information. Here's the link:
The Art of Alchemy
People have managed to brew quite a few interesting things so far. You can find the list of public potions brews as the Alter Aeon Potion Recipes web page.
The new system changes that by adding affinities for ingredients, where different spell components are more likely to brew particular spells or spell groups. Players get the ability to actually influence what comes out of the brew, as do builders who can set those affinities if they want.
The new code also uses a staged algorithm for the PRNG such that I can add and remove things chunks of the algorithm without causing major damage. We can also tweak the probabilities on specific brews and components now if necessary.
As with any change, there's been some complaining about this, but it's largely been well received. It helps that there's information about how the new system works; I updated the brewing article on the AA articles page with a bunch of new information. Here's the link:
The Art of Alchemy
People have managed to brew quite a few interesting things so far. You can find the list of public potions brews as the Alter Aeon Potion Recipes web page.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Welcome to the new year!
Alter Aeon has survived yet another year, and while there have been a lot of ups and downs overall things are looking pretty positive. We've put a lot of work into making the game accessible, more playable, and more fun - and it's really starting to pay off. I've gone back to playing AA in my spare time for fun; that's something I haven't really done regularly in over a decade.
I've posted a very large '2009 year in review' article on the Alter Aeon Website. This took me several hours to put together, from both the postings here on this blog as well as going through the entire coding changelog for the last year.
Naturally, the things I found important and worth talking about come from a very biased, immortal based perspective. Fortunately, one of our more vocal players, Subtle, wrote up and posted his own player-centric year in review. I wish more mortals would do this; I think it's really cool to have a permanent record, even if it's not a feel-good propaganda piece.
I've posted a very large '2009 year in review' article on the Alter Aeon Website. This took me several hours to put together, from both the postings here on this blog as well as going through the entire coding changelog for the last year.
Naturally, the things I found important and worth talking about come from a very biased, immortal based perspective. Fortunately, one of our more vocal players, Subtle, wrote up and posted his own player-centric year in review. I wish more mortals would do this; I think it's really cool to have a permanent record, even if it's not a feel-good propaganda piece.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
New Alter Aeon Article
People sometimes send me articles for the web site, and sometimes those articles get lost. I recently found one in my mailbox from somewhere around April. Without any further ado, I present:
Morpheus' Guide to Running and Finding Gold
This newbie-level article talks about the basic ways to get gold in the game, and gives things for new players to do that will help them acquire enough gold in game for the occasional purchase. It also touches on trading with other players, which is usually where the large transactions take place.
Morpheus' Guide to Running and Finding Gold
This newbie-level article talks about the basic ways to get gold in the game, and gives things for new players to do that will help them acquire enough gold in game for the occasional purchase. It also touches on trading with other players, which is usually where the large transactions take place.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Articles and Propaganda
There's a new article out for thieves. It's a pretty comprehensive overview of the various stealth skills, such as sneak, hide, stealthy movement, searching, and even how these affect other skills such as backstab. It's a real treasure trove of information:
The Thieves Creed - Stealth and Hiding
With this addition, we've now cleared 30 official articles, not counting things like FAQs, the quest guides, or other related things. The web site is actually becoming useful to players.
The articles are continuing to show their value, both in greater and lesser extent than I had expected. I regularly refer people to the articles when discussions and Q/A happens on public channels. I really had not expected this, and I'm constantly surprised at the things people ask. A good example is the article on Time, Age, and Aging, which I refer people to regularly. Other articles, such as the article on attack strategies, are much less active, though much more comprehensive.
One other area that did not work out as I had expected has to do with the web traffic to the articles. I was expecting substantially higher numbers in regards to web traffic than what we've been seeing. I think this might be a critical mass problem however, in that traffic has been picking up recently.
In other news, the maps and quest guides have been very, very popular on the web pages. They are now the second and third heaviest hitters on the site.
The Thieves Creed - Stealth and Hiding
With this addition, we've now cleared 30 official articles, not counting things like FAQs, the quest guides, or other related things. The web site is actually becoming useful to players.
