Altered Alterations

Finally, after a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, holycrap, long time, phpBB 3 was released yesterday. For those out of the loop, phpBB 2.0.x has powered the Altering Time Forums since 2002, and is somewhat buggy. I followed phpBB development fairly closely for a couple years, into 2004, which was supposed to be the “Year of phpBB 2.2″. In 2005 it was renamed 3.0, and has now finally been released.

Now that 3.0 is out, I can evaluate it against building my own Forum system, or switching to a different forum package. Unfortunately, phpBB 3.0 still has no plugin system, which means making custom modifications is a chore. So much has changed that upgrading will be almost as big of a chore as making all our custom modifications was in the first place. Also, without plugins, upgrading to point releases (i.e. 3.0.1) will continue to be a pain. That said, I waited 5 years for it, so I should at least take it for a spin. I’ll keep everybody informed.

A dedicated Altering Time news blog is now live! Here you will find updates and thoughts on Altering Time, Faith, the Forums, and other site features. For those who have been watching, it took a few steps to get here:

• 2002: Sarcastic News blog launched
• 2004: Engineering Faith news blog launched
• 2006: General (mostly tech) commentary blog launched, merged with Faith blog
• October 2007: Commentary blog merged with old Sarcastic News and spun off into Antipode.
• November 2007: Altering Time finally gets a dedicate site news blog, restored with old Faith news

Before, some Altering Log readers would be bored/annoyed when I went on about non-AT topics, and some would be bored/annoyed when I went on about AT. Now I’m free to go on about my AT-related dreams! Topics I’d like to cover here soon include the Forum upgrade to phpBB3, when is Faith going to be finished, and a site redesign I have in mind. Stay tuned.

I’ve gotten back into playing Faith again recently, and have realized how much I missed it. According to Google, lots of people are really excited for Faith. Search results like “create your own religion” and “engineering faith” are a lot more frequent than I expected. Although I’m always thinking about how to finish it, I’m now back into the thick of things.

However, one of the things that has been bothering me about Faith for years now is there are too many numbers. Balancing is hard, UI is hard, learning is hard, and everything just seems a bit messy compared to Asylum. Others have said the same thing: it doesn’t feel enough like a game.

A major reason for this, I think, is that it isn’t abstracted enough. It forces on the user things like the subtleties of Economy vs. Income, which in the end aren’t all that different. So, Instead of just polishing what I have now (the easy way out) I want to make it right, and to do that, there needs to be fewer virtues.

And so, I propose a refinement from the 10 Virtues to a new 5, as below:

Devotion: Their loyalty to the faith and their community.
Economy: Their ability to produce wealth, and their willingness to share it with you.
Health: Their fortitude and ability to reproduce.
Strength: Their ability to maintain order and fight for what they believe in.
Zeal: Their passion for life and the word of their religion.

This will mean a fair bit of rebalancing and tinkering, but I think it will actually make it possible to properly balance things. An example of what the effects of the new virtues would have would be:

• Births: Health + Strength
• Lifespan: Devotion + Health
• Belief: Devotion + Strength
• Conversion: Devotion + Zeal
• Production: Economy + Health
• Lawfulness: Devotion + Economy
• Donations: Economy + Strength
• Science: Economy + Zeal
• Attendance: Health + Zeal
• Military: Strength + Zeal

Probably the worst thing about all of this would be that I’d need to make new icons. As well, the laws, traits, and most other facets would need to be looked at again. However, I think it would make a huge huge difference that would be worth it. The game would be more of a game and be less a sea of math. So, what do you guys say? Does my proposal make sense? Are you with me? Shall we kick some butt?

While I’d hoped this summer would be a time of increased coding, working on Engineering Faith had to compete with other things like my day job, Budgetable, conferences, vacations, and other vital occupations. Now that I’m getting back into school mode, though, I’m back into Faith mode!

Admittedly, I have been afraid that while I was off working on other stuff, things would be going to hell - and not just some smartass making a Place of Worship called “Hell”. Surprisingly though, it’s actually been pretty stable. There haven’t been any insane explosions of followers, nothing new has broken horribly, nobody completely destroyed a game through a trivially abusable bug (although I’m sure it’s still possible). On the downside, it seems all the bugs that were there before are still there - odd, really.

The thing that struck me the most, though, is that even though I haven’t updated it in a while, and it’s still not ready for prime time, people are still playing. Just seeing that excites me and reminds me that I’ve created something cool - it just needs to be taken into the home stretch.

