Schik
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There's a lot of work left to do, but the hold uploading process is at least good enough to take for a test drive. If you go to the new "Holds" board, there's a link in the announcement for the "Upload a hold" form - I wasn't quite sure where to put it. I'm sure mattcrampy will put a link to it on the site somewhere when he gets a chance.

When you upload a hold, a thread will be automatically created in the Holds board, with the hold attached. Other users can then rate your hold for difficulty and quality. There's no page on the main site listing all the available holds just yet - I'll be working with mattcrampy to get that running in the near future.

As always, if it breaks, let me know. If it just plain sucks, let me know.

To answer a couple potential questions before they come up, things definitely planned for the near future are:

- Making the sortable hold download page on the site
- Adding an "Add this hold to the Insert DROD Room image database" option.
- Allowing the hold author to update their hold, although this should be used sparingly.
- Adding an "Email me when a new hold is available" profile option.

[Edited by Mattcrampy on 11-18-2003 at 06:05 AM GMT: How about here?]

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eytanz
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I really, really like the interface. Well done to everyone involved!

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Schik
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eytanz wrote:
I really, really like the interface. Well done to everyone involved!

Thanks, man. High praise from a man with a critical eye.

Now I'm getting really antsy to get a bunch more functionality in place.

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Schik
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The "Insert DROD Room image" works for all holds uploaded to the "Holds" forum now! This was a big re-write, now drawing the rooms directly from the .hold files. It might be a little slower now, which makes sense considering what it's doing. I think it's worth it though, as it is fully automatic - all holds uploaded from now on will instantly appear in the room image database.

Those of you who have uploaded holds - if you go to your profile, there's a new section where you can change options for your holds. This allows you to modify the options you set when you uploaded, like description, theme, and difficulty. You can also hide rooms or levels from the image database if you don't want them to be seen.

Give it a try, and let me know if any problems come up!



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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Mattcrampy
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Neat!

I'll try and get the hold page up sometime tonight. Turns out I have no idea what it's doing, so I'll have to concentrate.

Matt

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The_Red_Hawk
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Is it possible to insert images of rooms that are not completed?

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Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
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.....the king of the skies.....

Schik
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The_Red_Hawk wrote:
Is it possible to insert images of rooms that are not completed?

No. With the continually changing nature of these holds, we'd end up with a bunch of broken links or broken images as new versions were uploaded. Or posts that make no sense, as we've seen rooms completely change over the development life of a hold.


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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
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Oneiromancer
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Schik wrote:
The "Insert DROD Room image" works for all holds uploaded to the "Holds" forum now!

I believe this was the pertinent information.

Game on,

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eytanz
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I think Red Hawk is concerned since Deep Hold is perpetually unfinished, at least if he carries through with his plans to make it bottomless. But I think it's best not too have holds which are too large anyway (they just become clunky and I think they play a bit slower too), so I'd recommend that he close Deep Hold soon, post it under "holds", and put his new levels in a new hold.

The new feature works great, by the way - but it might get a bit clunky once the number of submitted holds increases. Probably only a minor interface change, though (replacing the combo with some other sort of list).

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The_Red_Hawk
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Then why can't we just post a "version 1" and then a "version 2" later on to the holds forum because people may want to insert images of what a room *used* to be?

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Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

Schik
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Hawk, eytanz is already worried about the drop-down menu getting clunky when we have more holds - having multiple versions of the same hold would only make it worse.

If you were literally going to only have a version 1 and version 2, then why not just wait for version 2? If it would continue on to version 3, 4, 5, 6, etc., then one hold could consume the entire list of holds - keep in mind that one big motivation for the holds forum was to create a page on the main site where users can download holds. I'm guessing we'll have a lot of visitors to the site that don't get into the forums for one reason or another, but would love to download user-created holds. I'd rather they see a smaller list of completed holds than a huge list of beta-quality holds.

One more thing - if you were to upload say 16 (?) versions of your hold, one per new level, to the Holds forum, you're not going to get nearly as many votes per hold as if you submitted one completed hold. I certainly wouldn't go get each version, play through it, and comment on its merits - I'd rather get the most complete, bugless version out there and play just it. And if I were to get an older version that had some bugs that had been fixed in a later version, my opinion of the early version will be poor, and that will be reflected in the rating I give it.

Another solution is to allow the user to upload a new version of their hold with more levels and rooms, and have it replace their old version. The problem there is what I stated earlier - it will invalidate old pictures and links, and generally confuse people.

All in all, I agree with eytanz that the best option would be to make sure Deep Hold is complete in its current form, or perhaps add a special ending level, and upload it to the Holds forum, and then start a new one. Let's keep betas and works in progress in the Architecture forum.

