I am a goon

A few precisations about the leaked patch notes.

Yes, I am a goon. Not only, I’m more gullible than what you expect. In fact a part of me still believes and hopes that those patch notes are real.

You see, the point is not what I believe, what I predict or expect. The point is that those patch notes, beside a few lines here an there, were damn good. They raised my faith on Blizzard by a fair amount in a way that doesn’t happen in months. A few days after, that Shane kiddo posted the Battleplan about the future of the game. And that battleplan, for the most part is crap. It completely fails to deliver any exciting information about the development of the game and, at best, is able to to get a yawn out of a reader. It basically says: “Don’t expect much if not what you see and what was already repeated at exhaustion”.

I believe the hype. No, I don’t believe bad hype because I can see that it brings nowhere. But the good hype is always good. Even when it’s faked. I think that who put together those patch notes, no matter if a dev, a normal player or a kid with too much time available, did a way better work to arouse the attention than that lame “Battleplan 2.0”. That’s the major victory. Whoever put together those patch notes kicked the ass of everyone at Blizzard and put to shame that official letter.

Whoever put together those patch note is a very good designer. Yes, it’s easy to think about stuff and write about it without actually specify much and do the work. But a lot of what was written was about usability features that are already possible with the infrastructure of the game. The fixes to the battlegrounds, the changes on the queues, the changes to the meeting stones and so on. Those are all features that should have been available in the game LONG AGO. And it’s a shame that so damn good changes are confined to be just a joke to entertain us bloggers. It’s Blizzard that should arouse our interest with innovative ideas and new features, it’s not our work to imagine stuff to entertain ourself while the game arduously wobbles forward.

Now tell me. What would you have chosen to be a fake, the battleplan or those patch notes? You know my answer.

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Blizzard crumbling down to pieces

It started a few months ago.

Or, better, a few years ago. We know that some important figures left Blizzard during the development of World of Warcraft. Arena.net and “Guild Wars” are one of the most notable fragment, Flagship Studios working on “Hellgate: London” is another.

Then there was the news of more devs leaving early this year to join a sub-division of NCSoft to work on an announced project. Which is what’s written in the link above.

World of Warcraft is starting to become a major phenomenon affecting and even overwhelming the whole game industry. What could stop it at this point? It’s simple, it can crumble from the inside.

I’m starting to see the leaks of devs above as the tip of the inceberg. In just a few days we have the news of more notable defections. Krones already spotted and commented one and I don’t have anything more to say about it. But he didn’t catch another that hit the news a few days before:

Castaway Entertainment is proud to announce that former Blizzard North studio lead Rick Seis has accepted the position of Technical Director and lead programmer for their current unannounced project. “I’m delighted that I will be able to rejoin friends and former coworkers from Blizzard North,” remarked Rick “and I look forward to reuniting with several others from that team very soon.”

Before joining Castaway, Rick held the position of development team lead at Blizzard North, the company responsible for the creation of the highly successful Action-RPG series Diablo. Prior to this position, Rick, who joined Blizzard North in 1994 as one of the company’s first employees, served as both a senior programmer on the original Diablo and the lead programmer of Diablo II. He has also functioned as the company’s director of technology.

We are very excited about acquiring more of the most important resources of Blizzard North: the people that comprised the team there were by far their most valuable assets,” stated Michael Scandizzo, president of Castaway Entertainment. “With the team we have built, we will be able to maintain the quality of development Blizzard North fans have come to expect.”

So not only we have the news of one more important dev leaving Blizzard, but also the implicit declaration that more will follow and that Blizzard won’t see anything if not the crumbs of what is left (which reminds me what recently happened at Turbine).

Blizzard North is gone. Completely. If someone was left after the leaks that spawned Arena.net and Flagship Studios, now has probably joined this newest studio-branch.

Blizzard South doesn’t seem much healthier either. We know that a first group left to join NCSoft and now, as Krones reported, we know that more left to start yet another independent studio working on an unannounced mmorpg.

Who’s left? No, really.

Krones writes:

I’m not sure how many of the original visionaries are still with Blizzard, but in the wings there is always new and old talent ready to replace the traitors.

I believe in authorship, myself. Blizzard’s qualities come from the single devs who worked within. Maybe more and better talents will join, but it will still be something new that just cannot be related to what was before.

Drupal upgraded to 4.6.3

It seems working. I messed with the database, reducing its dimension by half, cutting some obsolete parts and editing here and there. If you find garbage text or odd question marks in the past entries it’s because the database got corrupted before I was aware of the problem. I don’t have better backups.

The search engine is brand new and just awesome. Morbus suggested me to try trip search and that’s what I did. It has a few quirks and bugs so you may see SQL error messages on top of the page (the highlight module is also buggy). But it’s still functional and millions times better of the other default, poor version.

