User talk:Nickj

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i have written your first discussion - that there's nothing to discuss! B

Homepage updated, so there is stuff to discuss now, B. -- Nickj 19:19, 7 February 2006 (PST)

Thanks

Thanks Nick for re-awakening my enthusiasm for skiing again -great commentary made it real! Cheers, janine kirkwood

Hi Janine, Glad that you enjoyed the skiing write-up, and I'm sure if you go to Japan that you'll love it. -- All the best, Nickj 10:21, 20 July 2006 (EST)

Your TA:Spring Review!!!

You claim to call it a review, but I think the more accurate word would be "Critique"

You did not actually discuss any of the depth and complexity of the tactics and strategy involved in the game. You did not discuss how enjoyable (Or not!) the experience can be. You did not outline at all what a multiplayer game of spring is actually like to play. All you did was state some facts concerning the engine and its capabilities, a few positive aspects of the game's design, and then you went on to criticize its many faults.

Thus you cannot truly call your writeup a "Review" as you failed to accurately depict the TA:Spring experience textually, and you failed to state what is truly good about the gameplay... Though you had no problem pointing out its many issues. If I were not already an experienced veteran of Spring then I would come away from reading your review of Spring thinking that it is a buggy mess and I would not bother playing it.

The fact is, I am an experienced Spring player and while it has its problems, the truly immense fun factor inherent in this game far far outweighs the problems which plague it... problems that can easily be overcome with a bit of time and practice. Your review does not seem to reflect this at all.

If you're going to point out exactly what problems exist in a game in a verbose and detailed manner, and counterweight that assessment with the vague and unspecified assurance that "It's fun," what do you feel readers are more likely to think?

This is not intended to be a flame, or to be insulting. Do not take offense. This is a critique of your review.

If you did not feel you knew enough about the game to comment on any of its other merits then perhaps you should have played it longer and gotten to know it a tad bit better. As it is you devoted far too much of your "Review" to pinpointing the game's issues and far too little of it to vaguely mention some of the game's strong points. This gives readers a highly jilted idea of what playing Spring is really like.

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-aequabilitas

Thank you for your comments! I appreciate your candour, and I don't take offence at what you have said. The truth is that the review really does reflect my experience of playing the game. There was good stuff, and there was bad stuff. And some of the bad stuff, most especially the sync errors are killers; they destroy gameplay. Really getting into a game with 8 people, and then having that progressively fall apart until everyone is playing a separate game is just not fun. I agree that some of those things you get used to (like the mini-map not working, the key-bindings, the units that get stuck, the visual feedback, the keys that are different, the polish stuff). Those things you learn to workaround. However, having played this game at a LAN weekend where I could see people's reactions and discuss it with them first-hand, I have to say that these things did put people off, until at the end of the weekend some people were refusing to play TA:Spring because of these problems. So if I had asked them at that time to summarize their impression of the game, it would be overwhelmingly bad. Some people liked it however, so their impressions were overall positive. I've tried to strike a balance between those two extremes by saying what was good and what was bad. Of course it's personal impressions and personal impressions of others around me, so there is a definite degree of subjectivity - but I should mention that to make the "bad stuff" list, multiple people had to dislike it, thus I feel making it more objective. Anyway, I'm sure the game will get better with time (it certainly seems to be doing that so far) and I hope the bits that bothered me and others will be resolved - at which point I'll be happy to redo the review, or at least add a whooping great big notice that it's completely out-of-date. Thank you once again for your comments and thoughts. -- All the best, Nickj 16:39, 25 August 2006 (EST)

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Hello, I suggest you use a screenshot of a map that is NOT speedmetal for your critique, if you want any real Spring players to pay attention to this at all. Speedmetal results in games that are all basically identical; its gameplay results not from strategy, but rather from who is able to spam lvl 3 units the fastest. It is viewed by proper players as the absolute lowest possible form of play. As for all of your complaints as to key binding differences, I suggest you put thought into the fact that Spring is an entirely new engine, not TA...It can run content from TA, yes, but the two main ta-style mods' (XTA and AA) gameplay is quite different from that of TA. It is more or less headed in a direction away from being TA-oriented, with more unique mods being spawned every week. -P3374H

No worries, I'll see if we can get a better screenshot at our next LAN weekend. I quite liked the TA key-bindings, but I understand what you're saying about it being a differente engine, with one particular application being more as a reinvention / reinterpretation of TA. Also thank you for your updates of the incorrect / out of date items in the article, it is appreciated. All the best, NickJ.

JAMWiki

Thanks a ton for all of the bug reports on JAMWiki. I've got about half of them fixed now and will get to the others either later tonight or tomorrow. I've added your Fuzz Tester to the JAMWiki Roadmap as something that I very much want to start using before too long. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help out the Mediawiki project, as you guys have provided a great platform for me to model JAMWiki after, and I'm getting pretty excited about the future possibilities. -- Wrh2 15:57, 4 August 2006 (EST)

Also, your font on the account creation page blends into the background for me (Firefox 2.0b1) - there's my bug report reciprocation for the day ;) -- Wrh2 16:03, 4 August 2006 (EST)

Thank you Ryan! I think I've fixed the white-text-on-white-background problem now. The MediaWiki folks seem to be quite on-the-ball, and it seems to me that the best thing with MediaWiki (and life in general I guess) is just to pick an area you're interested in, and do that. For example, they're talking about formalizing the wiki sytnax so that different parsers can be written without having to try and reverse-engineer all the corner-case behaviour (something which may or may not interest you, having written a Parser implementation in Java), but progress seems slow - so if/when that happens I'd probably suggest keeping an eye on that (generally the wikitech-list is where stuff like this would be discussed). -- All the best, Nickj 15:12, 9 August 2006 (EST)

Keys which worked in TA but which are missing in TA:Spring

This refers to the default keys. Infact, almost every hotkey you can think of ("select all aircraft with more than 50% health") can be set up with the included SelectionEditor.exe

you might want to try that out and change your review then... have fun, -knorke

Hi Knorke,

Thank you for your message.

