http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php en Sat, 25 May 2013 16:15:07 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.gewar.net/forum/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=177 Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:47:03 GMT [B]Kinda important on street as well as in Gewar[/B]

[SIZE="3"]you wanna be noticed
[/SIZE]
what would you do if you are new in town and everybody believes you are fresh meat ?

easy, you look for the strongest around and deal with him until anybody start to respect you

but well, you might be careful as a noob because he may has "big" friends and they put you in jail :D

[IMG]http://www.gewar.net/forum/picture.php?albumid=186&pictureid=1502[/IMG]

As I meant before socialising is an important issue in here and so my valuable advice for any noob - get your big friends before you hit around.

*dear jailers, didn't wrote that post because I have any issues with your action, just use you as an example
well, hopefully you won't have any with me after I kicked your ass, :666 ]]> leoneo http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=177 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=176 Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:10:21 GMT [B]My first contacts[/B]
Having 15000 Geo's at hand, willing to use them as it seems a fortune, what you're going to do ?

[I]Knocking at the door of your neighbours and kick them out of their house, great fun:[/I]drinks

Pm's floating in, friendly and unfriendly. Well, couldn't expect that they would love me, but more or less most reaction have been okay.
Strange feeling beiing a scholar - primary - again.
Good advice, mostly telling me I should save and join an alliance.

That was the easy part, just needed one PM to send and I was in, yeah.

Having many bro's around, feeling super strong, I said hello again to my former enemies.

BAD mistake, that wasn't something I should have done. 10 minutes later I was kicked out of my new alliance.

Strange world, if a leader even don't ask you, specially after you haven't been informed about anything what you should do.

[U]that is how you make friends, if you play war [/U]

[B]My advice to those leader is - better you have some text prepared, sending to your noobs after you let them in. Cost you a few seconds nothing more[/B]. ]]> leoneo http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=176 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=175 Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:47:59 GMT [B]what did I do the first days ?[/B]
-read the Wiki and it was worth to go through all the details
(thx to all who spend time on it)
-read the Forums, well there is a lot inside where I thought could that be for real, but I also found valuable information
-hit the first cities around my homebase,
yeah.....the real fun started

[U]First surprise,[/U] guys really love their cities ;)
[U]Second surprise[/U], my first game where people almost don't play
(is this about war or are we all buried in a cemetry ? )
[U]Third surprise[/U], some old player believe a noob know nothing, which may is true, but Gewar isn't such a complicate game to catch up, so what ! ]]> leoneo http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=175 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=166 Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:54:21 GMT The boy scout motto always fits. Why is it people are surprised when a storm is coming. I guess I can understand if you lived in a city and had limited room, but then again I wont and dont. We have 2 generators, one smaller but as a spare. Never even fired em up last year except for my monthly tests, but if we need em we have em. That covers food spoilage and water. And boredom... a big thing with 6 kids. We stock enough food to live good for 2 weeks, and then survive on stuff like... The boy scout motto always fits.

Why is it people are surprised when a storm is coming. I guess I can understand if you lived in a city and had limited room, but then again I wont and dont.

We have 2 generators, one smaller but as a spare. Never even fired em up last year except for my monthly tests, but if we need em we have em. That covers food spoilage and water. And boredom... a big thing with 6 kids.

We stock enough food to live good for 2 weeks, and then survive on stuff like beans and rice and cans for 3-4 weeks more.

Our house can not be flooded, there are still a few trees that could hit it, but I take out 2-3 a year so there is far less now.

I keep batteries and flashlights stocked. always. One get used it gets replaced. I keep the chainsaw ready just in case and a few tarps on hand also just in case.

if you spread it out over years I prob spend an extra 5$ a month to make sure we will be fine.
Of course it goes further than that I rejected houses I liked cause of the locations.

I keep some lumber spare in a shed. When I need a piece I use it then replace it, so if we ever loose a window or 3 I can cover em. I have battery powered power tools, and the batteries are always charged.

I bet I do not spend 2 mins a week thinking bout this, its just a routine. I do spend a few hours once a month checking stores and so forth, but its pretty easy.

So right now a big storm on way and I just went and bought macaroni and pop tarts. Macaroni cause we were down to bout 6lbs and pop tarts cause we havnt had any in 2 years or so as a treat.