I also finally enabled the mighty Spam module 2.0 which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen (Jeremy is great, really). Hence everyone can now post comments without my approval. I also hacked the comment.module a little so that the titles of the comments default to “Re:” + title of the node. Which would make the “comment block” more usable.

Testing UTF8:

¥ · £ · € · $ · ¢ · ₡ · ₢ · ₣ · ₤ · ₥ · ₦ · ₧ · ₨ · ₩ · ₪ · ₫ · ₭ · ₮ · ₯

யாமறிந்த மொழிகளிலே தமிழ்மொழி போல் இனிதாவது எங்கும் காணோம்,
பாமரராய் விலங்குகளாய், உலகனைத்தும் இகழ்ச்சிசொலப் பான்மை கெட்டு,
நாமமது தமிழரெனக் கொண்டு இங்கு வாழ்ந்திடுதல் நன்றோ? சொல்லீர்!

काचं शक्नोम्यत्तुम् । नोपहिनस्ति माम् ॥

Μπορώ να φάω σπασμένα γυαλιά χωρίς να πάθω τίποτα.

ฉันกินกระจกได้ แต่มันไม่ทำให้ฉันเจ็บ

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The MySQL soap opera

UnConeD: drupal passes a bytestream consisting of utf-8 data to mysql if mysql is set to a plain 8-bit character then it will be treated as such. if it is set to utf-8, then it is treated as utf-8. but regardless, it is stored in the same fashion

It makes sense. In fact if you convert the tables and columns from latin1 to utf8, the content does not change. In latin1 you see three characters representing one utf8 character. But if you convert the db in utf8 (without changing the content of the fields), the database assumes that the three characters are then three utf8 characters, representing EIGHT latin1 characters. The content remains the same. This is why he says that they are stored in the same way.

My database started more than a year ago without the character encoding. But it always contained utf8 data stored in the classic iso/latin mode. When mysql got upgraded, all my database was automatically considered as latin. But the content in the tables was latin1 representing utf8. And, consequently, the data was sent out properly by Drupal as utf8.

Morb: UnConeD: alright. another stupid question. in mysql 4.1, all the tables are defaulted to latin1 for a charset. likewise, when they are dump’d, the table defs are latin1. that shouldn’t have any corruptive effect on utf-8 data?

UnConeD: morbus: no because latin-1 means, each character is a byte. so the utf-8 bytestream enters and leaves as is. it just doesn’t get interpreted correctly. the only place where it has an effect is on column data lengths

Here you ask the wrong question, this is the point. He is right because he assumes the database is in latin1 and the dump is again in latin1. So the utf8 data is still preserved because always coded as latin1, so retained.

The point is that the curruption isn’t because the utf8 data is converted to latin1 as you assume in your question. But the exact opposite.

The corruption I have in the database is the result of this fucking option that I see if I do a mysqldump -?

default-character-set utf8

I believe that mysqldump, by default, reads my latin1 data (three latin characters for one utf8), taking it as utf8 (three utf8 characters) and dumping it in a ISO-8859-1 (latin1) file.

Basically:
In the web page I have one character of utf8: ( ’ )
In the database that single character is encoded as three latin1 characters: ( ’ )
As I dump the database, mysqldump defaults to utf8. This means that he believes my database data is ALREADY in utf8 ( “ ) so three utf8 characters to dump in a latin1 .sql file. Resulting in this following crap: ( ’ )-latin equal to ( ’ )-utf8.

Morbus: UnConeD: without –default-character-set=”latin1″ on the mysqldump, the dump is corrupted. WITH that –d-c-s though, the curly quotes are fine. where “dump is corrupted” means “the curly quotes are messed up”

UnConeD: cut and paste from a mysqldump WITHOUT -d-c-s: in their 20’s and 30’s. and with -d-c-s: in their 20’s and 30’

I WISH I had that type of dump. In my latin1 database those three characters in the dump are what correctly represent one utf8 character. So it’s all good.

The point is that it’s not what I have in my dumps. Without the latin1 option my dumps show: ( ’ )

UnConeD: morbus: but that’s just the literal utf-8 bytes, what encoding are you viewing it in?

Morbus: no idea.

He is saying that it’s the latin1 encoding of the utf8 character. So if you are viewing the dump in latin, the dump is correct. The point is that I was seeing ( ’ ) in utf8 already. And a friggin ( ’ ) in the latin dump.

UnConeD: there’s your problem. you’re not using a utf-8 locale most likely.

Morbus: so, without the -d-c-s, if I reimported those characters into a fresh db, they’d still be fine?

If the dump you showed him was set in latin1 (so three characters for one utf8) he is correct to say that the dump was working properly. But that’s not what happened in my corruption problem.

