Before I forget, a dear friend of mine asked me to give a link to his currently empty site, Violent Bees. He said giving him a link would make him get off his ass and put some content up, so here you go, Tony! It's under the sidebar, too, for those of you that look at those sorts of links.
Let's see, what else... oh, yeah. There are some general site changes I want to make, like:
The nice thing about sup/tg/ is that there's always something I could be doing to make it better, so I'm never stagnating. Of course, I did just pick up The Witcher, so that's going to be eating up some of my time between the changes.
I keep saying it, but I also would like to add some kind of article section. I don't know who will contribute or what they'll want to say, but it's something I've wanted to do for a little while. It'll happen one of these days!
Why do I do this to myself with the late nights? Anyway, Maid RPG character generator is looking good. It doesn't save characters yet and I think UsuallyRandom wanted me to add a comments field, but this looks pretty good and it lets you make the most goddamned ridiculous characters I've ever seen come out of a generator. It's like a Mary Sue Generator. I mean, just look at this:
Your name is Derp. You are 18 years old. You have pink eyes and pink hair, and wear a pink maid uniform. You are pure and cool; others describe you as unflappable, clean and fragile.
You are a vampire, with long fangs, pale skin, an aversion to light and an insatiable appetite. You know the spells necessary to summon demons, your tools of the trade being magic circles, a black cloak, and ancient books. Rather than a Western-style maid uniform, you wear a Japanese-style uniform featuring a kimono and an apron. For some reason, love just never works out for you; at this point, you've resigned yourself to your fate. You wield magic that lets you control the bodies and souls of the dead, your tools of the trade including skulls and black clothes.
In combat, you fight with a revolver. When you are extremely upset, you unleash violence on the other maids and the master.
Holy shit man. And yes, it really did manage to land on pink for hair, eyes and uniform. This chick is basically cotton candy with fangs. (Also the game recommends rolling two, and no more than three, random qualities... but where's the fun in moderation?)
Whoops. I have a bunch of services that I don't use which send me email reminders pretty constantly regarding their expirations. Since I don't want or need them, I just ignore the emails entirely... so when thisisnotatrueending.com expired I didn't notice right away. Oops! It's been renewed and should resolve just fine shortly. Most of you won't even notice unless your cache expired in the short interval between the DNS change and its restoration. But if you couldn't get to the site for a little while today (sorry Wearfe) it was because I am a gigantic idiot.
Just a quick note. The archive was making empty image files and not cleaning up after itself. Now it does. Hooray!
Man, I just spent way too long on this. Basically I discovered a security hole and closed it, but then spent three hours trying to allow the PDF generation utility to continue functioning normally. I've got it working again in a rather roundabout fashion; it's not perfect, but it does the trick. PDFs are now re-enabled for Dark Heresy.
Edity: I got mad at the sidebar at 6am and beat it up. Don't ask what it did; it knows what it did. Then Clarence made me do this:
It's like that all over the site now. Isn't CSS awesome? Also I will probably regret this tomorrow but right now it is fucking hilarious.
Just a quick note, I've turned off the PDF capability of the Dark Heresy character generator for the moment. I found a security error that has since been fixed, and haven't gotten around to re-allowing the PDF-generating .exe to, well, execute. I'll probably fix it tonight. If anyone else finds weirdness on the site, let me know and I'll fix that too.
Also also, happy birthday to Silver :D
Derp derp. I didn't get much done today; rather, nothing visible just yet. I added in a lot of information to the tables, but switched gears midway so that the Maid RPG character generator keeps everything on a single page before giving you a 'finalized' page afterward (ala the DH chargen). Ignore the old link, you can check out the latest progress here instead. UsuallyRandom is working on a writable PDF that will work like the one for Dark Heresy, so that's upcoming as well.
Also, happy birthday to Ruler :3
I was going to bed but Ruler was all "LL UPDATE THE WEBSITE YOU DON'T NEED SLEEP LL UPDATE DO IT" so now I am so there.
Anyway, I'm sure you've all heard that Maid RPG is out. Given the ridiculously hilarious characters you can create with its character generation, and given that it's 100% roll-based generation... well, you can probably guess where I'm going with this. It's far less data-intensive and edge-case-intensive than, say, Dark Heresy, so I think I'll have the Maid RPG chargen completed tomorrow night or so. You can fuck around with it if you want, though it's nowhere near complete, naturally.