The articles are continuing to show their value, both in greater and lesser extent than I had expected. I regularly refer people to the articles when discussions and Q/A happens on public channels. I really had not expected this, and I'm constantly surprised at the things people ask. A good example is the article on Time, Age, and Aging, which I refer people to regularly. Other articles, such as the article on attack strategies, are much less active, though much more comprehensive.
One other area that did not work out as I had expected has to do with the web traffic to the articles. I was expecting substantially higher numbers in regards to web traffic than what we've been seeing. I think this might be a critical mass problem however, in that traffic has been picking up recently.
In other news, the maps and quest guides have been very, very popular on the web pages. They are now the second and third heaviest hitters on the site.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Chaos seems to reign
The field of software arguably contains some of the largest and most complex functional systems ever created by man. Even relatively simple systems can demonstrate incredibly complex behavior, and can hide potentially major flaws through indefinitely long periods of use, only to demonstrate them at inconvenient times. The Alter Aeon server codebase is no exception.
Pretty much the most complicated discrete object in the server is the socket stack. It handles a huge number of protocols and a bunch of different filtering layers, with hooks in various places. The last major redesign of the socket stack was around 1998; it is a testament to the design of that module that it has required no major modification in that entire time period, though many minor modifications have been made to it.
Unfortunately, the server is not made of such lovely discrete objects. Often, obscure bugs lurk in the sea of wild code that makes up the substructure of the system. This weekend I had the incredible good luck to catch and haul two of these bugs to the surface.
For years, there have been a handful of issues that occurred seemingly at random. In the early, old days, some of these would even cause a server crash and reboot the game; but after being unable to find and fix them, the crashes were gradually protected against and ways were found to ignore these spurious events.
Examples of the two most common of these are deceptively simple: sometimes, the get_room function would be asked to find a room but be given no instructions on how to do so, and other times a character (a monster or player, it was difficult to tell) would die and simply 'get stuck'.
In reality, these are monstrously difficult. The get_room function lacking instruction was mindboggling - it happened perhaps twice a year, the reports were never the same, and there were thousands of places that could be calling the function. Even as our debug facilities improved, no progress was made - there just seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it.
The dead character bug was just as bad. The entire destruct and event handling process was revisited and inspected several times, but no holes were ever found. Until thursday.
---------------------------------------------------
In the course of trying to add some new restrictions to the 'charm' spell, I noticed that the destruct sequences for the charm, possession, and entangling roots spells looked a little goofy. We didn't check or clear certain important things, but there were comments indicating that we didn't need to because something else over there would take care of it. Keep in mind that this was entirely my code; I had written this well over a decade ago.
In the course of looking at this, I suddenly had a realization: there were no 'holes' in the logic for charm or possession, but maybe, just maybe, there was a hole in entangling roots. Entangling roots did come later, and quite frankly the code for it was a complete hackjob.
Within ten minutes, I had my answer. There was indeed a conflict between entangling roots and the 'special' code that made possession and charm work. The problem then became, how exactly do you fix such a mess? After about two hours of thinking about it and five more of carefully backing things out and reorganizing, I got what appears to be a stable fix. There's still some debug logging in it, but this bug appears to be properly killed. The new code is simpler, the checks are stronger, and we don't rely on obscure handlers to clean up messes. I hope.
---------------------------------------------------
I thought that was the end of my troubles in the short term, but then Glorida shows up with some obscure problem of his own. He's been working on mob programs, and had built something rather complex that simply was not working. Not only wasn't it working, but it was doing something weird, and it was doing it reliably.
This is another one of those 'fairly complex' pieces of the system. It took me about two hours off and on to get it loaded into my brain so I could really think about it. It then took me probably another hour to really understand what was going on, and figure out what was happening. And then it occurred to me:
This explains a lot of those debug log reports over the years!
The symptoms he uncovered showed up as a very unusual sort of 'doing things before other things have completed' recursive issue. One example of it is that a monster would 'say' something to trigger another monster, and the second monster would perform its action before the first monster could fully complete its 'say' command. In obscure cases, this chaining could be several layers deep.
For simple things like monsters talking to each other, the worst that can happen is that some things get out of order, and you might not understand why it works sometimes but not others. But monsters do substantially more than just talk to each other.