Morbus: UnConeD: another question. So, the reason I’m seeing the garbled curly quotes is my shell encoding, fine. So, if I import the what-appears-to-be-garbled stuff, it’d still import correctly? What about if I dumped with the default-character-set (so that it looked fine in my shell) and then reimported? would that too still be fine?

UnConeD: morbus: no because you’d lose all non-latin1 characters

Morbus: on which? the –default-char-set?

UnConeD: yeah the overriding one

Bad. He is wrong here. Because my goddamn database is in latin1. If I export a latin1 database as latin1 there is no conflict. What I override is a wrongly defaulted mysqldump.

Could you forward him this mail to understand if what I’m saying is correct?


Thanks to both, really.

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Drupal not upgrading

Okay. I cannot get more tired than this. In the last three days I just worked on this problem.

All my backups are corrupted. I cannot get a dump of this version running currently because the dump corrupts the database. I cannot upgrade.

It’s fucked. I cannot do nothing, I passed an insane amount of hours on all this and the result is just my site completely broken and unrecoverable.

Thank you.

If you want to have an idea about what’s wrong look here. It’s a freshly installed version of drupal with the database set to utf8. As you can see it’s all completely broken, I even added a dump of the db.

I have no clue if it’s Drupal to be fucked up, or Dreamhost or mysql. I just know that I’m wasting my time in an unprecedented way.

Please shoot me in the head.

P.S.
Before going to sleep:
mysqldump -uuser -ppass -h hostname dbname –default-character-set=latin1 | perl -pe ‘s/\),\(/),\n(/og’ | gzip > dumpforthewin.gz

mysql -uuser -ppass -h hostname dbname < dumpforthewin.sql The perl part is to have break lines in the database to have it readable, since I need to mess with it manually. Goodnight.

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I rant against Drupal community

I like Drupal (the engine running this site), but rather often they just don’t care about what truly matters. So, beside still not having decent forums, working trackbacks, configurable rss feeds, the archive module and a decent search engine, now we also get corrupted databases “by default”. How fun.

You know, I use to dump the DB in order to back it up for safety reasons. Well, the current Drupal install happily corrupts itself right as you try to dump it. Enjoy your backup.


This is a rather serious problem, from my point of view, that I foresee getting rather widespread if not solved quickly. After a few hours of research and an headache here’s what I discovered:

– Mysql 4.1.x adds the possibility to set a collation for the database. This seems a new feature that wasn’t there before.

– By default it seems that every database created or imported is automatically set to “latin1_swedish_ci”. The whole database is set with that collation as you install drupal under that version of mysql or import a previous dump.

– This is causing a serious corruption in the database while exporting it because accented and other utf-8 characters are just NOT COMPATIBLE with the latin1_swedish_ci set.

– This means that if you install drupal on mysql 4.1.x, the very first time you export the database for a backup or whetever else, you’ll finish with a corrupted dump because all the accented characters in the nodes, comments and aggregator items will get replaced with GARBAGE. As -> “Saturday’s Teen People” in the place of “Saturday ’s Teen People” This is taken from my now broken database and since I noticed this too late I now cannot do anything if not manually change every single entry. How fun.

– In the handbook, install.txt and all the other install guides for Drupal THERE IS NO MENTION of the collation. This means that it’s written nowhere how to set the collation and so everyone just follows the standard instructions and finishes with a “latin1_swedish_ci” as it happened to me. Including the text in the aggregator items, node and comment bodies.

– How the hell the DB must be configured now? Because from what I read here it’s not even possible to set Drupal to use utf8 because it’s still not compliant.

So, beside having my database now unrecoverable, how should I set it to have it working properly from now on and be able to back up it without getting unrecoverable garbage text?

Then I seriously suggest you to patch the guides and the drupal package to stop this or it would become a rather large problem considering that following step by step the instructions you unavoidably go toward this corruption problem.

– HRose / Abalieno


EDIT – I somewhat managed to obtain non-corrupt dumps. Or at least from now on since the database is still screwed. The “MySQL connection collation” field on the home page of phpmyadmin was set to utf8, conflicting with the database that was set to latin1. Now I have both set to latin1 and it’s better. But the database has still to store odd characters that are then converted when the page loads. Works for now.

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Too hilarious to be real

Taken directly from FOH’s boards:

Another WoW article in the NY Times

“I don’t think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month,” said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm. “World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it’s the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers.”

“It may continue to grow in China,” Mr. Pachter added, “but not in Europe or the U.S. We don’t need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn’t work in the U.S. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

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Darniaq

See, you can just pull randomly one of his comments and nearly always find something outstanding:

There’s an update coming, but otherwise, yea, everything I’ve read points to the same stuff: this is not your father’s SWG.

They’re expanding it by integrating the content it seems everyone wants: combat and quests in environments designed to maximize both. Not sure of how much you’ve seen of Kashyyyk, but the planet is basically designed more like a WoW zone than the other planets. It’s a nice attempt to funnel players into encounters, but it’s at complete odds with the openness of the rest of the game.