A big reason I think my work on Faith dropped off over the summer is that I was no longer seeing people who are playing it every day, like I was at school. Instead, I was seeing people who use our internal website at work every day, so I got more excited about that. As mind-numbing as generating quarterly contract renewal reports sounds, that kind of toil can be enjoyable if you’re really making people happy and making their lives easier. Basically, I’m a whore for user feedback.

As such, I decided I didn’t already have enough RSS news items to plough through every day, so I added an RSS feed to the bug tracker. It now keeps me instantly up to date about how things are going, and what bugs are, well, bugging. Gone are the dark ages where Altering Time bug reports go unnoticed because I’m simply at school, working, brushing my teeth, or even in bed. Wait… what have I done?

Especially now, know that your votes on bugs really do matter, and I’ll be attacking popularly requested fixes soon. As for when it’ll be out of beta, well for once I think I’ll give an absolutely firm date of

As you may have noticed, I’ve been making some changes around the site. The first of these was the blog, which you’re, uh, likely aware of. Things here have been going well so far, and this section is already comprising a substantial amount of the site’s traffic. But enough blogging about blogging - on with the show.

Homepage revamped - Give it up for a new homepage that comes up for logged-in visitors! Now featuring the last 20 items that changed from across the site, it lists the category and age of each. The previous model is still available for those who aren’t logged in - showing the newest item from each category is great for site newbs, since it helps them find what the site has to offer. The new edition effectively removes the need for the “Posts since last login” feature once used to watch Forum activity. Now you can log in and out with reckless abandon! There have been claims that it could look better, such as that it’s too cute or too plain. We rise to the challenge, and will keep at it to make it the shiniest and improvediest homepage ever.

Smilies bank cancelled - This summer, simplicity is the new cyan. You’ve been demanding less features, and we’re going to give it to you! The bank of yellow smilies that used to peer at you eerily whenever you were writing a Forum post have been shown offstage. Not only were they distracting, but they encouraged, well, using smilies. One of these things was not like the others. AT isn’t “just another forum” for 9 year olds - this is Altering Time, the most noble of alteration forums. Simplicity reigns supreme, and you get your dollar’s worth.

Spam spammed - Have you noticed buttloads of spam recently? Each moderator has been deleting at least one butt worth of spam posts daily, which amounts to maybe 3 buttloads a day on average, which is roughly equal to damn annoying. But wait! A suggestion has come forth: a feature where users’ first post can’t be a new topic. Not only would this stop a lot of spam, but it would be completely free of cost! On the other hand, it would inconvenience some newbs, potentially stopping them from joining the fray. On the other other hand, it would inconvenience some spammers, and we hate spammers even more than we love newbs.

Redesign philosophized - The “other guys” might flagellate themselves by doing a huge all-at-once redesign, changing every colour and every line in an orgy of rewriting. Not here at AT: every change is carefully calculated to titillate in the most subtle and refreshing ways. Expect these sort of piecemeal updates - it’s the way of the future. For example, the gradients that gracelessly fade white to black on either edge of the page shall be slain in due order.

That’s it for this episode. Don’t miss the next episode, slated for some completely undetermined time in the future.

While I’ve been working away on Faith (11 releases since the last blog post here) it occurs to me that people who aren’t watching the Changes page might think things with Engineering Faith are going slowly. Things are still indeed live and kicking, although I’m busy with various other things as well. For those who are curious, my various ongoing projects include:

- Altering Time Redesign: to include a more general blog, a fresh new look, and an improved What’s New view
- Engineering Faith: might be out of beta status at the end of summer
- SFU Computing Science Student Society: Site rewrite, as well as separate site for Frosh Week 2006
- One Laptop Per Child project: Students from my university are helping out with MIT’s project to produce inexpensive computers for education in the third world.

Plus I have a couple projects ongoing at work… but that doesn’t count because I’m paid for that! So, does me being busy mean I don’t have time for Faith? Heck no! It just means I’m a crazy ambitious mofo who plans to write ridiculous amounts of code this summer!

Faith is progressing along, with a constant stream of bugfixes and tweaks. While I’m not spending as much time writing new features as I’d like, I really want to get things right. I think that a smaller number of better-written features is exactly what Faith (and most projects) really needs. I don’t want Faith to end up with lots of features that never lived up to their potential, the way Attacks and Covenants are right now.

