"Edit"

So as it turns out, I ended up trading the server I've been hosting for half a year for the other type of server. I believe that either way, this new server should become more popular faster than the other one. I've spent almost a week so far making many modifications to the game and how it works.

I still have not set up a donation type thing. But when I do, I might then be able to consider buying another VPS for which I can host my old server again, thus having two servers.

It's kind of interesting, seeing how the promotion of this server is going. I'm already having people say that my server is a lot 'better' than others. Even more surprisingly, people are literally asking me if there's a way to donate yet. I keep telling them that I'm more focused on development related to balancing the server and whatnot first however.

Even more interesting, is that I'm just burning through all the modifications I've planned to make. Only half a year ago did I have little clue what I was doing trying to modify anything, and now I'm able to make many more intricate changes. I think that I might also start making some things for the modding community related to that game. It'd be good experience for me as well. It has been almost three years since I last had anything interesting enough to program that I'd spent a week straight doing it. This is also exactly the type of path that leads to me learning a lot more about a language. Knowledge of assembly coding doesn't transfer very much to normal programming unfortunately. They're both very different. At least to me they are. Assembly is actually considered much harder, but I find normal programming harder. This is likely because I just got used to assembly language first. I've started filling my notebooks with programming stuff again, as well as having dreams about it. It's kinda weird, but making some algorithm is just that much fun to me. The classes I ask the most questions in are math and science. In a purely subjective class like Humanities, I retain almost no interest in the attempts to over glorify one's opinions about art. There is little or no real knowledge to be gained from it.

In any case, I believe I should set a goal for this server stuff. If I can meet a quota of active donators, donating $3 a month, I'll be able to open another server again. Before the end of the year, I hope that I'll have all my coding done. This also includes setting up a unique color theme for my server that's more uniform than what I have now, which is almost as much work as any of the coding. And that's not including any special graphics designing. I may also be increasing the specs of my server to have more RAM to decrease the chance of having one shut down accidentally by being overloaded.

The most interesting goal will be having a community in the first place, all started by me. I really only started this because I couldn't find a server or community to play on occasionally that I liked, so I learned how to make one myself.

Updates

With Halloween coming around, came the Halloween update to the game server I run. Up until now, the server has only seen at most 16 players at a specific time of day. As soon as I updated to the new map and system, mostly because it was new stuff, my server was so full that I couldn't even join myself.

But with this update, meant I needed to update all of my client side modifications. My server was crashing me and people trying to join! Some of my modifications were outright outdated. I ended up having to redo the process of piecing together all the different modifications because my attempt at updating the core of it all made it impossible to even join the server without crashing the entire thing. It took me a few hours, but it is up and working now.

This is a good step however. It's been months since I had to really make such a big update. I finally got around to adding reserved slots for example. Reserved slots allow me to give special permissions to people, such as myself, to join the server even if it is full. And with my server now on equal grounds with any other server running the same new map, people are more likely to join mines. This has given me the incentive I need to focus on setting up a donation system and benefits. I'm also working on putting up some better advertisement of my own community through the server. I haven't so much as considered putting in a welcome message that explains what community the server is from and some of its basic rules.

After getting all this to work for my server, I would also have to figure out how to add a page to my website that links to paypal and see if I can get a friend to make a bot or something to update people's statuses, because until that I would need to manually approve everyone.

I'm also considering expanding my server. Right now I only host one type of game. But there's another game type that I'm particularly well known for amongst a few gaming communities. It takes a lot more work to set up, but is also a much more popular game mode. The problem being, I didn't want to just trade out my first game server for this, I'm busy with college, and it would double my server expenses to do so.

Programing Progress

As I figured, all the papers I have due for college and whatnot take up too much of my time to do much programming related stuff. My main focus now in relation to that is to edit the code for my Team Fortress 2 gaming server to offer donator benefits, to give people an incentive to donate $3 a month. It costs me around $30 a month to host the server, and it's been starting to get really popular. It started out with only two to five people going on it for an hour a day, but now I see a daily 16 people out of three 32 player limit. If I can get at least ten people to donate, the server pays for itself basically.

The work involved with setting this up, aside from just coding everything or finding code for the changes, is to test the server and whether or not all my client-side modifications can work together or if some may conflict with each other and not work. There might be other problems that can only be seen after a long time. For example, I learned that I can't just leave my server on the same map for people to play on, without massive lag accumulating after a few hours. I resolved this by adding a script that simply refreshes the map every four hours, as my server is a 24/7 gaming one. It's all a lot of work to set up and particularly, I'm not sure how to set up Paypal with my website to allow people to donate. I have a verified Paypal, but I'd need a way to record people's player identifications so I can update people's donation statuses. Some people are crafty enough to make bots that can do it all automatically but I know I'll have to at least edit the databases myself to add people to the donation list.

What is a Node?

To save you the time of Googling the definition, here it is!

A node is basically a communication endpoint in computer networking.

16 weeks for 16-bits

As challenged to do so by my current English professor, I have decided to undertake a simple goal during the next 16 weeks to complete studying all the information in a free online course for C++ offered by MIT.edu. Should I finish early, I'll move on to different free online courses offered at another university.

My goal program to make is a simple program that can perform ROTx encryption for unicode characters (which are 16-bit), read from a file, and written to another file.