They’ve changed a lot of stuff. The current players seem ok with it, though I don’t see SOE posting subscription numbers like they used too, falling back on the largest number they’ve got left: the total number of active subscriptions across all of their games (800k+).

It’s a shame though, but I guess expected. Like OSI before them they just got too comfortable with what has become outmoded thinking. They delivered games for the previous generation of players, rather than understanding how to grow beyond that niche core.

They still don’t quite get it, or maybe they just can’t really retrofit WoW thinking over games not designed for it. Whatever the case is, I largely consider them irrelevant now. Not because of Blizzard/VU, but really because of the sheer number of titles out now. There’s just too many games to really suffer through the bug riddled incomplete patchwork of autonomous conflicting features that is current SWG (or current EQ1… not sure about EQ2 nor really care).

I’m honestly surprised at myself in my lack of interest in returning. I’ve effectively lost all faith in SOE as a company able to provide me fun experiences. Their recent acquisitions of MxO and Toontown point to the things they’re more interested in: buying other’s innovations because that’s cheaper than innovating oneself.

Unfortunately, that thinking has gotten many companies in trouble in the past because of something failed and was therefore cheap to by, unless you spend the time fixing it, all you end up doing is continuing the failure. It now just costs you the money.

But beside this, I’m just completely in love with his maps. I really do hope that he decides to write down how he was able to create them, because if I can learn that I’ll just stop to play these games the way I do now and just create maps.

I’m that type of geek. I love that stuff and I’m jealous of what he can do. I want. (also his writing skills)

Late edit – He added another nice stab:

Is EQ1 even relevant anymore? Worse, with the buggy long criticized experience that is Star Wars Galaxies, the obviously not-so-wildly-beloved Everquest 2 and the never-really-played Planetside, is SOE even relevant? Most of their action in the last year has been about business decisions. The publishing of Asherons Call expansions, the absorption of The Matrix Online and Toontown, their relationship with Massive Entertainment. Meanwhile, their games suffer for long-standing apparently backwards-looking game philosophies.

This is a tricky time for the former giant of the genre (I can’t say “darling” because, well, they weren’t really perceived as such). While their portfolio has grown, none of it has been because of any creativity shown in the games. On the one hand, creative and innovative game design can only get you so far. On the other, unless you have creative and innovative games, whatever business decisions got you to that point won’t allow back continued growth.

So I hope to see a new title announcement from SOE soon. I’d almost go so far as to say they need to. How much more money do they have to be able to continually build their Station Pass system through acquisition?

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Thank you for the leak (1.8)

The 1.7 patch is still stuck on the test server and rather badly bugged while we get leaked patch from the future. And they sound legit. Thank you (this time leaked directly on WoW’s boards through a character named “Spybot”).

(press button)

I give it a quick glance while reformatting it and it looks yummy. Lots of overdue usability fixes that are always an improvement.

And… Siege combat? Ohhh..

Let me build a quick highlights list:

Goblin Gizmo Gauntlet

Assemble robots to do battle via remote control against other players for engineering glory in this explosive event in Gadgetzan. Sign up for daily tournaments to win new parts to upgrade your invention! No engineering experience necessary.

General

– New Auction Houses in Stormwind, Darnassus, Thunderbluff, Undercity, Booty Bay, and Everlook are open and ready for business! Ask the guards in each city for directions. Auction Houses are now shared within a faction – Alliance, Horde, or the Steamwheedle Cartel. Extra heavy security in the form of Goblin Bouncers has been added to Auction Houses in goblin towns to put a stop to any… bidding wars.
– Buff/debuff tooltips will now be correctly updated from talents.
– The effects of +healing and +spell damage items will now be shown in the tooltips of spells they affect.

PvP

Honor System
– You will now receive some honor for restoring health to allies during PvP combat.
– Dishonorable Kills will now apply only to the players responsible, rather than to their entire party or raid.

Battlegrounds
– You can now exit a battleground from an option on the scoreboard at all times.
– Siege weapon combat has been introduced to the Alterac Valley battleground.
– Fixed several terrain exploits in Warsong Gulch.
– You can now enter the queues of multiple battlegrounds simultaneously. Once you become eligible and choose to enter a battleground, you will automatically leave the other battleground queues.
– You can now see the number of players from the other faction in a battleground queue.

Druids

– Druids have learned to dance while shapeshifted.
– There is now an animation for skinning and herb gathering in Bear and Cat Form.

Professions

– Plans for keyrings that hold multiple keys have been added to Blacksmithing.

User Interface

– Quest levels now appear in the quest log.

P.S.
I find fun how on FoH’s boards noone believes these are legit notes. But they are :)

I’m having a good fun seeing the moderators at full work trying to delete all the threads on the official forums.

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