One thing that seems to be happening that I’m glad about is that disparate strategies seem to really be becoming viable. Rather than getting everybody always telling me the same thing is overpowered, I’m getting some people telling me one approach is the best, some saying another, and so on. While things are still very much imbalanced, it’s slowly approaching the point where there really isn’t one overpowering strategy. This is helped a fair bit by the fact there’s multiple goals (holiness and followers).

One thing there’s been some talk about is Faith’s complexity. It really is damn complex, and I agree somewhat that it’s more complex than it needs to be. This isn’t just in terms of features, but in the sheer number of things you can do and the number of numbers flying around. However, I don’t think it’s unworkable - just challenging. It’s possible I may do some things to try and tighten things up and make things more stable, but I think the complexity adds a bit of charm to it, in that you don’t really know what’s going on… and neither does anyone else! Real life is like that anyway. If anything, I think that less numbers should be exposed to the players, so that the complexity is less overwhelming.

Another thing there’s been talk about is that your gain isn’t necessarily somebody’s loss, the way it is in Asylum. This is very much by design, and results in a less directly competitive atmosphere. My intent was to make it so everybody could enjoy themselves, and not have a game with 1 winner and 99 losers. However, it’s made the low level of player interaction and conflict much more annoying, and I totally agree. Thankfully, work on that is high on the todo list.

After many months of fairly sane games, I managed to have two stable games go completely insane in the span of a week!

First, people got smart and took so much advantage of the Places of Worship imbalance that somebody managed to get millions of followers, and the game became seriously lopsided. D’oh.

So in the next game I fixed that bug, but introduced a worse one: everybody got the effects of their Places, and Places of every Faith who came before them in sequence. Imagine the confusion for the guy at the end of the list! Unfortunately, this is a bug that is only noticable on some players after it’s been running for a few ticks, so it went unfixed for about 12 hours. Mess mess mess.

Anyway, there was a mass influx of holiness all over the place - it was ridiculous. I’ve fixed the bug now, and tried to push things towards normal artificially. Things are continuing to return back to normal on their own now, but I apologize for the ineveitable permanent damage the bug did to people’s testing activities.

I know this is indeed the kind of thing that happens in a Beta, and people understand that. However, this is the kind of thing that made people give up on Asylum during Beta before it became stable, so it annoys me when stuff like this slips through. In any case, I’ll be mindful of that kind of bug in the future, and try to do less coding at 3am. I’ve also started a fresh new world for those who are interested.

Year ye, all faithful. The Engineering continues strong, and the masses are growing. Since my last post, there’s been 8 new versions, which have included some really huge balance improvements, among other things. People of course are still finding amusing ways to wreak havoc, but less so than before.

Speaking of havoc, people have actually been attacking each other, which is exciting. I think this is partially because they’re enjoying stealing artifacts from people who have been hoarding them, but it’s also fun to get more interaction.

Speaking of interaction, I have the much-neglected Covenants system on my radar. I want to have as much group-forming and interplay in Faith as there has been in Asylum. People will also be more inclined to invite new players if they can then work together in the game (although that has some potential abuse implications.)

Speaking of invites, they’re going well - there are more than 50 people testing now, which is awesome. The gradual growth has allowed me to systematically fix things that get out of hand one by one. I’ve been manually giving people invites so far, but that’s getting freaking annoying. Naturally, the system will be automatically assigning then fairly soon - I just don’t know exactly how yet. Also, the ability to send an invite to somebody who doesn’t yet have an Altering Time account would be good.

Speaking of good, there’s been good feedback on the Forum and in the bug system, and people seem to be engaged with the development process. People are taking an active part in how the game turns out, and letting me know what they feel is important. Play still feels a bit slow to me (a complaint I’ve gotten less of recently) so I’ll keep hacking away at that issue. I want there to be more new activities to do in the later game - maybe more incentives to change things throughout the game.

Speaking of things, things on the technical side have progressed a fair amount since Faith started development. The amazing Dreamhost has given me the technologies MySQL 5 and PHP 5. Dynamic Ajax technology has become mainstream too. Faith doesn’t really take advantage of any of these technologies, but as I learn them more thoroughly I’ll be retrofitting Faith with them. Ajax is particularly exciting - it’s the technology behind the magic “pin” buttons on the Affairs page that instantly update when clicked. The new MySQL version should help me keep things stay orderly as the Faith database grows towards 100,000 items.

