Category: quaddicted.com
3 more bounties are completed
Time to celebrate! It’s bounty time.
1) mh finished “.lit support to aguirRe’s tools”. He even added multi-threading so you people with multi-core processors will light much faster now. You can download the finished new light.exe tool here. 50$ went to PAWS Animal Welfare Society. Thanks mh!
2) Two more bounties will also be closed: “Origin brush support to aguirRe’s tools and “.qc code to use origin brushes”.
Those were meant to get an easy solution for rotating solid things (imagine doors or gears). Recent developments made that idea obsolete.
First avirox posted a QC tutorial for QuakeWorld. Then Baker adapted that to NetQuake and provided an example mod & map. gb also jumped onto the bandwagon with a mod & map.
So there is an easy way now and no need for those origin brush bounties anymore. Hooray! Because half the Quake developer community was involved, there is no-one to fairly award the bounty to. Instead it will go to an yet unannounced project (if they can need it) related to Inside3D which – once ready – will greatly benefit everyone.
3) In addition I was contacted by the QuakeForge (yes, that project is alive!) developer Taniwha:
QF’s tools (qfbsp, qfvis) support [hint/skip/detail brushes], though there may be bugs as I have not been able to test them properly.
So, mappers, please test those. Help bugfixing and tell me if they qualify for the bounty. I don’t even know what those things do (apart from skip).
4) I sent a mail to the person who worked on the Vorbis bounty again. Hopefully there will be a reply.
Update: The mail to the Vorbis bounty developer bounced back as “Unrouteable address”. Meh!
The Injector database is now dynamically created from the main database
Task 1 from http://www.quaddicted.com/quaddictedcom/wait-1messagehelp/ is done! By myself! Hooray!
Thanks to my namesake spirit (play his map!) for reminding me how easy the first part would be (it was) and megaman for moral support and hints on the xml creation. I also fixed some descriptions in the database. Apparently I dropped quite a few description parts with quotes in them when I imported, oops.
“wait” “-1″;”message” “help!”
Some information first: The Quaddicted map archive’s reviews/ratings/comments are nowadays stored in a SQLite database. I wrote the PHP code around it and it is terrible and a pain in the ass to maintain. The Quake Injector uses XML.
Previously everything was XML (one file per map), for updates I concatenated all files into one and then used XSLT to render the Quake Injector XML (who am I kidding, I manually edited when a new map came out). For the actual website I used XSLT to render HTML files and uploaded those. But then I did realised that a database would be better after all and actually needed for having proper ratings and comments. SQLite is nice because it is just one file. So I implemented the bare functionality needed for the site to appear working like before (plus the new features).
Now the site is stuck in between the old and the real new. Adding maps to the database must be done manually (and thus I don’t do it), the XML is not automatically created, etc. These next steps are over my head and I am procrastinating. So I worked on other things (you’ll see). negke probably hates me by now.
So, I hope to find some help from the community. These are the most important steps that need to be done:
Get all the map information into the database. And create something that nicely (eg cached) exports the information needed by the Quake Injector into http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/quaddicted_database.xmlCurrently there is a mixture. Some things are only in the database (eg the included files), others are only in the XML (eg the whole techinfo stuff).
Where I got stuck: I could not decide if I rather have several new tables (eg for the startmaps and dependencies) or simply use comma-seperated fields.
Done by myself!Write something that allows user authentication against a FluxBB installation (MySQL database) for the reviews and comments. Statistics about reviews/ratings/comments would still be stored in an independent table. But someone should be able to register in FluxBB and then be logged in to the reviews section with the same details/cookie. There really should only be one account needed for everything.Where I got stuck: I did not even start thinking how one could do this.
Done by myself!Write an “add file” thing for me that scans the zip, asks for a screenshot, provides text fields for manual information. I have an old script by Sajt that I badly hacked for the changing needs but I would go mad if I tried to add sqlite support (currently it “only” renders a html/xml file), add functionality to the zip scanning (it already produces the “included files” list but now we need a CRC for each file too) or even add simple text fields the Injector needs.Where I got stuck: Not sure, I just avoid it as it would be a considerable chunk of work for me.
Done by the amazing Sajt!- Possibly rewrite the whole reviews/ratings/comments php code from scratch.
Where I got stuck: My clueless spaghetti code of despair. MVC might have been a good idea I guess…
As you can see these tasks depend on each other which really is not motivating me at all.
We can definitely talk about some compensation.
Hooray for backups
I just accidentally (oh Filezilla, why is there no decent FTP program…) all the code related to the maps listing(s). Backup was 4 weeks old (oh Spirit, why have you still not automated this?) and I did work on some things but forgot which. So if you notice anything missing (shut up about new maps missing) please tell me about it.
Weeding out spam user accounts
Just a small and quick update. I forgot to add some spam protection on the account registration which led to some suspicious accounts.
nodyfxgqm, ynqsyh, srfempu, tfiubhjkoqa, if you are legitimate users, please tell me in the next 7 days. Otherwise these accounts will be deleted. I strongly support anonymity, so such account names are welcome. But due to the previously missing robot protection this are more likely to be non-flesh intruders.
edit: They are gone
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