I’ve got arcade pads.
November 8, 2021
Oh Wow
January 3, 2018
In which I discuss building my third score tracker in fifteen years.
So there’s a new project on the horizon, like I said in the more from yesterday. A score tracker that’s StepMania-friendly. And I’m gonna be honest, this is mostly for my benefit. I want to have some visual indication of how I’m approaching my goal of “95% of all available DP in DDR Extreme” as a cool-ass graph and all those bells and whistles. But honestly, when using a Framework like Laravel, making it so others can also use it is really the easiest part of the thing. I’ve gotten quite proficient in the framework, and I should be able to knock it out before the domain is registered.
Oh yeah, the domain.
I don’t remember if I actually talked about wanting to register full.com.bo here before. But I did. And I had ambitions of it being a unified score tracker, so one tracker for all your games you play. I did a score tracker for PIU for a while thinking it worked like DDR. You’ve got a set number of DP available, score it how you want, whatever. It turns out you can employ a few little tricks to actually game free perfects out of the song on the arcade versions. Which is neat, but also makes this kind of hard.
A unified score tracker for many arcade games also introduces a number of issues in sourcing reliable data, and is generally shaping up to be a tremendous pain in my ass. So I’m not doing a unified score tracker. I’m doing one centered on StepMania, and making use of StepMania’s way of handling things. E.g., fields in the database for marvelous, perfect, and so on use the Stepmania code conventions of W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, Miss, Held, and LetGo. Tier01 instead of AAAA, Tier02 for AAA, and so on. Why do all that crap? Because, I can still make it a unified score tracker for the different games that Stepmania can emulate. So Pump is still doable, provided you’re playing it on StepMania.
Going this route, I can use a much simpler database schema that totals about 13 tables for the whole system, which covers everything from user authentication, authorization, and preferences to password resets, to metadata about each game, full localization support, room for rich details for each song, and the scores themselves.
I mentioned on Facebook yesterday that people are going to ask about cheating/proof/etc., and there will be only one question on the FAQ, and it will be:
Q: What if I suspect someone is posting fake scores or cheating?
A: Who cares? Shut up.
Let’s be real, a lot of people that are still in the game own their own machines and there’s not a goddamn thing stopping them from adjusting the timing windows in the operator menu and then taking full credit for an MFC. And I really don’t give a fuck. Like, if they’re cheating, they’re cheating, they know they’re cheating, why should it bother you? I might give people the option to hide all scores for a user, but it’s way, way down my list of things to give a shit about.
…
You know what, never mind. My big reveal was supposed to be that thelegendofmax.com became available and I snatched it. But someone else snatched the fucking thing again as soon as it dropped again even though I was watching for it a-fucking-gain.Â
The funny thing is I don’t think the site ever had ads on it. Meaning people over the years have spent at least a hundred bucks on renewals for a domain that, historically, has never made anyone a dime.
Whatever. We’ll rock it on .net for a while. I’m gonna try to import our old posts and such too at some point.
December 22, 2017
Shivering with antici…
I didn’t mean to cliffhanger this shit. I thought the thing would happen like a day or two after that post. It’s still coming.
Also I cleaned up the site after a dodgy plugin and theme update started mining your computers for bitcoins.
Doing that broke everything on the sidebar. So I fixed that too.
But seriously, I’m excited for the thing. It’s coming.
November 27, 2017
Watch This Space
Like the sage professor Ab-Soul once said:
Oh, shit. Somethin’ bout to happen.
March 11, 2016
I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.
So I saw the post yesterday on reddit on how Google’s AlphaGo AI beat a world-class Go player for the second consecutive time. This is a big deal given that Go has a rather intractable nature, it’s as much felt as analyzed at the top level. It also reminded me that I tried to learn Go like a year ago.
While I understand the rules, the aim of the game, and more or less how to score it, I’m missing something rather important, which is understanding the context of why I would want to, or not want to, make a particular move. How to defend myself, how to spot an attack before it gets out of hand. I’m so bad at this part of it.
For reference, the ranking system in Go starts with 30 Kyu at the bottom of the tier, it counts down as you get better, to 1 Kyu, then there’s 1 Dan, and it starts counting up. So 30 is the bottom, to be clear.
According to this Go AI, I am 32 Kyu. That’s like, bizarro world bad. I’m that goddamn bad. The game is spotting me 4 turns, and I still blow it most of the time. I was twice given four black stones at the start of the game and lost by 89.5 and 88.5 points. To compare, it would be like if you were playing basketball, and you were given 40 points at the start of the game, then lost 129-40.
I am 8-23 with an average play of 32.1 Kyu. I mean, it’s better than the Sixers. But it would be like if the Sixers were still this bad against, like, an elementary school. I don’t actually know at what age the average Go player was this bad. Five? Probably.
What the fuck? I don’t think I’ve ever struggled so much at a game. I’m not great at chess, I don’t play it much, but I’m around an 1150 Elo. That’s better than most 5-year olds, anyway.
I think I’m going to plot my record over time and my rating and see if things ever get better. I don’t know if they will.
March 10, 2016
I haven’t been on here in so long
That I actually forgot I recreated the site in WordPress. Dang.
May 18, 2013
Phoenix From Ashes
So TLoM’s been quite a while with no update. This isn’t terribly unusual. But I’m here because I’ve had something pretty freaking awful happen: My entire simfile library has been lost. There was something like 5900 songs in it, a lot of stuff from the OGs of StepMania, the height of it’s popularity. And it’s occurring to me that this site is important. It can preserve the legacy of a game that I love. I’ve got a new purpose with TLoM, and an awful lot of motivation to do it right. I’m going to fight and scrap and scour the crusty armpits of the internet until I find every last one of those fucking songs, and I’m going to give them a forever home, right here. Just you watch.
April 7, 2012
Full Circle: TLoM Car Mix v1.0 Released
After 11 builds leading up to it, and almost 9 years after beginning, TLoM Car Mix is available on CD-replacement service Spotify, as a three-CD set entitled Crossovers. Â They’re broken down like so:
CD1: My favorites from each of the original Car Mixes from 2003-2005.
CD2: Omissions, songs that deserved to be in the original mixes but weren’t. Â I had to have known about them prior to 2006 to be considered for inclusion.
CD3: The new generation of the car mix, selections that I’m currently listening to. Â Only songs released in 2006 or later were considered for inclusion.
Subscribe to them here: CD1 | CD2 | CD3 | Complete 3CD Playlist
Whether people still care about them or not, I had a lot of fun, more than even makes sense, making the original compilation. Â Starting some time around v0.5 I started designing with the concept of “flow” in mind, not an actual mix but a transition from song to song that is pleasing over the course of the album. Â I tried to keep that spirit alive with CD 2 and 3. Â These are all burnable, if one was able to find all the songs (or rip via Stereo Mix). Â In an upcoming post I’ll go deeper into why the songs were chosen for 1.0, and what music has meant to me and the site over time.