And this is where the problem arose. In the course of doing more complicated actions, those actions could be interrupted mid-stream by other monsters trying to complete their triggers. One such set of actions would cause the get_room function to be passed trash. Another such set of actions would damage one of the monsters so that it could never properly die. Both of these sets of actions, and a number of others with similar strange effects, were possible and implemented in monsters on the game; and they were sufficiently rare to explain the infrequent bug reports.
This bug was easier to fix than the first, taking only about three hours to really think about and put together a proper solution. This fix also appears to work, though it does break a dozen or so special monsters that relied on the old behaviour to function.
---------------------------------------------------
There are several morals to this story, which all software engineers worth their salt will immediately recognize:
1) Never assume you'll remember anything about code you've written. When you start working on objects so complicated that it takes you an hour every day to load it into your head so you can go to work, what makes you think you'll remember every detail after a year?
2) Think about the design of any halfway complex system and stick with it. The charm/entangling roots bug was caused entirely by undesigned/spaghetti code for the character destruct process. It was never properly designed because I wasn't experienced enough at the time to know how. It's better now.
3) Never underestimate the power of race conditions and call trees. When even simple/obvious actions can invoke arbitrarily complicated effects capable of invoking other effects, you're walking on very, very dangerous ground.
Software continues to become more complex as time goes on. It pushes at the limits of our minds, bringing programmers to the limit of what they can understand and then begging them to add one more thing. It allows arbitrary expression, but with that comes the cost that our comprehension is limited even for structured objects, to say nothing of more arbitrary and abstract ones.
Where does the future of software lie? Undoubtedly toward increasing complexity. But we will need either better tools, or better brains, to be able to manage it. We are such a young species.
Pretty much the most complicated discrete object in the server is the socket stack. It handles a huge number of protocols and a bunch of different filtering layers, with hooks in various places. The last major redesign of the socket stack was around 1998; it is a testament to the design of that module that it has required no major modification in that entire time period, though many minor modifications have been made to it.
Unfortunately, the server is not made of such lovely discrete objects. Often, obscure bugs lurk in the sea of wild code that makes up the substructure of the system. This weekend I had the incredible good luck to catch and haul two of these bugs to the surface.
For years, there have been a handful of issues that occurred seemingly at random. In the early, old days, some of these would even cause a server crash and reboot the game; but after being unable to find and fix them, the crashes were gradually protected against and ways were found to ignore these spurious events.
Examples of the two most common of these are deceptively simple: sometimes, the get_room function would be asked to find a room but be given no instructions on how to do so, and other times a character (a monster or player, it was difficult to tell) would die and simply 'get stuck'.
In reality, these are monstrously difficult. The get_room function lacking instruction was mindboggling - it happened perhaps twice a year, the reports were never the same, and there were thousands of places that could be calling the function. Even as our debug facilities improved, no progress was made - there just seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it.
The dead character bug was just as bad. The entire destruct and event handling process was revisited and inspected several times, but no holes were ever found. Until thursday.
---------------------------------------------------
In the course of trying to add some new restrictions to the 'charm' spell, I noticed that the destruct sequences for the charm, possession, and entangling roots spells looked a little goofy. We didn't check or clear certain important things, but there were comments indicating that we didn't need to because something else over there would take care of it. Keep in mind that this was entirely my code; I had written this well over a decade ago.
In the course of looking at this, I suddenly had a realization: there were no 'holes' in the logic for charm or possession, but maybe, just maybe, there was a hole in entangling roots. Entangling roots did come later, and quite frankly the code for it was a complete hackjob.
Within ten minutes, I had my answer. There was indeed a conflict between entangling roots and the 'special' code that made possession and charm work. The problem then became, how exactly do you fix such a mess? After about two hours of thinking about it and five more of carefully backing things out and reorganizing, I got what appears to be a stable fix. There's still some debug logging in it, but this bug appears to be properly killed. The new code is simpler, the checks are stronger, and we don't rely on obscure handlers to clean up messes. I hope.