As for all those site upgrades? Yeah, fuck it, not going to bother, I give up. I spent too much time getting nowhere to continue, and I managed to complete my original task of installing Perl (with ActivePerl) and AWStats for log analysis. Like any website, Apache logs basic information by default, allowing administrators to fine-tune the site, either to help people find what they're looking for, make certain pages more attractive to visitors and search engines, locate problems, see which pages people enter and exit from, and more.
Since my installation of AWStats, here are a few awesome things I've learned from traffic analyzed between January 2008 to present:
Neat shit. (Note to any paranoids out there: I don't sell traffic data to anyone and I don't use tracking cookies or any of that nonsense. The information collected is anonymous and uses nothing more than the vanilla default Apache logs, the same kind collected by each and every webserver on the face of the planet.)
Edit: ffff goddamnit ruler I just lost another half hour of sleep to this update it's 5:11 now
So, because things were working just so well I felt like I had to fuck them up to feel normal, I've been attempting (and horribly failing) to update various server components, e.g. PHP. Unfortunately I spent three hours or more trying to install a new version of XAMPP only to revert back to the original files (always back up your work, kiddies!). At least rsync with DeltaCopy went swimmingly, so if the server machine dies or I totally fuck it up at least it's on a different physical machine and drive.
I'm going to keep trying to upgrade components, possibly in advance of both analytics software such as AWStats (I'm curious about what kind of traffic I get) as well as installing a blog suite like WordPress. I'm still waiting on the "editorfag" for Nerd Journal to write me (I didn't get the email, by the way, please resend it!), but it seems like having a place for people to write articles and rants and the like is a good idea in general and seems like a good next project for me to work on.
Lastly, there's a new MUD using the GodWars 96 codebase up at xen.thisisnotatrueending.com on port 4000. Wearfe is currently screwing around with the source and attempting to add new classes; unlike SmaugFUSS the core content isn't shit and isn't geared toward horrific grinding, so it's already got one up on the old MUD. Since he's messing around with the actual code and recompiling it on occasion, the MUD might be a little... bouncy for a bit, but after all the random stops and restarts around here it really will feel like home.
Also, I didn't mention this before, but PurpleXVI is a recent addition to the IRCop team, along with Ruler, Jean and myself. If you need help or just want to bug him for shits and giggles, please feel free to inundate him with dongs and gibberish.
Success! I actually managed to get it to do what I wanted without sacrificing any more goats or Hot Pockets. You can now view a writable PDF of any character in the database. As it strongly recommends, use FoxIt so you can actually save your sheet (stupid Adobe).
This is the last work I'm going to be doing on the generator for a while; I need to take a break and do other things, such as install another MUD, upgrade the webserver to the latest version of everything, install AWStats so I can start actually checking out my traffic (I realized Webalizer already comes with XAMPP so I'll try that first), get back into Dwarf Fortress, potentially set up a rants and articles section for authors to write pieces on RPGs both homebrew and commercial... you know, the usual I-have-too-much-shit-to-do chaos I tend to thrive in. The next iteration would ideally include the ability to purchase advances for your characters, but that's a whole new level of data entry and I'd rather just, you know, not do that right now.
Anyway, it's crazy o'clock, so please have a wonderful weekend.
So, I am dumb and am up way too late these past few nights. Anyway. I guess the LHC must have caused a space-time rift or something because I've said twice now that the DH CharGen is complete and yet here I am still working on it. This time I'm trying to make the charsheet print to a writable PDF, and after a couple false starts and other general problems, I've started actually getting it to work. However, I've come to realize that PDFs are pretty much shit. They display weird for no readily apparent reason and unless you're willing to shell out money to fix someone else's mistakes, you can't actually edit the PDFs. Still, it'll be a neat option when it's done, albeit a potential resource drain (at 1.85MB per request), but it's certainly something no one else offers.
Also, yes, you can't save a modified PDF in Acrobat (e.g. if you edit the writable fields you can't save it with their free bullshit extortion software); however, you can do that in FoxIt, a free and lightweight PDF viewer. Granted, there are some other weirdnesses with FoxIt to consider and both applications seem to cause the filled information to fucking float unless you modify the fields in some fashion, but it's better than nothing.
