Alden Bates' Weblog

I've found an odd and annoying bug in the UT 2004 level Junkyard Escape. The level is a parody of a British show in which people built stuff out of junk they find in a junkyard. The attacking team has to fix their vehicle and escape from the junkyard while the defending team has to stop them.

The first objective is to retrieve the "power core" shown at right and return it to the vehicle in order to fix it. What I've found is that if the person carrying the power core doesn't make it back to the vehicle, the bots lose track of what they're supposed to be doing and just head for a random position and stand there.

In Example Shot 1, the attacking team has started congregating at a point just a couple of metres from the power core they're supposed to be picking up. In Example Shot 2, the attacking team has decided to regroup in front of the checkpoint, which is no where near the power core. In Example Shot 3, they're bunched up in front of the building housing the vehicle... those clouds of smoke in the latter two shots are from sniper rifles.

The sequence of events are as follows:

1. Someone picks up the power core. The announcer feels the need to mention this three times.
2. The person carrying the core dies on the way back to the vehicle. You will notice in this shot that there are now two power cores - one which has been dropped and one which is still strapped to the bot's back. At this point, if there isn't a human on the team, the attacking bots can get no further...
3. Sometimes if you're lucky, someone grabs the real power core and continues on to the vehicle.
4. or sometimes the original person makes it back to the vehicle, but the game forgets to take the power core off them.

I dunno if that's a bug they introduced in a patch or what, because I don't remember this happening before...

Also another odd bug: when playing back a demo (it doesn't do it while playing the actual game), my character isn't wearing the power core on his back and appears to be wearing it like armour(!)

Edit: There's a line in the readme for the last patch which I'm now wondering if it's related:
- Fixed (for assault) the energy core always showing on the HUD even if it not the current objective (thanks AngelMapper)

I couldn't find anywhere on Atari's site to report the bug though...

Edit: This is, in fact, fixed in the 3369 patch. Yay!

As mentioned here previously, Prime are playing Doctor Who in full screen, losing the picture at either side. As noted on the NZDWFC message boards, there was also a cut made to The End of the World, with a line being lost when the show came back from ad break - the line being the episode's "Bad Wolf" reference. Which probably won't mean much in the end. I didn't notice it when I watched the BBC version.

Jonathan Park reported that Rose got about 151,000 viewers on its first showing, which is quite good for Prime. I haven't been able to find any regular source for ratings though.

There's rumblings over the Inside the TARDIS stage show on the NZDWFC board. Originally the tickets for the prime seats at the Wellington show were $79.90... then the Wellington show changed venue from the St James Theatre to the Opera House, and the ticket price has dropped to $36.50.

I'll be interested to see if Ticketek refunds any money for the balance of the tickets.

Of course, if you bought, say, a fridge and then saw it dropped in price by $200 the next week, that's hard luck, but then the show hasn't been on yet, and there's nothing stopping anyone from getting a refund, then buying tickets at the lower price...

Though what's more confusing to me is the idea that the arranged discount for NZDWFC members isn't, in fact, a special discount at all.

This is all very confuzulating, and doesn't make me trust Ticketek any more than I did after the Wellington Moby concert was cancelled a while back, due to "overseas commitments", and then he later appeared on TV saying he'd been spending the last week relaxing in NZ!

But no, I'm been laid up with it for the last four days. I'm pretty much unable to eat much, so I'm mostly drinking and napping a lot.

I wonder how many working hours a year are lost to the flu.

People who drive slowly in the fast lane. Here's a clue: if people are changing into the slow lane to overtake you, you're in the wrong lane.

The ultimate form of this is, of course, to drive alongside a vehicle in the other lane, matching its speed, so that the cars behind you are unable to pass. I saw a wee red car doing exactly this on the way home today...

I discovered today that one particular spammer seems to be attempting to use the feedback script on the NZDWFC site to send spam. They have some sort of program set up to post crap to it, which is hitting my site daily, sometimes up to 30 times in the same day.

Sadly, because of the way they're calling the script, all they get back is a perminant redirect, which they're not bothing to follow, therefore it never actually gets to the point where the script runs. Of course, if they did follow the redirection, my script would give them a nice Access Denied error for being a spammer, but they don't know that unless they try it.

Idiots.

I see the features for Movable Type 3.2 include some nice spam-fighting stuff, like Trackback moderation and some sort of junk folder. I have my fingers crossed for OpenID support, but I suspect it won't appear until the next release...

Level: Avali-2k4
Type: Capture the Flag
File Size: 17.7 MB
Rating: 8/10
Downloaded from: ut2004maps.com

Description: Alien wilderness with lower mine level.

Continue reading "UT Review: Avali"

Was played in full screen. I half expected that anyway...

Now we sit back and wait to see what sort of ratings it got. :)

One day to go - Rose airs here tomorrow night.

This week's TV Week (a TV schedule magazine supplied with the Dominion Post) has a nice big Doctor Who cover and article inside. Yesterday's Waikato Times had something similar (reported on the NZDWFC boards. Apologies for the quality of the image - it's too big to scan, so I had to use my camera.

Most of the traffic to the main part of my site, the www part, seems to be coming at the moment from people looking for LiveJournal icons. I can't think why that would be. :P Also, people really dig the Dalek mood icons. I still prefer the K9 icons, myself. But, like, the average hits to my site keeps going up by the week.

When I started on Host For Web in January '04, my site was using around 1.5GB per month. It's currently eating through 4GB per month... Fortunately my account allows for up to 50GB per month.

• Popular Weblog posts: cmblineext02.dll, My Crappy PC, TabMix, A wee wireless networking question, and The Hotel rant.

My favourite spammers, the Bulgarians switched from comment spam attempts to trackback spam attempts. They didn't notice when I renamed the trackback script and blocked all access attempts to the old one. Apparently they've given up as of the 29th, and I've had very few spam attempts since.

• Popular NZDWFC archive items: Image: Daleks playing computer games, Review: Build the TARDIS, eBook: Who Killed Kennedy, I Exterminated JNT, Notes from a Who Island

Sadly I think most of the people who googled in to the second item were wanting to build a real one, and #1 is probably people searchign for info on the new series. :P June also saw record traffic to the NZDWFC pages due mostly to the build-up to the Prime screenings, and the exposure this got the site in places like This Week in Doctor Who, which is posted to the newsgroup and several high-profile Who sites. Also the Prime Press Pack went up fairly late in the month, but still managed to get into the top 25 pages with some 143 hits. Himpressive.

• Popular music items: Era, The Mass, Daft Punk, Interstella 5555, Daft Punk, D.A.F.T., The Celtic Circle 2, The Celtic Circle.
• Popular Artists: Enigma, Mike Oldfield, Daft Punk, Enya, Moby.

Moby and Daft Punk both released new albums recently, and Mike and Enya are both working on new ones. Enigma is... well, who knows? Hopefully his next album won't have the same copy protection that stops me being able to play Voyageur (See also Hotel). Likewise, what Era are up to is not obvious from their Flashturbated site, which is still merrily promoting their 2003 album.