NAB622

Cagelight and I talked some more, and he liked the idea of incorporating an element from Morrowind. So disregard my post above; this is far more interesting. We still need something to replace Drain. if anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. Also, any user can choose any force power they want. There is no limit on light side or dark side abilities. There is also no force point system. Force powers will now have several casting types. I know this is complicated, but we would like to simplify this with a special menu and several default binds, to make it far less intimidating. Self will apply to the user only, and uses the least energy. (Yes, you will be able to lightning yourself.) Touch will affect anything the player touches. It will use the energy equivalent of self. Cone will affect a small area in front of the player, facing forward. It will use a moderate amount of energy. Area will force the user to put away their lightsaber or gun, and both hands will be used to cast the power. It will use a large amount of energy. Projectile will use a huge amount of energy and will be fired toward the player's crosshairs. The effect will diminish greatly over range. The distance will likely be a server side Cvar, so it can be changed on a per-server basis. Toggle powers can be used indefinitely, as long as the user has force energy left to cast with. Multiple toggle powers can be used simultaneously. Also, force energy will continue to recharge while a toggle power is being used, but it will be diminished. Neutral powers Light Side Powers Dark Side Powers

I forgot to mention - there will be no restriction between dark side and light side powers. Users will allowed whatever powers they want. They will be labeled for light side, dark side, and neutral, but it is of no consequence. Saber throw is not going anywhere. I love saber throw. Speed is hard to control and honestly kind of useless in JAMP. If you have suggestions for making it less useless, I am all ears. I would *much* rather have levitate over speed, though, if I had a choice. Edit: honestly I would rather have a 'force slow' attack than force speed. Levitate will have the ability to throw objects at every level. Levitate will interact with push and pull. So if you want to throw something, just levitate it and push it. Kind of like how the movies always do it. And if you see an object coming toward you, you can push back on it. Again, just like the movies. If you see someone throwing their light saber, pull on it to make them drop it. The goal here is to make the force abilities as organic as possible, to give players creative freedom to use or misuse them however they see fit. Heal and drain pose a bit of an issue for gameplay. Both of them are simply too powerful, and FAR too instantaneous. I'm perfectly fine with players having the ability to heal themselves, but it needs a lot of refining. I'm not sure what to do with it honestly. Force freeze? Do elaborate. I don't recall any such power, but then again I hated Episode III and only watched it once or twice. New saber styles will not happen in JAOWNT for a while, if at all. I'm okay with having *lots* of new styles, but there is a LOT of background work that we need to actually succeed in before that will happen. It is certainly something we'd enjoy, but why waste the effort doing it with Ghoul2 when you can make a better system that is far easier and modular. Cagelight and I both share a disdain for Ghoul2, and I'm sure most other coders do as well. I'm not willing to make a whole new move set in ghoul2, just for it to be outdated or useless the minute I'm finished with it. At some point we WILL be tweaking the weapons a lot, but that is not happening yet. Right now we’re in the planning phase for the force powers, and I would hate to make highly controversial changes without at least getting some kind of input first. Believe me, this is merely the tip of the iceberg.

I'm not opposed to a modular system, although at the moment, I was planning on using cvars for everything and setting all parameters in cfg files. That way, servers can change anything on the fly, and users can make simple mods to the current abilities without a code mod.

According to Cagelight, this error is caused by Firefox not allowing Javascript to parse the CSS. If I recall correctly, there are two places where this is done in ParaTracker. Worst case scenario, we might be able to substitute a default value if the CSS part fails.....I'll have to sleep on this one, though.

With ParaTracker done, I hope to get Linux installed on my computer soon (Again) and get moving on this project in earnest with Cagelight. Since there is already a working physics engine, and the force powers are both dated and boring, Cagelight and I were talking about what to change about them. The goal is to make the force powers interact with both the physics engine, and other force powers. Here is what we came up with so far. Feedback is welcome! If you have any idea what to replace heal, protect or drain with.....please speak up!

