Where's Jason?

2009-12-21 13:23:50 | Stormtrooper

Hello Folks!

I'm seeing more and more questions from people asking where Stormtrooper is (that's me; Jason!). I'm alive and well. I've just been busier in my personal life and took a step back from the development of the Psychostats software. It's much harder these days to devote a lot of development time to a piece of software that I make no money off of (and remember; I pay a monthly fee for this server too). As much as I like developing "free" software for the gaming community, getting nothing back but frustration and complaints from people can get on your nerves after awhile.

Right now it's unclear if I'll pick-up the development of Psychostats any further. I don't want it to die, but the economy is tough right now and I have to do what's best for me. I made a lot of progress on PS4, But a lot more still needed to be done before it was ready to be released to the public as a viable software package. For now, I'm not saying Psychostats is dead, but definitely on hiatus and stale.

I may be pursuing new development projects too. I just have to see what opportunities come my way.

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New hitbox model

2009-09-18 15:06:37 (edited: 2009-09-18 19:45:19) | Stormtrooper

I need a new hitbox model similar to one shown below (but better?). The model will be used in a new hitbox flash animation I'm building. I only want the human model, not the background.

Requirements:

• Human only model in the classic Vitruvian Man pose (or similar fashion; any pose is acceptable but should provide visibility for the 7 hitbox areas in a model.
• No background art. Transparent (or white) background only, please. This means no shadow or other borders, etc.
• If possible, I'll take vector art suitable for Flash.
• The art (if used) will be royalty free and freely used within the Psychostats software w/o limitations. Credit will be given to the author.
• The model can either have detailed textures, or be cell shaded (similar to the picture shown).

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On Hiatus

2009-06-04 16:25:59 (edited: 2009-06-04 16:30:09) | Stormtrooper

Some might be wondering where I've been lately. Well, the bottom line is I've taken a bit of a hiatus from PsychoStats and I've finally been able to move back into my house after the house fire from February (a couple of finalized pics are below).

I have not given up on PsychoStats. I just need some time to get back into the swing of things. The last 4 months have been a blur and I haven't really done most of the things I'm used to doing on a daily basis. I will get back to work on v4 of PsychoStats as soon as I can.

Thanks.

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Private Messages disabled

2009-04-07 20:44:02 | Stormtrooper

Due to some recent abuse by spammers, I've disabled the PM system for all members until a 'fix' can be implemented or the abuse reports die down. I apologize for the inconvenience.

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Theme Support

2009-04-06 10:06:15 | Stormtrooper

PsychoStats themes are extremely flexible and have used "Smarty Templates" to separate any PHP coding from the presentation. But there's still a lot of "logic" in the themes that probably shouldn't be in the themes. And a theme has dozens of files that make up the overall stats website. This can be very cumbersome for users who want to make simple changes.

I'm toying with some ideas on changing the way themes are done to make it easier to alter common elements like menus, colors, headers, etc... but remove most logic out of the theme which would make them less robust but a lot easier to 'skin' for the average user who knows nothing about HTML or CSS. But is this a good idea?'

Ps3.2 introduced "parent - child" themes, but as I look back at this, I think it just complicates things. And I've noticed that out of all the themes that the community has made all of theme are nothing more than some style/color changes. No one attempts to change the overall look of the stats. So is there really a need for this system?

Your thoughts?

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Player stats that are important

2009-03-26 20:12:19 | Stormtrooper

I have a question for you. As a user or admin who likes to view their game play stats and the stats of an entire server what's most important to you? This is a very important question to better understand the gaming community. I need your feedback to help design the next generation of gamer stats.

Currently, a stats website generally gives you a list of players and some basic stats in a table.... boring! What can be done to spice that up a bit? What important should be immediately visible when you first view the player stats for your server? Do you want to see an overall view of the server? Do you want to see a list of the top 10 players? Do you want to see how players are fragging each other?

Do you want lots of pretty graphics and a complex website design, or something minimalistic? Do you prefer flash over dynamically generated images? Or maybe you fancy something like the google chart api?

Do you like to compare players or do you really only care if you're in the top10 and screw the rest?

Do you want 'forum signatures' that shows your ranking as an image that can be used in external forum sites?

Now is the time to express your desires, you never know something you mention may appear in PS4.0.

Thanks.

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House Fire

2009-02-04 08:38:45 (edited: 2009-03-13 19:19:29) | Stormtrooper

On Monday afternoon, February 2nd, my house caught fire while I wasn't home. The fire department arrived on the scene pretty quickly and extinguished the blaze. Unfortunately, the house is not livable and will take awhile for it to be "normal" again. The house is now boarded up and is waiting for the insurance company to do their thing to get my life back to normal. I hope they don't screw me over. In the meantime I'm living like a nomad. All my important stuff is in my car and I've been staying at my parents house.

