A brand new online poker game will be coming soon to a browser near you.  Bluff This is in beta testing right now, and is an RPG poker game.  Your characters will start at level 1 and gain skills in reading, bluffing, and slow playing.  Money is distributed through Penny Ante games which will ensure value.

Bluff This will not allow you to play for real money.  It’s illegal in the United States, so that can’t be done.  Bluff This uses play money.  The real problem with that is that people will discard the value of play money because they can always just reload, so the poker game suffers.  This is not true on Bluff This.  Bluff This uses a Penny Ante game to distribute money.  In Penny Ante there is no blinds, only a $0.01 ante for each player.  If you have no money, you are given this $0.01 for free and placed all-in.  This is a fair system and means that losing all of your money pays a real penalty.  You have to wait until you win a hand at the Penny Ante table, and then make use of those winnings before you get ante’d out.  Once you graduate up to the next table, there will be real games going on.

In Bluff This, you gain experience points every time you show a hand at the end.  You also get additional experience points if you beat someone who shows their hand.  As you move up levels, you get skill which allow you to get reads on other players, or notice when other players are getting reads.  A tiny sweat drop appears on a player when they have a worse hand than you, or a plus sign when their hand is better.  A small eye appears when that player gets a read on another player.  Of course, your skills and attributes (instinct, game, awareness, poise) help prevent others from getting reads on you.  As you get skills, you also unlock additional skills, like being able to read if a player caught the river or flopped a set.

If you want to help Beta Test the game, point your browser to beta (dot) bluffthis (dot) com.  I do not want to link this online because I don’t want Google to crawl it just yet.  See you at the tables!

Light-Bot is a robot programming game and this article gives you all the programs to complete the game.  I’m a programmer, of course, so this helps a lot.  If you want to play this, you can play it on Kongregate:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Coolio_Naito/light-bot

F: Forward
R: Right
L: Left
J: Jump
B: Light Bulb
1: Function 1
2: Function 2

Level 1: Program your bot to move and light up the blue tiles!
Main: FFB

Level 2: Try turning your bot!
Main: FLFRFFFRFB

Level 3: Jumping can get you over barriers!
Main: FJJFLBFBFB

Level 4: Jumping can also get you to new heights!
Main: FJJFRFFFFFB

Level 5: Get it now?
Main: JFFLFFFLJJJB

Level 6: Not enough space? Try creating Functions using F1 and F2
Main: F1R1BJR2RR22
F1: JJ
F2: FFFB

Level 7: RE-USING functions is great for REPETITIVE tasks!
Main: 1RFR1
F1: 2222
F2: BFBF

Level 8: Putting the “fun” back in “functions”!
Main: JF111R1
F1: BFFBRFF

Level 9: Now you’re thinking like a programmer.
Main: JLJ1111
F1: BJBFBJR

Level 10: Do you feel your mind getting numb yet?
Main: FFF11BRR1JR2
F1: JFLJFRJF
F2: JL1FB

Level 11: Second-to-last level… up to it?
Main: 1RJR1RJR1
F1: 22LJL22
F2: BFBFBFBF

Level 12: The Final Level Don’t get dizzy!
Main: FJBL1R1R11R2
F1: BJBJBJ
F2: 1R1R1

GREAT JOB You are truly a programmer at heart!

Well, it seems that you learn something new every day. A user requested to have this program Xcode installed on her computer. After a little bit of research, it appears that Xcode allows you to develop applications on the mac and iPhone. I found the location to download the application and sent it to the user.

http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html – Just in case anyone was interested.

The download includes Xcode IDE, Dashcode, Instruments, interface builder, and the “rest” of the developer tools. If I knew how to develop code, this would interest me greatly! Oh well, at least I got to research something I never heard of before!

So, I do a SHOW PROCESSLIST command in phpMyAdmin, and it shows a ton of SELECT statements that have EXPLAIN in front of every one of them!  Now, I never even heard of the EXPLAIN keyword, so I certainly didn’t do it.