Ahhhhh, I did not know this. I will give it a fresh go after I finish with SoF2. Thank you, that helps a lot.

I downloaded and started MB2 for the first time ever, hoping to get levelshots. Apparently, cheats are not allowed (So I can't noclip to get levelshots, or even explore the maps to find nice things for levelshots) and I can't start the maps in base openJK due to a vehicle extensions error, and I have no desire to pick through their assets removing vehicles to get it to work. Is it even possible to use noclip in MB2? Alternatively, if someone is willing to provide levelshots to us under MIT license, we will accept them. Otherwise....I think I'm done with MB2 and will move on to games/mods that are easier.

Try this CSS file. I fixed that issue for you as per Cagelight's instructions, but I also added a few other styles that were missing from minor updates. http://paratracker.dogi.us/Circa2.css Even though I didn't want to initially, I also made the ParaTracker logo / version number a clickable link that opens the setup page. I hope that's okay with everyone. If you don't like it, just speak up and I will remove it. After a bit of thought, it just....made sense to have it.

ParaTracker 1.4 is live. Any bugs, let us know. If you need assistance setting up things like a custom skin, let us know. Big changes this release are: Refreshes are now butter smooth (no page reload) The player list can be sorted several different ways The color of the scrollbar can be customized An analytics button has been added directly in the tracker Website: http://paratracker.dogi.us/ Sample: http://paratracker.dogi.us/?ip=dogi.us&port=29070&skin=Metallic%20Console&filterOffendingServerNameSymbols=true&displayGameName=true&enableAutoRefresh=true&levelshotsEnabled=true&enableGeoIP=true&scrollShaftColor=039&scrollThumbColor=079

If all goes well, we will be updating some time tomorrow or the day after. The utilities will be organized nicely on the new page - use them to your advantage! This might be a bit bumpy, so if something breaks, let us know and we'll fix it.

Off-topic from the last several posts: Analytics looks like it's pretty much done, minus a little polishing. If anyone would like to do some bug testing, feel free. Here's a sample from SO's server: http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/utilities/Analytics.php?ip=so.jk3.in&port=29070 And here's one from my favorite CoD4 server to track: http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/utilities/Analytics.php?ip=66.150.121.164&port=28931 Click around on the graph to see more data on things. Edit: You can also link people to exactly what you're looking at, since parameters are set in the URL. If you have any issues, post a link here! Edit 2: Analytics data has been reset. Don't bother with it for a few days.

Fixed. Removed. If you know/learn of any other differences between JKG and base JA just give us a shout.

Currently, every server that is tracked by any user will continue to be tracked until it is offline for seven days. After that, the users will have to re-track the server, although the old data will remain. It is theoretically possible to use a JA master server; however, I have no knowledge of how to do this, and it is impractical given that we are tracking 10+ games. The load on the web server would be incredible.

By bitflags, I mean things like g_forcePowerDisable. See this link for the reason I am asking. http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/ParaTrackerDynamic.php#bitValueCalculator I hate to ask you to spell this out, but unfortunately I do not know C yet (And I am also very very tired) - if I'm reading this right, the gametypes for JKG would be something like this: 0 - FFA 1 - Duel 2 - Powerduel 3 - Single Player 4 - RPG City 5 - RPG Wilderness 6 - Team FFA 7 - CTF 8 - Warzone 9 - Ninelives 10 - Ticketed 11 - Roundbased Yes? If so, I will add them just like that.

I am still working on the most useful part of it, which will show how many players there are per map hour. Basically, it will be an easy way to see what maps people like most. The other thing I could see it being used for is to tell when a server is normally busy, so players know when to show up.