---------------------------------------------------
I thought that was the end of my troubles in the short term, but then Glorida shows up with some obscure problem of his own. He's been working on mob programs, and had built something rather complex that simply was not working. Not only wasn't it working, but it was doing something weird, and it was doing it reliably.
This is another one of those 'fairly complex' pieces of the system. It took me about two hours off and on to get it loaded into my brain so I could really think about it. It then took me probably another hour to really understand what was going on, and figure out what was happening. And then it occurred to me:
This explains a lot of those debug log reports over the years!
The symptoms he uncovered showed up as a very unusual sort of 'doing things before other things have completed' recursive issue. One example of it is that a monster would 'say' something to trigger another monster, and the second monster would perform its action before the first monster could fully complete its 'say' command. In obscure cases, this chaining could be several layers deep.
For simple things like monsters talking to each other, the worst that can happen is that some things get out of order, and you might not understand why it works sometimes but not others. But monsters do substantially more than just talk to each other.
And this is where the problem arose. In the course of doing more complicated actions, those actions could be interrupted mid-stream by other monsters trying to complete their triggers. One such set of actions would cause the get_room function to be passed trash. Another such set of actions would damage one of the monsters so that it could never properly die. Both of these sets of actions, and a number of others with similar strange effects, were possible and implemented in monsters on the game; and they were sufficiently rare to explain the infrequent bug reports.
This bug was easier to fix than the first, taking only about three hours to really think about and put together a proper solution. This fix also appears to work, though it does break a dozen or so special monsters that relied on the old behaviour to function.
---------------------------------------------------
There are several morals to this story, which all software engineers worth their salt will immediately recognize:
1) Never assume you'll remember anything about code you've written. When you start working on objects so complicated that it takes you an hour every day to load it into your head so you can go to work, what makes you think you'll remember every detail after a year?
2) Think about the design of any halfway complex system and stick with it. The charm/entangling roots bug was caused entirely by undesigned/spaghetti code for the character destruct process. It was never properly designed because I wasn't experienced enough at the time to know how. It's better now.
3) Never underestimate the power of race conditions and call trees. When even simple/obvious actions can invoke arbitrarily complicated effects capable of invoking other effects, you're walking on very, very dangerous ground.
Software continues to become more complex as time goes on. It pushes at the limits of our minds, bringing programmers to the limit of what they can understand and then begging them to add one more thing. It allows arbitrary expression, but with that comes the cost that our comprehension is limited even for structured objects, to say nothing of more arbitrary and abstract ones.
Where does the future of software lie? Undoubtedly toward increasing complexity. But we will need either better tools, or better brains, to be able to manage it. We are such a young species.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Gaming Articles Suck!
It's been a while, so I figured I should post some observations about the web pages and traffic. Things work differently than I had expected, though honestly I didn't know what to expect anyway.
The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.
Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.
Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:
1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.
The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.
[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]
I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.
The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.
Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.
On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.
As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.
The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.
Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.
Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:
1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.
The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.
[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]
I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.
The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.
Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.
On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.
As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Status Update
Events so far this week on Alter Aeon:
- The first pass of microleveling is installed. It's required to get to level 31 and level 32. We're still thinking about the best way to handle level 33 and higher. There's also a new mode for showing the who list that can be toggled with the 'set who' command.
- We got a new article up on the web, courtesy Morpheus: The Black Art of Poison Brewing, which talks about brewing poisons using the 'brew poison' skill.
- Minor additions and updates to the Mud Terms Glossary.
- Various web page updates, which I've been slacking on recently. One of the more interesting ones is the Alter Aeon Quests List, which is now sorted by geographic area. You can see which quests are on which islands, or on the mainland.
- A 'resurrect' spell has been added, which is effectively a more powerful summon using the corpse of a dead teammate. Resurrect ignores distance and various nosummon flags, making it easier to put a group back together after deaths. You must be grouped and have a corpse to use the spell, so there's not much potential for abuse.
- A new 'faq' section has been added, detailing how the in-game text editor works.
- A new version of the TinyAeon custom Alter Aeon client has been released, with hopefully improved screen and scroll handling. Even better, a new version is on its way and should be uploaded in the next couple of days.