It took me a couple hours to figure out, but PHP was putting it there.  I had turned mysql.trace_mode = On because the comments said it would give me warnings to table/index scans.  It did give me a couple warnings where I didn’t call mysql_free_result(), so I was happy with it.  But apparently it also added EXPLAIN to all SELECT statements in order to get some data out of that.  Well, I don’t want to slow down the database, so I turned that off.  Good to know it’s there I guess, and exactly what it does.

SimYard runs on a webserver with eight cores.  The games themselves run as a PHP script on this machine.  Recently, the game hit the maximum speed because the PHP script was running as fast as it can and couldn’t keep up.  The solution was to make it multithreaded, and so the adventure begins.

The script used to work this way.  It would start up every hour and only run for an hour before shutting down.  It would start by loading all of the games that are in-progress.  Then it would process one at-bat for each of those games and look for new games to start.  Every at-bat was followed by saving the changed records to the database.  Anyone watching a game has an AJAX script which runs checking for new at-bats and refreshes when they are available.

This script wasn’t using up 1/8th of the CPU power on the webserver, though.  The time that the script was taking was split between actually calculating the results of the at-bat (which uses CPU) and saving the results to the database (which takes none on the webserver).  So I had a situation where the game was pegged out and couldn’t run faster, yet the server was only running at about 10-15% capacity.

After making a couple modifications to the way the data updates to ensure that these games could actually run multithreaded, I changed the way this logic works.  Now, the script starts every five minutes.  It runs for five minutes, starting by loading up any abandoned games which have not been active for at least five minutes.  Then, it enters the same loop where it looks for new games to start and runs them.  The difference is that once the five minutes are up, it stops adding new games.  It just continues to run the current games it has.  Once all those games are finished, the script exits.

This is working well.  It’s resulting in a return to the fast gaming before SimYard got busy.  And it’s much more scalable.

The newest baseball simulator on the web is getting better.  SimYard is undergoing improvements this month which will make the game deeper and the gameplay better.  If you haven’t checked out the best baseball simulator on the web, now is the time.

A new bidding system will be launched, allowing public bids to be made throughout the season on players.  Players who have expiring contracts will give “Buy Now” contract extensions to their current teams based on the public bids.  This will lead to a much more consistent salary for all of the players.

In addition, many of the players have been working to compile a wish list of features, and I plan to implement many of them.  In my opinion one of the biggest things that makes SimYard so worth playing is the fact that there’s an active administrator working on it full time.  Yes, this is my full time job.

So stop by SimYard.  It’s free to play pick-up games in the park, and you can even qualify for the postseason tournament.  If you want to take the team to the next level, you can get a Stadium Permit which allows you to have a farm system of three teams.  The bottom team can play pick-up games in the park while the other two join leagues and play scheduled games all month in their league with a postseason at the end.

It’s a lot of fun.  Come by SimYard today and start playing your franchise now!

I really enjoy giving praise much more than I like giving criticism, although nowadays there seems to be less opportunity to do it.  I’ve been given the opportunity here, and I want to take it.  Hello, blog!

I ordered two servers for SimYard, my baseball management simulator that’s opening soon.  I was given an estimated arrival date of 1/21 (two days ago).  On 1/18, I asked my salesman for an update on the delivery, and was ignored.  I followed up on Monday, 1/21, and found out that the first had been shipped and the second was going out soon.  Yesterday, 1/22, I finally get an e-mail from my salesman with the tracking numbers of the two packages, and I’m told they’re going FedEx Freight.

So, I tracked the numbers.  The first server had been sitting at my local facility since 1/19, waiting for a delivery appointment.  It was too late in the day to get it the same day, so they scheduled an appointment for today from 10-2.  This morning, at 8:30, I checked the tracking numbers and saw that the second server had arrived three hours prior.  I called Fedex again, and they checked into the status of my delivery truck.  It was still being loaded, so they’re putting the second server onto the truck also, and both will be delivered today.