It could have been far worse then it was. The fire was contained in the kitchen and didn't burn down anything else. However, standard procedure for the fire department is to break and knock out every single window in the house to help vent the fire. The only window they missed was the one that was slightly cracked already. And the big double sliding glass door going out back was shattered ... AND THEN opened. Tell me how that makes sense?

When I got home the fire had just started about 10-15 minutes before. I ran up to the front door and looked in. From there, through the black smoke I could see the kitchen stove and the huge flames that were blazing around it, up the walls, and across the ceiling which were starting to reach under the top of a door frame to the foyer. I've never seen something like this up close. You only ever see something like this on TV or in the movies. Seeing it 10 feet from your face is something entirely different.

A friend of mine lives in the basement and his car was in the driveway but I hadn't actually seen him yet. For fear that he was in the basement, I charged into the house and into the basement to look for him. Thankfully he wasn't actually home. But I was able to find the dog cowering downstairs from the smoke. I got Kolby out of the house and my other dog was outside in the back yard, safe and sound. I also have 2 cats in the house and at the time we could not find them. A couple of hours later we did find them in the basement under a bed, scared out of their mind, but otherwise unharmed and safe.

As for the cause of the fire, I do not have the official Fire Dept. report yet, but while on-site they told me it was ultimately undetermined.

I took some pictures of the aftermath for posterity. See the following link: http://liche.net/fire/ - The first few tell the real story, while the rest are basically proof that the fire dept. knocked out the windows, and some extra damage they caused upstairs.

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Logs for l4d, cstrike, dod, tf, natural, cod4?

2009-01-31 08:34:49 (edited: 2009-02-09 08:00:52) | Stormtrooper

I need the assistance from the community.

If you run a game server I could use a set of new logs. ZIP up as many as you want and send me a LINK where I can download them (please do not email them to me). Or attach them to this message. I need logs from any halflife mod or COD4.

Thanks.

EDIT: I should have mentioned that I DO NOT ACCEPT '.rar' FILES! They are a pain in the ass and do not work for me. So please use ZIP, GZIP or BZIP2 only. I will ignore RAR files.

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Points system for PsychoStats?

2009-01-29 08:15:41 | Stormtrooper

I'm considering a slightly new idea for PsychoStats to help generate new and interesting metrics for player stats. We all know players have a calculated 'skill' value. but that is not always a perfect measure of a player skill. I'm proposing a new metric for players: "Points." Do not confuse "points" with "bonus points" which are completely different.

My thought is this, players receive points for various actions, but you never lose points. Overtime the point value for a player would help measure the activity and usefulness of a player. It's not a perfect metric for all things. But may offer a new way of looking at things and could possibly used as a sub-metric in other calculations (for example, don't allow a player to rank until they have at least X number of points).

Any points you receive for a kill are added to your points. Other actions like capturing a flag, or bombing a target would be assigned a pre-determined point value too and added to your total. Over time your point total helps to measure how much you've done.

Does anyone see this as something that could be useful? Or maybe offer any suggestions on how this could be better?

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The Future of PsychoStats

2009-01-19 17:57:22 | Stormtrooper

Alright, it's been awhile since I've announced anything new about PsychoStats so I'll finally give a brief update on what I've been doing.

First things first, I decided to take a good hard look at the present state of where PsychoStats is and where I believe it should be and I've finally come to the conclusion that in order for PsychoStats to stabilize and mature into a better product I needed to take a step back and rethink how I've been developing it. I decided to stop development on the current trunk version 3.2 of PsychoStats. I felt that it simply contains too many bugs and is becoming harder and harder to maintain due to poor programming practices and lazy coding habits. Version v3.2 was starting to feel the effects of "Feature creep" and "Over-engineering" and was hindering its ability to be a good, robust, solid and effective software product for the community.

So, in a nutshell, I stopped working on v3.2 of PsychoStats a couple months ago and have started to develop a new version of PsychoStats: version 4.0. This new version is almost a complete rewrite from the ground up. This has allowed me to fix a lot of lingering issues that the old versions had. Rewritting software tends to take a lot longer than trying to "fix" old software, but the end result will be a better software product overall. And really, this isn't a complete rewrite. I am still reusing several core objects from 3.2, I'm just re-engineering them to be simpler and easier to maintain.

So, what's going to change with PsychoStats v4.0 (PS4)?

How about Real-Time stats? This is the #1 top feature that most of the community has requested time and time again. PS4 can handle multiple streams of logs at the same time. This includes listening on several ports simultaneously and allowing multiple servers on each port at the same time. Each stream can even be a different game.
Multiple games can be tracked in a single installation. This has been another common request and can now finally be realized.

There are a lot of core elements that are being reimplemented that will make the entire core of PS4 stronger and more reliable but aren't important enough to list here.

I've taken a lot of feedback from users and some of the ideas or requests are being implemented into this new version.

Questions? Comments? Let me know.

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