Speaking of databases, I’m currently sitting in Databases class at SFU. Yawn. If I hadn’t been a database programmer by profession for 3 years already, this class would probably be more interesting. Maybe I’ll learn something by the time it’s finished.

Speaking of finished…

I’m not dicouraged by hurricanes. Not the hurricane of bug reports, not the hurricane of invite requests, not even the hurricane named after Faith.

Okay, maybe only a tiny bit. But no worry; I should have expected the beta testers would find more bugs than I expected… right? This is just the normal one-month-into-beta panic.

For the first two weeks I fervently fixed bugs and balanced things, posting version after version. Every other day another player joined and their feedback piled on to my todo list. Bugs filed in, sometimes simple things like rounding errors that can wait for now, and sometimes fundamental things like “the game is too complex.” Oh dear.

For the second two weeks, realized how much there really is left to do, and hid under my kitchen table. Actually it was more that I realized I was failing classes, so I focused on those while my mind regrouped. I don’t even have a kitchen table actually. Actually, I was spending most of my alotted Faith time on moderating the Forum, bug system, and help system. Actually, I took hiatus to protest that they don’t actually teach Intelligent Falling in schools, actually.

Anyway, even though my exams start in two weeks, I’m back to being motivated about Faith. I have two projects to do and two exams I have to do really hardcore studying for, but that’s never stopped me before.

One of the biggest reasons to have a fairly large Beta was to find out where the imbalances were, and there’s certianly been a lot of feedback on that. Of the few dozen bugs fixed in the month, a lot were balance-related, and a lot more remaining ones are for balance. Although I’m dying to work on ease-of-use and help, I need to get it so the game’s somewhat fair, or people will stop playing!

Another problem is that for Beta I decided to run a slightly (1/3) slower world so that I could keep up with what’s going on. As a side effect, the game is kind of dragging on. Tomorrow I’m starting a faster (twice as fast as the current one) world that should be more engaging to everybody (including me.)

I also recommend that those who are eager/impatient/bored check out the now-public Changes Page and Help System. The changes page will help give people an idea of progress by version numbers, even if they don’t know what the bugfixes mean. In case you’re curious, I’m going to align the version numbers so 1.0 is the first out-of-beta version, and will use the standard convention that 0.5.10 is a higher version than 0.5.9.

Anyway, I’m off to fix some bugs so that tomorrow at the Beta Party (at 7pm Sunday at Guildford Boston Pizza) I won’t be pelted with small rocks and fruit.

This storm altered time.

The World Meteorological Organization has named Hurricane Beta, just hours after Engineering Faith’s entrance into Beta. “We are pleased to honour Engineering Faith’s amazing accomplishment,” said a spokesperson rumoured to represent the World Meteorological Organization.

While some may ask how they could spare an entire hurricane’s name for the Beta, experts are quick to explain. “This storm will get little media attention due to only poor countries lying in its path,” explained one researcher. “Additionally, there have been approximately a crapload of storms this year, so they actually ran out of person names.”

Why exactly there have been so many hurricanes this year (more than any year in recorded history) is completely unknown. While hurricanes are caused by warm water, and warm water is more common now due to global warning, there is reportedly no connection. “Correlation does not mean causation,” sternly warned one oil industry expert. “It is possible the hurricanes and global warming are both caused by a third variable, such as the devil, or bleeding heart liberals.”

Faith’s Beta has been a major acheivement for Altering Time, and a new player is being invited every other day. However, there are many players who have not yet been invited, which is causing some frustration. Some theorize that Hurricane Beta was not a random act of nature, but actually caused by the combined angst of everybody waiting to play the game. “how do I get an invitation? … I can beat Allen at RISK any day out of the week Why can’t I have an invitation?” demanded one confused site member.

As with any situation, however, there are some skeptics. “There’s no way they named a hurricane after Altering Time,” claimed one such character. “The storm before it was Alpha, do you think that’s just some sort of coincidence?!” When informed that Tropical Storm Alpha was likely referring to the Alpha state of Engineering Faith at that time, the skeptic became very agitated. “It’s a web-based game nobody’s even heard of for god’s sake! I bet Allen started Beta on the 26th just for that reason.” When informed Beta actually started briefly before the storm was named, the skeptic stormed out.

The author of this article does not believe in coincidences.