We’re getting close!
-posted by Chris
Things may appear to have been quiet around here lately, but in truth we’ve been a beehive of activity. Pati is almost done with the new rewritten tutorials (the existing ones were written in February and much has changed since then). Facundo and Louis have been fixing lots of silly little bugs that arise from people accessing our server from multiple platforms with multiple browsers, dealing with problems arising from the server being too busy, and generally making our server software more robust.
But the biggest hangup has all been my fault: getting Balance of Power 21st Century up and running. We had a version running in early June and the beta testers made a great many useful suggestions, some of which entailed substantial changes in storyworld. We decided to implement a number of important changes, which in turn pushed the whole schedule back.
Well, BoP2K is coming into focus. For the last few days I’ve been doing nothing but fine-tuning the behavior. For example, right now Iran is caving in a little too easily — I need to adjust its parameters to make it a little more recalcitrant. Last night I tuned the algorithm that awards Prestige to the player for achieving a diplomatic success. This is the kind of stuff I’m working on these days — not much architectural stuff. Which means that we’re getting very close to being ready to resume beta testing.