Author: rakkar

The last time I contracted to Europe was about 4 years ago. I forget the exact figure, but the pay was quite poor, partly because at the time the dollar was worth more than the Euro. I think it was .7 to 1 or something (easy to look up if anyone cares to).

With the dollar now so devalued that a penny is worth less than the copper used to make it, the opposite is true. I can make more contracting to overseas companies. The current exchange rate is 1 euro to 1.37 dollars.

This is good timing because I’ve had several contracting offers the last week. Compared to four years ago, I can ask for twice as much money and it’s considered the same thing. Since inflation hasn’t risen correspondingly (yet) I benefit from the lag. It also keeps me busy as I get contracts now where I wouldn’t have before. Maybe I should buy a bunch of gold.

It helps RakNet too since it means RakNet is cheaper.

I see now why China likes to peg its currency lower than its actual value.

I got an email from a pissed off “Customer” this morning complaining about getting double charged. Which is funny, because I am not charging yet, nor have plans to in the near future.

Dear XXX:

Our records indicate an overdue balance in the amount of $49.99 USD
remains on your Galactic Melee account. To avoid interruption of
service, you must bring your account current.

If your payment has already been made, please accept our thanks and
disregard this notice.

If you feel the information included in this notice is incorrect or have
questions about your Galactic Melee account, please contact us at .
Thank you for choosing Galactic Melee.

$49.99 is the cost of my lifetime subscription fee.

My billing service provider Aria Systems must charging when I told them not to, sending out payment emails in test mode, and/or charging monthly for the lifetime subscription.

I told the (potential) customer I will personally refund his money if he was charged and the billing provider does not deal with this satisfactorily. I don’t want chargebacks and complaints of theft before I even open for business.

Another problem is that two weeks ago I also found that Aria did not verify email addresses on signup, which I discovered when I tried to contact a few people for some feedback. Admittedly, I never specifically asked for this, but it’s sort of obvious this is a necessary requirement. I don’t know of any online games that don’t verify email addresses, it’s just common sense that this should have been implemented, or at least they could have asked me “Hey, is it important to you that you can communicate with your customers?”

When I emailed asking about this I was ignored. So I followed up a week later and get a reply to the effect of “There is no central repository of all valid email addresses, how can we verify it?” Perhaps, the same way everyone else does, which is to make the user click a link when they get a confirmation email. I never heard back again after that – maybe they are doing it, maybe not. You’d think they have the code for this already, since every online game needs it.

Since I’m a small customer I’m really trying hard not to ask for too much. But still, for a $1500 setup fee and a percentage of my gross revenue is this too much to expect?

Speaking of fees, it’s been bothering me that the credit card processing company takes 10% They don’t call it 10%, but at the end of the day this is the difference between what I charge and what I get.

If I can find a 3rd party billing provider that:

1. Charges less than 10%
2. Can generate a purchase confirmation code that my game can automatically check
3. Can add paid registrations to my database automatically (through a web form ?)
4. Verifies customer information before sending it to me (esp. email address)

I can switch over, do lifetime subscriptions only, and fix both of these problems in one swoop. I think the hardest part will be #3 though. I know there are download services, and services where you get an email for every new customer, but I don’t want to go into the database every time I get a new customer.

Only took me 5 years but I think I finally have the flow control problem in RakNet beat. It maintains a record of average low ping, and if your ping starts going up, it increases the amount of time between each datagram send. In testing it was as fast or slightly faster than TCP and maintains 0% packetloss.

I am also using Windows WaitForMultipleObjects by default. Previously, this gave very bad performance, adding 30-50 ms ping times. But apparently Windows XP does a better job with this, so my throughout is roughly equal. This should resolve the long standing problem of people bitching about reported 100% CPU utilization.

Getting and keeping new players is turning out to be much harder than I originally thought.

The first problem is that the original zone designs called for a minimum of 20 players to be fun. I don’t usually have 20 players simultaneous though, which is a self-defeating prophecy. Plus the zones that I spent the most work on was the larger ones for hundreds of people, so most of my effort isn’t yet visible.

The second problem is that some people still can’t run, or those that used to run no longer can. Part of the problem is Ogre 3D does a full file scan, so older deleted files are still used, and cause errors. Usually the autopatcher deletes these but sometimes I have to reset the autopatcher database so it doesn’t happen.

The third problem is that when there are only a few players online no amount of ship designing is going to make it so that the newbie can sometimes kill the expert. With less than 15 or so people the newbies don’t get those lucky kills and don’t have fun.

The fourth problem is not enough newbies come online at once to play each other. So they sit in the newbie zone for 10 minutes, go to the regular zone, and get wasted as above.

What I might need to do is put Armada (500 players) on hold for a while and work on a zone very friendly to new players, that works well with very low populations. I’ll think for a while on this. Throwing out some possibilities:

1. Speed kill competition in a very small zone with at most 5 players, no spectators allowed. Most kills in time X wins. Since dying doesn’t matter, newbies have more fun.
2. Racing mode, just race around a track
3. ???

*** EDIT ***

Got a good idea for target drones. Adding that now. I will have them rotate to shoot at you. Shouldn’t be too hard.

I saw some newbies play for 10 minutes, fly right into a hail of bullets, say “I can’t play against ships this powerful” and quit. The real reason they were quitting is not the power of the enemy ships, because all weapons and ships are equal. It is because of a perceived unbalance, where other players of higher level would have a wider range of weapons available and this was assumed to mean more powerful. As it is a convenient excuse for poor play, it was considered as a game inbalance, and they quit.

On my part, there were three problems here.

1. The skill balance difference is still too high, with a 4:1 ratio between the best and worst players. This is far better than before, and I’m running out of ideas on how to balance it. It would be good if I can get it down to 3:1 though.

2. The initial weapon I was giving newbies (standard momentum based gun) still took too much skill to use, as in you’d have to play for a while to get the feel of how fast your bullet moves, how much to lead, how fast your ship rotates, in order to hit anything. It’s sort of like the first time you use the grenade launcher in quake, where everyone else has chain guns. It wouldn’t be very fun unless you were unusually patient or skilled. In response, I increased the Guided part of guided rockets, and make this a level 0 item, so you get it for free right away. Guided rockets take little skill, mostly strategy, and from what I’ve seen newbies like having it.

3. Even with the first two points, newbies are willing to tolerate this if they feel the challenge is temporary and surmountable. I took my queue from Planetside here, and made it so you can unlock all the weapons and items in a few weeks with dedicated play. This is much different from my original play of taking 6-9 months. Planetside is also a skill-based game, and I can see how having unusable weapons can feel unfair. What’s funny is people actually complain now it’s too easy to level, but I think that’s just because they were used to the old system. It actually takes about a year to reach max level if you were to play religiously, but right now you don’t get anything past level 20 or so.

Every time I ask people how they like it I get positive feedback. It feels good, but I’m only hearing from the people that stuck around in the first place. I’m more concerned about the guys that jump in and leave in 10 minutes. It happens less, but it still happens, and I hope to discover and address why.