Maybe this isn’t such a big deal.  Maybe this type of customer service doesn’t qualify for any special praise at all.  Maybe this is the kind of customer service that we should be expecting all the time.  Or maybe it just seems a lot more special because of the contrast between the salesman who didn’t even care enough to spell my name right and the people at FedEx who apparently take customer service very seriously.

I’m calling SimYard a “baseball management simulator”, but it’s more like a “baseball owner /manager simulator”.  There are some elements of managing involved, like setting lineups, pitching rotations, and choosing the closers, but there’s also team management and ownership elements as well.

When you sign up and get a team, you own that team.  You can cut players from it, and if someone wants to play for you, you can add them to your roster.  You start with a 25-man roster, but you can have up to 40 men if you find more guys to join your team.  You choose which teams to play and when.  You can choose exactly which pitcher to start, and you can adjust your lineup before the game begins.

Once you get a stadium and join a league, your team will play 162 games per season, and each season is 26 days long.  If you do the math, that’s about 6-7 games per day, and they’re at least two hours apart.  It would be unrealistic to think that you could be present for each of them, but there’s a computer manager that takes care of the on-field decisions.  He decides when to pull a pitcher, who to pinch hit with, and when to intentionally walk a player.  When a player is trying to steal, it’s the player on the field that decides exactly which pitch he’s going to go on.  If you’re watching the game, you can also provide some instructions to the dugout, such as to pull a pitcher, or to put a certain player into the game.

You can see the current status of SimYard on the website, simyard.com, until the end of the month when the beta test starts.  SimYard plays a season every month, and it uses real year numbers.  So the site will start testing with the 1898 season.  I am hoping that there won’t be any need for a wipe of the data on the website, and this data will become the historical data for the game.  It will be a unique opportunity to make history, and I hope you’ll join us for it.

The baseball simulator I am creating will be ready for Beta Testing at the end of the month.  Since each month will be its own season, it’s an ideal time to open it up. I will be looking for beta testers so that we can start playing serious seasons, train the players, and make sure everything is balancing out.

If you want to be a beta tester, bookmark the site www.simyard.com and check back at the end of the month.  Once the beta test is complete, the website will use a subscription model.  Free accounts will still be able to play in the public fields, which will have its own tournament at the end of each season.  Upgraded accounts will be able to create and join leagues, have their own stadiums and finances, and draft the best players from the teams playing in the public fields.

In the meantime, I have posted some more screenshots on the site.

All day I’ve been playing baseball in the park, and now my pitchers are all tired and worn out.  So, I’m waiting for them to get their stamina back to go another round.  The play interface is pretty neat, I think.  I added screen shots showing what’s going on and put them on the splash page that’s up for SimYard.  Here are the three new ones:

The Park – This is where you go to find games to play.  Once two teams enter the dugout, they choose their starters, their lineups, and the game begins.  The players on the right are all of your pitchers so you can see their status before entering a game.  The pitchers highlighted in red are worn out and need the break indicated before they can pitch again.  You can pitch them on short rest, but there’s a limit to it, and they won’t be as effective.

Team List – These are the teams I created so far.  They’re displayed ordered by number of fans, record, and most games played.  This is just for teams that aren’t in leagues, though.  In leagues, those would be divisions showing each team and their placement.

1024×768 1280×1024 – Screenshots of the live games in progress at two different resolutions.  The away lineup and pitchers are on the left, and the home team on the right.  You can see the stats for the game next to each player.  Pitchers have their pitch counts displayed also (and number of strikes).

Technically, this means I could open up the game to beta testers at any point, but I want to wait until I get some more key features in place first.  I’m about to start working on some sort of draft or other distribution system for new players.  This should be challenging considering there could be thousands of teams which are going to want new players.