However, I'm not sure it's correct. For example:

• Can you bind the capture key to "C" with SelectionEditor?
• Can you bind the previous menu key to comma SelectionEditor?
• period to Select the next menu for a unit?
• F5-F7 to Map bookmarks?
• B to build menu for a unit?
• N to Scroll to and select next unit off-screen?

My memory could be wrong, or SelectionEditor could have been updated a lot since I last saw it, but last time I looked I think the answer to the above questions was no.

The ones I think you can do with SelectionEditor are:

1. Ctrl-S : Select all units in current view.
2. Ctrl-V : Select all aircraft.

However, I could be wrong. If I am, please tell me. It won't be the first time I've made a mistake, and I'm sure it won't be the last. :-)

All the best, Nickj 12:19, 27 September 2006 (EST)

TA Spring Sync Errors

Nick, I just played a game of TA Spring with some coworkers (all on the same LAN) and we ended up seeing the exact sync error scenario that you talked about. Did you ever figure out a solution to this? We tried reducing the number of players but that didn't seem to help at all.

No, unfortunately we didn't find a way of stopping the sync errors. It seemed to happen more with longer games though, so we tried to keep the games shorter, and that helped a bit (of course, it may just be that it happens randomly, and by keeping the game shorter you're just proportinally decreasing the chances of it happening). The basic problem I think is perhaps that they're using floating point math, and different CPUs can have different results for floating point math (i.e. integers may be better). By the way, which version of TA:Spring were you running when this happened? We were on 0.72b1, but if you were on 0.73b1 then that would be good to know because it'd mean the bug was still present in the latest version, in which case the TA:Spring folks have indicated that they'd like a bug to be filed for this. -- All the best, Nickj 12:36, 14 October 2006 (EST)

We were running TA Spring 0.73b1. In fact, we hadn't seen it in 0.72b1, but we hadn't played with more than 4 players before. This time we had played with up to 7 players and as little as 5 players ... and we ran into it every game we played, about 10 minutes in. However, since that night, we've played multiple times with NO sync errors, up to a max of 4 players. (Thus, I highly suspect the number of players.) The different CPU possibility could be true, but like I said we haven't seen sync errors with up to 4 players. Is there a way to pause the game or resync players when you start getting sync errors? -Zack

Hi Zack, I have reported this to the TA:Spring folks as http://taspring.clan-sy.com/mantis/view.php?id=328 . Can I please suggest adding any extra details that you think may help to that bug report, and maybe helping to provide the TA:Spring folks with any extra details they need to help resolve this? Certainly the problem is very annoying, and resolving the sync errors would be a big plus. -- All the best, Nickj 17:34, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Can We Link It?

Nick: I just stumbled across your "Can We Link It" page. I have been working on general purpose Wikipedia auto-linking for the last four or five months, and I thought you might find my system interesting and possibly useful. It's designed to add Wikipedia links to more or less arbitrary webpages on the fly. If you want to check it out, you can find it at http://www.golimojo.com, and if you want to drop me a line, I can be reached at curtisb-at-almostinfinite-dot-com. -- Curtis Bartley, 11:58, 20 November 2006 (EST)

I also stumbled across Can-we-link-it, and it is the best thing ever. I was sitting there thinking "NickJ, NickJ, I know that name from somewhere..." then it dawned on me! see you in Taipei :) -- phoebe

New with MediaWiki

Just started with MediaWiki, how can you change layout(Change Main Page to my personal name), upload links in the default page of MediaWiki? I am making a Intranet at work. Do I have to edit/config in each .php files(from MediaWiki) in the web server doc? Or is there a software to make it easier perhaps Deki Wiki?

I am not sure where to start from, help would be great. Dean - Sweden

Hi Dean, probably the best resources are mediawiki.org, the IRC channel, and the mediawiki-l mailing list. But to answer your question, the Main page link is changed by editing MediaWiki:Mainpage, and whatever is in there becomes the name of the main page. You generally don't have to edit many PHP files at all - in fact usually just one - most customization is done either by editing LocalSettings.php or by editing MediaWiki messages (the list is of these is on the Special:Allmessages page). Editing other files can sometimes be a bad idea, because when you upgrade you have to reapply those changes - so for making it as painless as possible, just edit the messages or LocalSettings.php . Also, I'm not familiar with Deki Wiki, so I can't offer much of a comparison, sorry. However if you are looking to compare wiki software, there are some good resources for doing this - there's this site which allows comparing the various wikis, and there's also a big table of the wiki options. Basically, there are lots of wiki packages besides MediaWiki. MediaWiki is one of the most mature ones out there with lots of extensions, but it may not be suitable for your purposes, but if not you've got a very good chance of finding something out there is something that is. -- All the best, Nickj 11:02, 2 October 2007 (EST)