Anyways, point is, think before you buy, plan far ahead. and always try and be prepared. ]]> Peonboss http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=166 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=165 Tue, 16 Aug 2011 23:18:07 GMT Mankind is the only species that actively breeds stupidity. But Darwin is a ***** and he always catches you. If you steal from your job they will catch you. And if you keep doing it then people start setting traps and then when they catch you there is no longer any doubt. And if you are really stupid, you get to take two trips in a police car in one day. One when you arrive at work and they are waiting for you. And then an other one when you get home from the police station and decide to check... Mankind is the only species that actively breeds stupidity. But Darwin is a ***** and he always catches you. If you steal from your job they will catch you. And if you keep doing it then people start setting traps and then when they catch you there is no longer any doubt.
And if you are really stupid, you get to take two trips in a police car in one day. One when you arrive at work and they are waiting for you. And then an other one when you get home from the police station and decide to check and see if someone was smart enough to change every password on every computer.
And if they were and expected you to do something like that then they record you doing it and you get a 2nd trip and this one is a bit longer at the police station.

Just saying, stupid is as stupid does, and no matter how smart you might think you are, there is ALWAYS someone smarter and many times it is the boss, and that is why he is the boss and you are in a holding cell. ]]> Peonboss http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=165 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=162 Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:30:35 GMT So I added a bunch of cities over the weekend. Our number is now 2,265 (started the round with 1368). Our population total is 1,732,312,215 (25.57%). That should overwhelm the larger alliances and combined with the cost to move troops around the world it "should" give new players and smaller alliances a chance to find some cities without intimidation (well less intimidation).

I have another batch of cities I'm building up, but I don't think I'll be releasing anything new next weekend. Cities are becoming harder to come by, and I'm trying to focus my energy on Africa and Russia (and probably China) to fill in more of the map. Anyone that can point me to a good KMZ/KML (preferably in English) would have my deepest thanks.

So with all of these news cities we will probably be holding a geos for city images sometime this round (see this thread). I don't know when or what the payout will be, but I'm sure the staff will come up with something worthwhile.

So what else am I doing? Well still working on multiple attack types as my biggest priority. Lucky for me I know what I want to do so it's just a matter of getting the code to write itself...Yeah like that ever happens.

I'm also looking into adding more resource cities. The drawback there is I don't just want the same, mildly useless, resource cities that don't tie into the game. Real suggestions, that aren't too wordy (but wordy enough so I understand them) would be a plus. This won't happen in the next month or two, but it will happen eventually.

Anyway, that's it for now. ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=162 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=160 Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:46:29 GMT We started the round at 1369 cities. We now have 1766, and I hope to add a bunch more before the end of the year (my goal is 2500 total).

So this batch should be available now. I'm running the cron off-cycle so that people don't have to wait and our error logs don't fill up with failed attacks :)

By releasing this batch we now have a GEWAR population of 1,698,540,692 which is 25.07% of the actual population number.

As I said, my goal is 2500 cities by the end of the year. I think that the more cities the more it can cause parity and/or chaos. Parity if people get active and take those cities, or chaos if they allow one alliance to grab 1 billion+ in value and then play "pile on the big guy". Either way is fun to see and be a part of.

The other thing I'm working on is multiple attack types. This won't be released with this round, but I'm hopeful it can be released either next round or the round after that. I'm working on Helicopters, Planes, Tanks, Artillery and a few others to start with.

I'm also looking into ways to add more resources to the game and maybe tie them to actions in the game (change oil to mechanized units and make food or wood for troops). More on this later.

Alright that's enough from me...Back to your regularly scheduled programming.:drinks ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=160 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=159 Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:07:09 GMT 1. Changed the height of cities.
Cities are now using the value to define the height. So the shape for Chicago is now higher then the shape for St. Louis.

This is something that existed in the old game, and was a nice little addition.

2. Reset home base bug
There was a bug (or whatever) that showed the Reset your home base not only on your home base page, but also on all other player's home bases. It was just one of those odd things where a coder put it outside of the IF statement. This is fixed now.

3. KML Shapes
The shape of the cities used to be 60 x 75 km (for the square) they are now about 40 x 50 km. It looks a cleaner, and it allows us to put more cities into the game without impacting army travel. (these are better then what I did over the weekend). ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=159 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=158 Mon, 11 Jul 2011 03:08:47 GMT 1. Army movement to homebase bug
Ran into this bug last week and thought we had it fixed, and after further analysis (and help from Thomas85) we were able to find that it wasn't fixed and where the exact problem was. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's a deeply rooted issue that can't be solved without impacting many other things and possibly screwing up the game for hours (story of my life in GEWAR). So we did a workaround. Instead of saying a player's name (i.e. this army is traveling to the homebase of Joe) it says their playerID. I know this is a PITA for players, but I hope to have it resolved after the dev server is up.