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eytanz
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(note - written as a respond to Red_Hawk, Schik got his reply in while I was writing this)

It's too big a resource demand on the database, for a rather rare event; it's true that people playtesting a hold often will need to use screenshots, but they can just upload jpegs, which can be deleted in the future - records of playtesting don't need to survive for posterity. On the other hand, hint requests for finished holds remain important, which is why they need a permanent room image insertor.

The forum doesn't have to cater for the desires of every poster - it needs to serve the game and the common needs of everyone. Allowing room images for completed holds is important. Anything else is nice, but really not worth a minute of Schik's time, or computer resources.

[Edited by eytanz on 12-21-2003 at 10:45 PM GMT]

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The_Red_Hawk
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With Deep Hold, if I posted separate versions, I would post it as one version every 10 levels or so (in Holds, that is). Besides, couldn't someone delete the earlier versions?

The main reason I want it is so I can get room images from incompleted holds. If there is any other way to do it, it's fine to not be in that list.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

Schik
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The Holds forum is for *complete* holds. Done. Finished. Not in progress any more. These are holds that Joe Average picks up when he comes to drod.net, without ever even seeing the forum. When downloading these, Joe should be confident that they will work (almost) perfectly, from beginning to end. I'll even allow some leverage, as nobody's perfect - not even Dugan's Dungeon in earlier releases. Buuuut.....

How many bugs have been found in your early levels after you released level 10? A bunch. Joe is going to be very irritated when he's stuck for days on a room, and may never even find out that it was unsolvable because he never saw posts in the forum saying "Hey! Level 2, 1W is unsolvable!!"

And still, deleting earlier versions gives you the problem I've stated twice in this thread so far - it will break room images and image links.

Why do you need room images from incomplete holds so badly? For your playtesters? As eytanz said, they can make screenshots & attach them pretty easily, and when there are lots of different versions of a hold out there, this would probably be the least confusing way to deal with it.

I spent quite a good chunk of time working on this, and to be honest, I'm a little burned out on manipulating hold files in PHP. It was fun, challenging, and worth it, but I'm ready to work on something else for a while. Like 1.7, for instance. Or any of a dozen other forum enhancements I'd like to make. I do forum work on a volunteer basis, so I've got pretty limited time to work on it, and except for trivial things I try to work on what will give the community the most bang for the buck. I see a lot of worth in having a place to upload finished holds, and the ability to rate them and insert room images for them. I don't see as much worth in being able to insert images of rooms that aren't even complete.

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--Mahatma Gandhi

ErikH2000
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Schik wrote:
The "Insert DROD Room image" works for all holds uploaded to the "Holds" forum now! This was a big re-write, now drawing the rooms directly from the .hold files.

It works beautifully. Let me brag a little for you:

Our Schik has done some first-rate web programming here. He started out using a utility to convert holds in the drod database to MySQL format, which relies on a fair amount of existing code in DROD to perform the conversion. This was quite an accomplishment, but was still, in my opinion, much simpler than what the latest revision does. Publishing holds using the export files is the high-road solution, and takes more work to write. Schik has figured out how to read the export files (which are zip-compressed XML files) from PHP, which is pretty impressive to me.

-Erik

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Schik
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Publishing holds using the export files is the high-road solution, and takes more work to write. Schik has figured out how to read the export files (which are zip-compressed XML files) from PHP, which is pretty impressive to me.

When I made the first version, I didn't know PHP very well - just well enough to get by. Nor did I know MySQL, so I was really just scraping by. Add to that the fact that our server had an aging version of PHP, and I simply couldn't do what I'm doing now.

The old way would have needed me or some other admin to run a program on a PC that would generate a php script which inserted rooms into the database, then upload and execute that script on the server - a far cry from the current method that requires no admin intervention. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Having the source code that saves the XML files helped in a couple cases - I didn't expect variable sized records per tile, and it was obviously nice to know what tile "17" means without trial and error.

Anyways, thanks, I'm glad you're happy with the changes I've made.


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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

The_Red_Hawk
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Schik wrote:
Why do you need room images from incomplete holds so badly?

It would be a great convenience. Is there a way to put the images on without them being in the images list? (not including screenshots)

Note: I am not referring to posting different versions of holds any more in the holds forum, just being able to have them under the image list.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

The_Red_Hawk wrote:
It would be a great convenience. Is there a way to put the images on without them being in the images list? (not including screenshots)

While the current forum software cannot do this, it is certainly possible to write code to do that. However, to be quite frank, I've got a lot of other things I'd rather spend my DROD time on.

I'll keep it in mind, however it's very low priority on my list.


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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi