State of the Site: October 2015

Scott Hardie | October 27, 2015
How we doin'?

Every planned feature mentioned in the last "State of the Site" has been completed except for the Facebook login form, which remains a goal of mine for the semi-near future.

Something that had secretly been part of my plans last time, that I didn't want to announce until it was done, was better encryption for passwords and better security overall. That's now completed, with three Security options depending on your tolerance for logging in over and over. (Personally, I'm fine with the lowest setting.) I cannot guarantee that your data will remain completely secure any more than any other website can — thank goodness I'm not taking credit cards or other really sensitive information — but these changes go a long way. If anybody wants more specific details about the improvements, ask me any time.

Tomorrow is Funeratic's nineteeth anniversary. Time flies! The History of Funeratic has now been broken down by year, with multiple entries on the same page, to make it easier to browse. There's also a page that collects just the ten newest items. This year's ten new entries touch on almost every section of the site (sorry, pirates) and stretch back to 2011, and reveal a few secrets that haven't been widely discussed before. Happy anniversary! :-)

Developing this website is about to get a lot more convenient for me. Thanks to the generosity of an awesome friend, I am the new owner of an Ubuntu laptop, which will make it much easier to do the advanced programming that I really want to do. For starters, I can run a local installation of this website on my laptop without affecting the live version that you all use, so I can aggressively change the code without having to worry about "breaking" anything. Furthermore, I can start using code versioning, which gives me more control over my workflow, like I can copy the code base and undertake a large-scale project in the copy and then either merge it back in or delete it, without having any of the changes affect the "real" site in the meantime. This is all nerdy developer stuff, but it frees me up to do some bigger things that I couldn't before.

I don't like to spoil future play rules in Rock Block, but this is worth it as an example. Back in Classic Rock Block, the Overtime play rule spawned a second concert if the first concert ended in a draw, and so on in a series until someone finally won, which was a corner-cutting solution to achieve the effect that I wanted. This time, I want to do it right: The subsequent "concerts" will continue to appear on the same page as the first, stretching on down the page into infinity until one of the opponents finally wins. That requires too much construction work on the concerts page for me to undertake it now, because it would break too many concerts already underway, and I don't want to take the concerts offline for hours to work on something that I might not even finish in one day. But with the new development environment, I can approach that kind of project with confidence and convenience. Expect the Overtime rule to (re-)appear in Rock Block in the coming months, and more rules like it that I couldn't pull off before.

Here's an even bigger undertaking: I want to streamline the celebrity goo creation process, for myself and for players who create goos. I can install a server-side program called ImageMagick that can warp and distort images for us. This means that everything can be done right in the form without needing to make images on your own and upload them: You would type in the celebrity's name, an assortment of thumbnails scraped from the Internet would appear, you'd click on one, an assortment of different gooed images based on that source image would appear, you'd click on one, and you'd type in the other data like the clue to finish it. The entire process could happen fairly quickly (you could make a goo in 30 seconds if you had the clue in your head already) and without needing any outside software. I want a lot more players to submit goos, and I will probably increase the point bounty once this is done to encourage that, so I hope that this works out as planned. I'm currently making a large batch of goos to carry us through the end of the year while I get this new form built (it won't be easy for me to make goos on the new machine), so I have temporarily disabled Beju, but she'll be back shortly.

Between the above projects and some bug fixes that the new environment will make it easier for me to do (like the way that a concert will time out without actually ending until you visit the page), I have plenty of work ahead of me in the next few months. I am thinking ahead about the longer term, including building a new RPG using Node.js that will allow for much smoother and more complex interaction between the server and end user, enabling games that aren't really feasible to build in PHP. As always, I hope to see more people using the website, and I appreciate you spreading the word whenever you can. Thanks for helping our little community reach its nineteeth anniversary, and here's looking ahead to what's coming up in year twenty. :-)

Scott Hardie | November 9, 2015
So, funny story.