2. Created/fixed a bug in the city kml build.
This one had to do with a city being unoccupied and therefore the icon for the city had an invalid color (since ownerid -1 has no color) and didn't show up. I changed this to a static color now. It should be good to go.

3. Adding a bunch of cities.
I've added about 100 cities. Most of them are in Turkey, Russia, France, Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Mexico, etc. I'll add more as I have time (I have about 100 queued up).

4. Changes to city shapes
I've shrunk the city shapes slightly. So the triangle, octagon and squares are a bit smaller now. There's a reason for this (well multiple reasons) but it should have little impact on playability.

5. City Manager Tool
I built this up about a week ago and finished testing today. For many months, almost years, we've gone without a tool to add cities (Surprise). So we've sat in the 1300 city range. As any active person can tell, we are closer to 1500 today. I would love to be at 2500 by the end of the year.

Fun Stat: We currently show a total of 1.602 billion in our globe which is 23.7% of the actual world population.

In closing, with the new city manager tool comes the need for additional data input from players. How do I do it? I...
1. Change my GE options to show lat/lon as Decimal Degrees (tools > options > 1st panel).
2. Go to layers > borders > labels and turn on Populated places.
3. Go to an empty part of our map and find a place.
4. Make sure it's at least 150km from centerlat/centerlon of surrounding cities
5. I then look up the info on that location and see if there is anything better populated in that area (sometimes I fail at this).
6. I then create a pin with the name, population value (use a source for this. I prefer WA or Wiki), Country, Center Lat & Center Lon.

That's it. If you want to add something just let us know the details in this forum. ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=158 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=157 Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:48:11 GMT Recently I made 4 changes to the KML files. 3 are presentation, and one was to (hopefully) fix an old bug.

1. I changed the label size on cities to scale 0.8. Makes it easier to read.

2. Changed the army label to match your color (it used to be white). This should help with seeing if any armies are "in your backyard".

3. Changed out the ICON for the cities. It used to be some For Sale sign, and that just didn't work. I tried to do our own icon (FAILED) and went with a generic one. I'll devote some time to a custom icon in the next week or two.

4. BUG FIX: there was a bug that existed where an army travelling to a homebase wouldn't state the name of the homebase it was heading to. It looks like travel type 3 wasn't defined in the kml files...It is now. I did some spot checking and things "seemed" to be working correctly. If you see this error again please send me a PM.

That's it for the KML changes. Also, I added about 30 new cities, and have another 50 or so to add in the next week. ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=157 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=156 Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:56:51 GMT I just recently received an e-mail saying that the server was being reset. I thought, why not get back in the game, since I do have a little bit of time to spend due to the changes I have made in my work schedule. I thought the e-mail was a great idea to try and get old members and new inactive members back into the game. The game seems to have changed in so many great ways. There are so many new alliances and some old alliances. I am glad to be back into this game. I am very excited... I just recently received an e-mail saying that the server was being reset. I thought, why not get back in the game, since I do have a little bit of time to spend due to the changes I have made in my work schedule. I thought the e-mail was a great idea to try and get old members and new inactive members back into the game.

The game seems to have changed in so many great ways. There are so many new alliances and some old alliances. I am glad to be back into this game. I am very excited about having different players to play with online.

Hopefully some old players will see the email I did and decide to join back into a game that they always loved. :) ]]> Riccur http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=156 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=155 Sun, 03 Jul 2011 05:35:16 GMT 2 more changes that may/will impact players next round, and one I failed miserably at :) _*1. The city page cleanup. *_ I know Luke was hellbent on keeping the images at 320 wide, but I needed to lose a bit of the size in order to fit them in properly. Now the page is laid out with a two column layout on top followed by the attack table at 100% below. I moved the error messages, owned time, incoming armies and other stuff to the left column. I put the city details, attack block and... 2 more changes that may/will impact players next round, and one I failed miserably at :)

1. The city page cleanup.
I know Luke was hellbent on keeping the images at 320 wide, but I needed to lose a bit of the size in order to fit them in properly.

Now the page is laid out with a two column layout on top followed by the attack table at 100% below. I moved the error messages, owned time, incoming armies and other stuff to the left column. I put the city details, attack block and Infrastructure on the right. It looks good enough for now.

2. Oil
This isn't really a change as much as it is an oversight for the past 3-4 rounds. Basically, there's a formula for figuring out how much oil is consumed. There is an Oil Limit, Oil Travel1 and Oil Travel2 defined. Well...Oil Travel2 didn't exist and Oil Travel1 was listed twice (Yes we make mistakes).

Long story short, the amount of oil to move an army will increase now. It will go back to the way it was originally intended (oil is scarce...don't sell it).

