Volity: Quality Jollity

[prog]

If you're coming to betatest in person tonight, try to bring a laptop if you can; our token Intel PC is still dead, so we have fewer courtesy computers than before. (This despite the generous donation of a hard drive from lediva; it turns out we had a bum motherboard. A new one is en route.) Folks can use our office Macs if it comes down to it, of course.

I just picked up two piping-hot guest parking cards from the city, which means that I don't have three, or indeed any number greater than two, for two's all they give ya. So drive if you must, and I shall endeavor to accomodate. (Rumor has it that I can nullify parking tickets that guests receive, but rumor also has it that this is hard to actually do.)

If you can't make it in person, log in to the system between 7pm and 11pm eastern and find it crawling with activity. Info as always at http://volity.org/betatesting.html . In the past we've had great success with a mix of both kinds of players. Just hang out in the devchat.

However you plan on playing, please go download brand-new version 0.3.1 of Javolin first; it's so new that as I write this the packages are still uploading from my Mac to our server. (Update: they're done now.) The most important change from 0.3.0 is an improved invitation system that radiotelescope devised, which should eliminate the need for people to be on your roster before you could invite them to a table. Previous betapaloozas showed us that, while this looked fine on paper, it was confusing and awful to actually use. We look forward to seeing how well this new way works.

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There has been a surge in activity from total strangers since I posted a testing request to Looney Labs' Fluxx mailing list. This has actually been great; several people have been playing Fluxx over and over (usually against bots), and occasionally filing new tickets for us. Our favorite one so far was filed by a player who discovered a way in which the Fluxx ruleset itself is broken!

This player and a bunch of bots got the game into a state where both the draw and discard piles were empty (meaning that some players were hoarding cards and not playing any Hand Limit rules, which is a bad habit of our current bots), and a bot played Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look, I drew Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look...

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So how about that there developer beta? I have two or three discrete bits of programming to accomplish still, and then I need to perform some release engineering. I am predicting that the betapalooza (plus this cold I have) will preclude me from finishing today, but I am hell-bent on getting it all wrapped up before Saturday.

I plan on making this the first release to the CPAN of the Perl stuff. This is actually exciting, and a big step.

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Volity is kicking butt. We need to start thinking about money again, soon.

Comments

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

How are you dealing with the Fluxx ruleset being broken?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Zarf sez he'll probably just tweak the bots so they'll be more likely to play Hand Limit cards. This is knd of too bad because thereafter we'll no longer be able to boast about how the bots are completely random and yet still fun, but oh well.

[cnoocy]

Or you could change the rule so that draw 2 and use 'em doesn't apply to itself.
(I think hand limits are lame and don't want them to be more likely.)

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I almost said that that would be changing the rules inappropriately, but I'm not sure now - is there an official ruling about whether cards like D2&U'E go to the discard pile before being resolved?

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

The rules say, of Action cards, "put the card on the Discard pile and do whatever it says". And there's no provision anywhere in the rules for a place to put cards *while* you're playing them.

(The Empty the Trash rule also implies this, since it explicitly says that you don't shuffle it into the discards that you're shuffling. I take that to be an exception to the usual card-handling, rather than a repetition of it.)

The problem with exempting Draw 2 and Use Em from applying to itself is that it usually isn't a problem. If you play it when the deck is empty, shuffle the discards, and then draw it as one of your two, then that's fine -- it should be allowed. (I'm sure it's happened to somebody in real life.)

The problem only arises when the discard pile is *also* empty. I'm not willing to put in a bunch of code to detect that special case; there are way too many variants and I don't believe I can think of all of them.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Ticket to Ride has a similar problem if people are hoarding cards, where there are only five cards in the deck and three of them are locomotives. I think they found this out in the online version too (where it endlessly kept reshuffling the deck).