There's also been a boatload of minor fixes, to everything from specp 25 (the shopkeeper reload specp) to channel replay. This week has seen a lot of cleanup and improvement to various things, though the microleveling additions spiked a lot of controversy. It's looking fairly good now though, thanks to good comments from lots of players.
- The first pass of microleveling is installed. It's required to get to level 31 and level 32. We're still thinking about the best way to handle level 33 and higher. There's also a new mode for showing the who list that can be toggled with the 'set who' command.
- We got a new article up on the web, courtesy Morpheus: The Black Art of Poison Brewing, which talks about brewing poisons using the 'brew poison' skill.
- Minor additions and updates to the Mud Terms Glossary.
- Various web page updates, which I've been slacking on recently. One of the more interesting ones is the Alter Aeon Quests List, which is now sorted by geographic area. You can see which quests are on which islands, or on the mainland.
- A 'resurrect' spell has been added, which is effectively a more powerful summon using the corpse of a dead teammate. Resurrect ignores distance and various nosummon flags, making it easier to put a group back together after deaths. You must be grouped and have a corpse to use the spell, so there's not much potential for abuse.
- A new 'faq' section has been added, detailing how the in-game text editor works.
- A new version of the TinyAeon custom Alter Aeon client has been released, with hopefully improved screen and scroll handling. Even better, a new version is on its way and should be uploaded in the next couple of days.
There's also been a boatload of minor fixes, to everything from specp 25 (the shopkeeper reload specp) to channel replay. This week has seen a lot of cleanup and improvement to various things, though the microleveling additions spiked a lot of controversy. It's looking fairly good now though, thanks to good comments from lots of players.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Hooray!
After all this time and effort, something finally paid off on the main Alter Aeon web pages: at some point in the last week, we went from page rank 2 to page rank 3. Yay!
I'm actually really jazzed about this. Finally, something I did had a positive effect. That said, looking back at the historical analytics data for this year, I really don't see any change in overall traffic to the site. A long term average since may seems to be about flat. Granted, I didn't start really hitting the site hard until september or october, but not seeing any impact at all over the course of several months is discouraging to say the least.
The only real solution to this is simply to spend time linkbuilding and getting us listed everywhere I possibly can. I suspect my latest push for that here is what raised the page rank.
In other news, the quest to add useful content continues. I added a bunch of stuff to the Blind and Visually Impaired Player Support page, including more downloads and scripts for GMud and a raft of MushClient sound and data files.
I also spent a good chunk of the morning going through Scribe's old mudding site, and imported a couple of articles for the current AA pages. A number of dead links were killed in the process, which hopefully will cause the google webmaster tools to complain less. The two new articles are:
Player Types and Styles, and
So you want to be a Player Killer?
This brings the article total up to 21, not including other things scattered around the site but not in my high-tech document management system. This is pretty low as far as SEO goes, in that most SEO sites recommend at least a hundred pages of solid content, but it's a start.
I'm actually really jazzed about this. Finally, something I did had a positive effect. That said, looking back at the historical analytics data for this year, I really don't see any change in overall traffic to the site. A long term average since may seems to be about flat. Granted, I didn't start really hitting the site hard until september or october, but not seeing any impact at all over the course of several months is discouraging to say the least.
The only real solution to this is simply to spend time linkbuilding and getting us listed everywhere I possibly can. I suspect my latest push for that here is what raised the page rank.
In other news, the quest to add useful content continues. I added a bunch of stuff to the Blind and Visually Impaired Player Support page, including more downloads and scripts for GMud and a raft of MushClient sound and data files.
I also spent a good chunk of the morning going through Scribe's old mudding site, and imported a couple of articles for the current AA pages. A number of dead links were killed in the process, which hopefully will cause the google webmaster tools to complain less. The two new articles are:
Player Types and Styles, and
So you want to be a Player Killer?
This brings the article total up to 21, not including other things scattered around the site but not in my high-tech document management system. This is pretty low as far as SEO goes, in that most SEO sites recommend at least a hundred pages of solid content, but it's a start.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Bots
Looking at the recent keyword search terms, I've been finding some unusual entries. One in particular has been more persistent than I expected, and can be summed up as "bots for Alter Aeon".