To give a rough estimate on the difference it looks like this:
Last Round: 20k troops used 15 barrels per step.
This Round: 20k troops will use 30.34 per step.

I advise everyone to plant your oil fields, and maybe use this time, pre-round, to figure out how this works into your strategy (or ignore it and complain 3 weeks from now).

3. The miserable failure

Right now armies move at 90km/step. I want them to double in speed. So last night I tried to get armies moving faster. I almost had it. For the record, this isn't some simple equation...This is GIS stuff and gets way too heady to mess with when you're about 9 deep in a 12 pack. So I had the armies moving at warp speed, for testing purposes, and I thought I had finally got this one right...and then they blew right past the city/destination. A few curse words and 2 more beers later and I ended up defeated. I think I know what the problem is and once I get a development server setup I'll try this again. ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=155 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=154 Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:52:24 GMT 1. Extending mutes into the game

I'm experimenting with this. Basically, if you get a mute you will not be able to post on alliance boards or rename your armies.

Reason: We find that every time someone is muted they tend to lash out in any way that they can. First they use the help desk (as they should) and then they extend into the game. They go to alliance boards and give some deranged version of the incident and/or they rename their armies to stuff like "ihatestaff" or "staffischeats"...

I'm sure people will bring up 100 different points of contention on this, but ultimately this is another place where the players have other players to blame. We will do our best to only mute those that deserve a mute (only one right now and maybe 2 this round), but mutes are going to happen...They always do.

2. Added more colors to player account

Seems like a small change, but it's something people have wanted forever...So you have it. 48 different colors to choose from. Should make the world a beautiful place :)

3. Fixing up the sidebar in the template.

Many months ago, OK years ago, I wanted to make the sidebar collapsible and make it so people could move items up and down and possibly add their own data to that column...I failed miserably. The way we use tpl files just doesn't allow it. So I simplified the sidebar (right column).

In doing this, I cleared a few KB of useless image and script data that was loading every time you loaded a page (thus slowing down the server slightly).

4. Cleaning up the staff list
This page has always been confusing to players and staff members alike. So we all discussed it, figured out the best way to move forward, and did so. You will notice that it makes a bit more sense. It's easier to see who does what, when and how.


Other things I'm working on right now:
- Trying to cleanup the city pages (they look disjointed and amateur right now)
- Trying to think of a more tablet/mobile friendly way to do the menu.

My hot list after that (once dev is back up):
- multiple attack types
- army/nuke stepping fix (the overshooting nuke issue)
- attack functions (the ratio issue)

Have a good day.
~J ]]> Prophet http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=154 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=137 Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:32:49 GMT A lot of players said they wanted to be updated. Because no news makes some think nothing is being done.

Though I disagree with that way of thinking, I noticed I do it myself too on other websites.

Most know that lately I had problems with our development server. It has been completely reinstalled, and therefor it can be used for developments again. First thing will be army splitting.

However I've put it on hold the last 2 weeks because I desperately once and for all want a major problem to be solved. That is the slowdowns here.

I've tested a lot on different configurations(as noticed by some as I have to reboot the server) and taken all other domains offline from this server. Now installing monitoring software. Got some hints from the provider as well as to what the problem could be.

Basically throughout gewar history we've always had this problem. Well even Mickey had the problem. And there must be a solution. A quicker server worked a little bit, but not enough.

To me solving the problem of slowdowns has become the nr1 priority. All else is less important because nothing is more frustrating than having to wait 30-45 seconds for a page to load sometimes.

So thats my update for now. After 2 weeks I finally have a feeling we're getting closer to the problem. I don't need to have a lightningfast game, but I don't want to say time out errors anymore or having to wait a ridiculous long time for the page to load. I think for new players this could also be another reason to quit if their first encounter with gewar is a game that runs really slow sometimes. ]]> Luke http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=137 http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=136 Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:49:59 GMT Registration Day(register for classes) is one of the most important days in college. The registration starts at 7am. This means more than thousand studend is logging on to the school website to rigister. If you are slow, you are very likely to get waitlisted.

Today, when I log on to Facebook around 10:30am, I saw 3 of my firends on the first 10 "top news" complain about being waitlisted. "A stressful process" as one of them stated.

Thanks to gewar, I get more chance to practice this "occupying for classes" event. Sounds similar to occupying nuked cities, right? I clicked the "register button" on the wabpage around 07:00:02am, this gets me through the system fairly quickly, and I got in to the class I want. :)

Playing gewar helps students in academic carreer~
--that is a fact now. lololol


Have a great day, everyone.



purefrost ]]> purefrost http://www.gewar.net/forum/blog.php?b=136