I mentioned above that I had just gained possession of an Ubuntu laptop. It was so new that I hadn't even set it up yet. A couple of nights after I wrote that, my Windows computer informed me that hard drive failure was imminent. I stayed up until 4am frantically copying files over to the new laptop. Good timing on getting a new machine, I guess!

Ever since then, I've been pushing myself to build that new goo creation form that I mentioned, since I only had enough goos in the queue to last through November 10. I didn't want to use online tools to make goos; I wanted all goos going forward to be generated using the fancy new form, now that I had a machine capable of running the software libraries necessary to run it.

I'm close, but I'm not going to finish by Tuesday. The entire website is now 100% in version control, itself a major undertaking that was a necessary precursor to the project. The form itself is about 70% built. I can type a celebrity's name, choose from a set of thumbnails, zoom in on the face, and choose from a series of auto-gooed versions of that face, and then type the clue and other details. But the form is still very buggy and needs some additional work before I can use it to make my own goos, and it does nothing yet to allow players to manage their own creations.

I'm hopeful to have it finished within the next two weekends, because making goos using online tools is kind of a pain. I'm considering running old GooCon goos on the website for a week or two just to buy some time.

For the moment, I have disabled the "Create a Goo" form. I want to honor all old goo creations that are already in the system without losing any or having to redo any. It's possible that a goo submitted the old way might be incompatible, so here's preventing any more. If you have a good idea for a goo, please hold on to it for a few weeks. Soon, you'll have a much better interface for submitting it to the site.

I'll post updates soon. Thanks for your patience during this unexpected turn of events.

Scott Hardie | November 21, 2015
It's been four weekends now that I've been working on this new goo creation form, and it's taken this long just to get my view working, let alone any view for players. I still intend to give players access to the new tools that let me generate celebrity goos directly on the server, but it's going to take me longer than November to finish that. For the time being, I have restored the old "Create a Goo" form and left the terms alone, so please feel free to keep submitting goos that way. When I get the revised tool ready for players, I'll make a further announcement. For the time being, i have to set this project aside to focus on other things. Thanks for your patience as I keep posting project updates on something that has occupied far too much of my time over the last few weeks. :-)

Scott Hardie | January 13, 2016
I don't know if I should bother mentioning this, but for whatever it's worth, I'd like to say that I'm aware that Celebrity Goo Game is in a creative rut and needs to break out.

When I built the aforementioned new admin tool for myself to make goos, what had been imagined as a grand new solution turned out to be severely limited in practice. There are only four distortion patterns that I can apply: The twirl, the wave, the oil paint, and the color change. I can apply a fifth (motion blur) on the copy of Funeratic running on my laptop, but it doesn't work on my host where the real site lives. I can make more varied goos by going out to websites like FotoFlexer, but doing so is lot more work. The repetitive, subpar distortion must be affecting my mental state, because I feel like I'm writing repetitive, subpar clues. Plus, I'm limited in which celebrities that I can add, for reasons too complicated to explain here, so less famous people like David Gunn require a lot more work for me to go around the form.

I'm working on improvements. I have found server-side software that I hope will allow me to generate more "traditional" goos, pulling parts of the image in different directions randomly, rather than following a boring fixed pattern. I'd also like to make changes to support a wider (unlimited) assortment of celebrities. If I can get these changes working, I'll convert the "Create a Goo" form, so that players can enjoy this tool that I have built for myself when they make their own goos. I'll continue to post updates on what has turned out to be a much longer process than I expected. Thanks for your patience.

Scott Hardie | January 14, 2016
Oops. Today's Movies goo is a good example of why the new system frustrates me: I made the goo on the server using a placeholder image, then I made a (hopefully) better image on my local computer using the motion blur effect. But I forgot to upload the final version to the server, so it's been live all day today using the wrong images. Nobody has solved it yet, so I'm going to run the intended version and pretend that this didn't happen. Hopefully I can fix this whole mess soon.