I don't know who is searching for this, but from what I can gather it might be a spider looking for game cracks or cheats. So, I honor said spider by giving it a new article on the topic:
A Guide to Bots and Botting for Alter Aeon
If someone thinks it's important and it drives traffic, who am I to complain?
I don't know who is searching for this, but from what I can gather it might be a spider looking for game cracks or cheats. So, I honor said spider by giving it a new article on the topic:
A Guide to Bots and Botting for Alter Aeon
If someone thinks it's important and it drives traffic, who am I to complain?
Sunday, December 7, 2008
I have returned!
After a rather hectic two weeks of travel and insane hours at my old workplace, I am finally back and catching up on Alter Aeon related work. The first things to take care of were various submissions and contributions from you, the playerbase (and godbase.) Thanks to everyone who sent me something; I'm churning through it right now trying to figure out the best place to put everything.
I've got some of these up already; in particular, a three-page guide to creating and being a tank, posted by Shadowfax, and a whole bunch of feedback on the newbie island thanks to Morpheus.
I also have an experimental audio walkthrough of the Outer Planar Ice World. This was really interesting for me to listen to, and gave me a view of the area from the outside that I don't normally get. Hopefully I get more of these; I'd be happy to host them on the server for blind and other people to use. If anyone wants to record walkthroughs of other areas, send them to me and I'll take a listen.
I've got some of these up already; in particular, a three-page guide to creating and being a tank, posted by Shadowfax, and a whole bunch of feedback on the newbie island thanks to Morpheus.
I also have an experimental audio walkthrough of the Outer Planar Ice World. This was really interesting for me to listen to, and gave me a view of the area from the outside that I don't normally get. Hopefully I get more of these; I'd be happy to host them on the server for blind and other people to use. If anyone wants to record walkthroughs of other areas, send them to me and I'll take a listen.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
The scourge of organization
I spent most of today doing web page cleanup and reorganization. For starters, I got Smith's Glossary of Mudding Terms edited and put onto the article pages. After that, I started thinking about the internal organization of the article pages, and how it basically sucks. All the links have to be added manually, and the metadata about the documents is pretty much only present in the document and copied as necessary into the manually added external links.
So in response to this, I built up a primitive document management system for the various articles. The new version can be found at http://dentinmud.org/articles. I wrote it all using shell scripts, and the various versions of the pages are built from a text file database.
This was partially driven by the idea that without a quick and easy way for people to see updates, there would likely not be any recurring traffic to the article pages. Also, it would be nice to have a categorized list, and possibly author sections. So the first things I built with the management system were a categorized listing, a date-sorted listing, and an author sorted-listing.
While looking at these pages, you might notice that the formatting and section headers are inconsistent. I've been having real problems coming up with a consistent way of breaking up and displaying subsections in the various pages; if any of you readers have any bright ideas on things to try, I'm up for it. There are a lot of pages where there are several major sections, each of which should be marked with its own sub-header.
In code news, it only took about two hours to reorganize the intro screens so that the name and password come later in the character creation process. That said, I totally do not trust this code. I've never had intro screen code boot in without at least one bug slipping through, and this was a pretty substantial reorganization; on top of that, I was tired when I did it, so I probably missed something super important. I'll try to debug it later, though I'm pretty booked up for this weekend and probably won't have time until Sunday.
The title of this post is not so much regarding some scourge that is preventing organization from happening so much as the scourge that is organization itself. I have this urge to organize a lot of things that perhaps don't need it; these web page articles may fall into that category. On the other hand, when I think about how I need to have about ten times as many articles as we currently do, it reminds me that the work I put in now will save me vast amounts of time later.
So in response to this, I built up a primitive document management system for the various articles. The new version can be found at http://dentinmud.org/articles. I wrote it all using shell scripts, and the various versions of the pages are built from a text file database.
This was partially driven by the idea that without a quick and easy way for people to see updates, there would likely not be any recurring traffic to the article pages. Also, it would be nice to have a categorized list, and possibly author sections. So the first things I built with the management system were a categorized listing, a date-sorted listing, and an author sorted-listing.