So we're still at least two weeks from release I think, but I wanted to get opinions on the final feature we're adding. ParaTracker is now continuously tracking every server that the users make it aware of, and saving the info to a database. We are still working on displaying the data to the clients, and this is where we need opinions. Circa, the following link is your server. The blue dots are the player count, and the pink bars are the map being played. Each map is a unique height. http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/utilities/Analytics.php?ip=so.jk3.in&port=29070 To see how it looks with more data, here's a popular CoD4 server with a map rotation every 15 minutes or so: http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/utilities/Analytics.php?ip=66.150.121.164&port=28931 There will be controls for viewing different data times and viewing a few other parameters but I am not there yet. For now, I would appreciate your feedback!

Not yet. Finishing ParaTracker first, then I intend to jump on board this project. That's why development on ParaTracker will cease after the next big update.

Circa - I modified your CSS file to be compatible with the upcoming release. I tried not to touch anything without good reason, however I did remove the float: left; property from the color classes at the bottom, since it broke the player list when teams were added. I understand you probably won't use it for teams, so feel free to add it back if you like. Link: http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/Circa.css It will probably need edited one more time in the future, but in the meantime it won't break anything when we update the back end. Edit: The new css file may break things, specifically the player list, so hang on to the old one.

We still have some time left before release, but I wanted to know if anyone has an opinion on the new layout of the tracker utilities. Click the button at the top of the page to open them. http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/ParaTrackerDynamic.php Most of the games that we plan to support are already added. All we need now is levelshots and to finish analytics. After this release, ParaTracker is intended to be maintenance only; we do not plan on adding any more features. We will do bug fixes and game support, but that is all. So if you want something added, now is the time to speak up. As always, opinions are welcome.

Most of the reconstruction process is complete. Here's a preview of what's coming. If anyone has feedback, I would like to hear it before going much further. These changes are being rolled out on the back end, and will affect all users. Link: http://testbed.dogi.us/ParaTracker/ParaTrackerDynamic.php?ip=66.150.121.164&port=28931&skin=Metallic%20Console&filterOffendingServerNameSymbols=true&displayGameName=true&enableAutoRefresh=true&levelshotsEnabled=true The two biggest changes are that reloads are now butter smooth, and clicking on the column headers for the player list will re-sort the list. Edit: Also, level changes are now handled differently. The levelshots will transition to static, buffer the new images, and then transition back to the images. Also, a lot of former PHP functions have been pushed off onto the client and are done with Javascript now, so response times under load should be faster.

JediTracker was a free server tracker for Jedi Academy and several other games. You could give it the IP address and port of your server, and it would give you some HTML code to put on your website that would showcase your game. Many trackers over the years have come and gone, and every single for-profit tracker I've seen has failed, except for GameTracker. What's worse, the code is never open-sourced for them, to my knowledge. ParaTracker aims to fix both of these problems, by being both free and 100% open source.

You should have full control over the transitions with the CSS file. At the end of your custom CSS file, paste the following code, then allow transitions to test it: Effectively, it should override the existing 15 transitions with the same basic one. If it does not work, let me know, and I'll see about adding a method to choose transitions.

Thanks. I think I already had it fixed, although at this point I'm quite a ways into rewriting the output code, and that stuff needs to wait for a new version because of the significant number of changes, plus I need to test a bunch of stuff first (Housekeeping stuff), By the way, I'm interested in your opinion - even though the levelshot transitions are disabled on your tracker, would you be opposed to allowing users to click on them to look through all the pictures manually?

I thought I knew what was causing that, but I guess not. Thanks for the heads up, we'll look into it. Edit: Any time you run into an error in ParaTracker, check the page in the iframe - if it's throwing any errors, they will be in the HTML comment at the top, right after the version number. Those messages are invaluable to us for bug finding.

We will eventually be making a move to JSON for the server data, but that update will roll out automatically on the back end. If you need to add any CSS classes to your custom skin for compatibility, I will let you know. The end result of using JSON for the data is that the refreshes will not blink, since the page will never reload. The tracker should also perform much better under high load, due to it loading two text files per page load instead of 12 or more.