Something something yadda yadda going to start a new MUD up again, blah blah someone apparently wants to run a newsletter and have me host it, herp derp still need to run the contest for upper-left site graphic...
Oh, a couple of neat last things related to the CharGen: Ross Watson of Fantasy Flight Games, the Senior RPG Developer for Dark Heresy, is going to be sending me some Arkham Horror stuff for my efforts on the generator. So that's pretty awesome. Also, it looks like Dark Reign enjoyed the character generator enough to put it right on their sidebar, which is also pretty neat. I just hope my body bandwidth can take it.
Happy Large Hadron Collider day! It's down at the moment and I'm sure it's just going to get the shit hammered out of it throughout the day, but CERN has a live video feed here. This is a momentus occasion; for those of you unfamiliar with particle physics and wonder how this shit's going to apply to normal life, methinks you need a bit of a history lesson on the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) - namely, the last batch of particle experiments led them to invent the internet because they needed a way to store, transfer and catalogue the data. Yes, that's right: Not Gore, not DARPA, but CERN invented the internet as a method to share their findings with researchers all over the world. The fucking internet was created by these guys out of simple necessity, almost as an afterthought. Imagine what other 'incidental' creations they'll come up with in this iteration.
Additionally, the CharGen is now 100% actually complete. With the very minor exception of a career memento list for Sororitas (since the .pdf didn't list them and I wasn't feeling creative), everything else has been implemented. There is now a standard view, a story view, and a printer-friendly plaintext view for every character sheet. If I can find a way to print to an image file or PDF, I'll add that (though I'm doubtful it's possible without licensing something). Version 3.0 of the CharGen will actually let you create higher-ranking characters and buy character advances and the like, but I'm putting that off for a while. (I haven't had requests for a WHFRP revamp, so it's not even on the horizon at this time.)
It's quarter to six, so I'm going to fall into bed. Please enjoy the hard work and please have a wonderful LHC Day.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Dark Heresy Character Generator 2.0 is complete. There are still a couple odds and ends - bug testing, a bit more error checking, career mementos, family generation, a "story" presentation of your character's features and information instead of a boring statblock (see the quick gen) - but the generator is otherwise completed, including the database. I hope you all enjoy it. Let me know if something explodes!
I'm not sure when any of you will actually be able to see this, but this status announcement will be patiently awaiting your ability to view it. Now that the server is nice and stable, of course, we have to have random outages just to make sure people feel at home. In this case, the internet died and seems to be weaving in and out of consciousness like an indecisive coma patient. The server never went down at any time, it's just your ability to reach it, so don't blame me! (What really sucks is that the phone is out, too. I hope nobody catches fire! No 911!)
I've added mementos to the character generator (world only so far, I'll do class next, though I still don't know what to do for Sororitas), and will be adding details like family next (ala the quick generator or WHFRP). I'll also be creating a "summary" instead of Eyes: X Hair: Y sort of layout to make things more interesting. I may or may not have character saving/viewing done tonight, we'll see if I can get it hammered out in the next 20 minutes (I have to get up early). Wish me luck!
Brief little update. I've been hammering away at the DH chargen, and it's nearly complete. My task now is taking all the info the users have selected and presenting it to them in a variety of easily-printable formats. The best-case scenario would be an actual character sheet, though printing to an image file may be difficult and I don't believe using a premade sheet will really do the trick. I may be able to alter one of the official sheets, but we'll see on that. If anyone has specific recommendations or desired formats, please let me know.
I expect to have it finished either tonight or tomorrow night, depending on how much extra crap I find myself needing to do. My favorite part, namely the little character summary of all the things you've chosen (including optional extras like mementos, family history, etc.) hasn't even been touched yet, and I'm not sure how long that will take me, but everything else is pretty much completed. I also need to do general error-checking (to help prevent players from missing a selection or section on the chargen) and make sure all the mechanics are functioning, but at this time you should be able to use the character builder right now and see all the little numbers add up, including bonuses from starting packages from the Inquisitor's Handbook and the like.
As always you can view the Dark Heresy Character Generator here.
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