While looking at these pages, you might notice that the formatting and section headers are inconsistent. I've been having real problems coming up with a consistent way of breaking up and displaying subsections in the various pages; if any of you readers have any bright ideas on things to try, I'm up for it. There are a lot of pages where there are several major sections, each of which should be marked with its own sub-header.
In code news, it only took about two hours to reorganize the intro screens so that the name and password come later in the character creation process. That said, I totally do not trust this code. I've never had intro screen code boot in without at least one bug slipping through, and this was a pretty substantial reorganization; on top of that, I was tired when I did it, so I probably missed something super important. I'll try to debug it later, though I'm pretty booked up for this weekend and probably won't have time until Sunday.
The title of this post is not so much regarding some scourge that is preventing organization from happening so much as the scourge that is organization itself. I have this urge to organize a lot of things that perhaps don't need it; these web page articles may fall into that category. On the other hand, when I think about how I need to have about ten times as many articles as we currently do, it reminds me that the work I put in now will save me vast amounts of time later.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Article - how to pick a god
After some pestering by Lexie, I finally managed to get to her 'How to Pick a God' article, which is now posted on the main AA articles page. She might yet disown it, because my sense of style demanded that I modify it quite a bit; but I think it's a decent article on the topic.
The regen changes from last night went in this morning, and appear to be almost universally liked. Playing as a newbie, it certainly is more palatable than the previous. I should consider switching over mana regen and hp regen as well, but probably not for a while.
If I get time tonight, I may make the previously mentioned dexterity and strength changes, as well as begin breaking up the intro screens.
The regen changes from last night went in this morning, and appear to be almost universally liked. Playing as a newbie, it certainly is more palatable than the previous. I should consider switching over mana regen and hp regen as well, but probably not for a while.
If I get time tonight, I may make the previously mentioned dexterity and strength changes, as well as begin breaking up the intro screens.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Articles and other stuff
Recently, I managed to get two more articles up. One is from Lexie/Ilex, and is targeted at helping low level players make the most of their regen time.
The other I'm more proud of, because it's something I actually wrote (instead of just editing.) Mine is on high level attack strategies, and lists some of the weirder things I've seen and used over the years.
Doubtless the players have seen many more than this; if you think something deserves to be added, let me know and I'll consider it for inclusion.
In other news, the client continues on its merry way. I got the help menus working properly last night, and today I had intended to work on something easy yet important, but I can't remember it right now. I'm somewhat afraid of the buttons, because those are going to be drastically different on probably all architectures. I need to find a way to handle those so they're pretty everywhere.
The other I'm more proud of, because it's something I actually wrote (instead of just editing.) Mine is on high level attack strategies, and lists some of the weirder things I've seen and used over the years.
Doubtless the players have seen many more than this; if you think something deserves to be added, let me know and I'll consider it for inclusion.
In other news, the client continues on its merry way. I got the help menus working properly last night, and today I had intended to work on something easy yet important, but I can't remember it right now. I'm somewhat afraid of the buttons, because those are going to be drastically different on probably all architectures. I need to find a way to handle those so they're pretty everywhere.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Karma V2
Three more articles appeared out of nowhere today:
New Player Words of Wisdom, by the god Morpheus
Introduction to Being a Group Healer, by the player Prisoner
and Starting a New Clan - Advice For Elders, by Ouch.
It's a lot of work editing and formatting, but in the end, good articles all three of them. There's enough of them now that I had to split the main articles page into pieces.
The only down side is that I really don't know how much web traffic, or how much value this will bring to the site. In the end, it's all about value, and how useful the information is to other people. Unless I can get other people to link to it, it might not matter.
New Player Words of Wisdom, by the god Morpheus
Introduction to Being a Group Healer, by the player Prisoner
and Starting a New Clan - Advice For Elders, by Ouch.
It's a lot of work editing and formatting, but in the end, good articles all three of them. There's enough of them now that I had to split the main articles page into pieces.
The only down side is that I really don't know how much web traffic, or how much value this will bring to the site. In the end, it's all about value, and how useful the information is to other people. Unless I can get other people to link to it, it might not matter.
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