Shares in Grain @sharesingrain - Tumblr Blog

Dodged a Bullet

Is the small sidebar score listing working? I'm not certain. It wasn't, and now I can't tell. Why? Because the sidebar only shows the top 5 players (sorted by money held, ignoring shares), who have logged in since the start of the game. However, as I recently reset the game, the current game ID is the 1st of October. Therefore, no one has logged in since the start of the game, because the game hasn't started yet. This isn't an error, it's the way I designed it, the only problem is setting the game to restart two weeks away, rather than overnight. But that can't be undone, nor would I want to.

On October 1st, after midnight, we'll see if the sidebar scores show up. The dedicate score page should continue to work, regardless of when the game started. Actually, that's probably not true either, but I don't feel like checking. If you see that it's not working properly, it's probably just the way I designed it. If you see that it is working properly, then that's the way I designed it.

Also, I've been having some issues with the game ID upon terminating games. The last couple times I've done it, the game ID was set to January, so the games were merged and erroneous. I had to fix it manually both times, and I still don't know why it's doing it. It's only an issue for the score history.

Oh, and the title refers to the fact that I almost spent hours troubleshooting the sidebar issue, until I realized the game ID problem I explained above. Maybe in October I'll still have to troubleshoot it, but for now I'm not going to break something else in the process of fixing something that may not be broken.

#66

To Elaborate...

One issue I've had with the new photography game, code-named PhotoMon, or PM for brevity, is expansion. At the moment, there are 10 subjects to be photographed, and the system was designed to pull those 10 out of the database, shuffle them, store that new order, and then display them for any player. The problem was that my initial sorting system used a single array holding the values 0 through 9. That worked fine for my 10 subjects, because if I needed the name of any subjects, I could use refMonsters[X]['Name'] where X is the index I supply to the array. Third subject would be 2, so refMonsters[2]['Name'] might be 'Flaremane'. Same for any other details on any subject, I just use refMonsters[X]['whatever info']. How it works is that refMonsters is a 10-element 2-dimensional array, and I'm just calling up index-2 of that array, and there's all the information. 2-dimensional is like X,Y coordinates. For every X, there is a Y, but in this case Y is a whole other list, so for every X, there's a A, B, C, D and E. The X directly corresponds to the subject stored at that point of the array.

For ten subjects.

The real problem was "what if I have 11 subjects?" And that's a problem because I'm only using ten of them. So, what if I call out 2 through 11 for my purposes? I have an array of numbers 0 through 9, so as I iterate (that means step one at a time) through the array of 0 through 9, I'm going to eventually request element 0 from the refMonsters array. Now, it'll show up, no problem. The system knows what all the subjects are at all times, so all I'm really doing is putting every subject's number in a hat, and calling them. But I'm only calling them if they are 0 through 9. That's pretty useless in the long-run.

My solution? I'm not using numbers anymore. That's just dumb. The subjects in my database already have ID numbers, I just needed a way to use those, instead. But I can't tell the system "grab the name from this array where the ID element of the array is MA". That'd look like refMonsters[refMonsters['MA']]['Name'] and I'm only now wondering if that might have actually worked. It may well have. I likely won't test it, mainly because it looks stupid. Instead, I have the exact same system as before, where refMonsters is supplied a list of indexes from another array, but instead of 0 through 9, they have things like 'ma','ig','fl' and so on. To compensate, I had to only modify my refMonsters creation, and nothing else.

Initially, it looked like this:

while (record = mysql_assoc_array(monsters)) refMonsters[ ] = record

What this means is: go through each subject one at a time, and add each subjects information (line) to a new index of refMonsters. At no point does it matter what number refMonsters is up to, whether there's 10 subjects or 50, it will automatically create 10 + 1 and put information into index 11. This is how I ended up with indexes based on numbers, not IDs. Now, it looks like this:

while (record= msyql_assoc_array(monsters)) refMonsters[record[ID]] = record

How this is different is that there's something inside the square brackets. In the earlier version, a number was assumed to be in the empty brackets, and that number increased as needed. In the new version, the square brackets have something specific in them, and that is the ID element of that specific subject being assigned to the array. And it works! I tested it several times, and I've yet to find any real issues.

The best part is that the array that used to have 0 through 9 still functions the exact same, so any calls to refMonsters continues to work without me having to touch it.

Also, I finally got the player's draw deck to explode and implode properly, which turned three lines of code into one. Not a huge advantage, but it reads better, it makes it more uniform with every other exploding array, and it's the way I've always meant for it to work. Why didn't it work before? The column in the database that the imploded array was being sent to was too small to hold it. Made the column bigger, no problems.

Also, I'm sorry this has largely nothing to do with The Grainhouse at the moment.

#64.2

My Suspicions Have Been Confirmed

I'm a genius.

More later.

#64.1

For Want of Dedicated Processes

What I need is a dedicated server. That could be useful. That way, I could have a page open at all times to refresh and calculate stock shifts and whatnot, rather than relying on a user's browser to calculate up to a full day of shifts upon logging in.

There are games in my head that would really benefit (or maybe could only work) with a dedicated computer to just sit there and be connected. That's the main problem, is that the page would need to be open at all times so the script can run as it needs to. I could probably automate something to periodically open a browser and connect to the site, perform updates, and then disconnect, but I feel like a web page being open would just be easier.

That's not the only option, I guess. A user could be subject to keeping their browser open for as long as they want, while processes run for them alone, and then save and close their browser when they feel like it. Background processes running from the server could reinforce this functionality, but making it something a user keeps open in a background tab while they do something else, and gaining some kind of benefit for having it open, could allow for different possibilities. However, I tend to make games with PHP so I can integrate a MySQL database, and PHP doesn't run continually, it just runs when the page loads and that's it. Javascript could keep running, that's how the clock works on the Grainhouse main page, but Javascript can't tell PHP script to execute at regular intervals, it would have to refresh the page and let the PHP automatically resolve itself. I'm not sure if Javascript can force a page reload, anyway.

So, I'll look into it, maybe it will make things easier. Maybe I should just accept that PHP/MySQL is not the final solution for making an html-based game, and learn something else. Probably wouldn't take much effort. Nothing will change for now, just wanted to post an update.

#63

There's Always Something

Alright, so not all the functionality was there in the new game. Thanks to a poorly written conditional statement, the game was continuing after the end-game conditions had been met. It was a matter of determining if you'd used up all your "cards" except it was set to check if you'd used all 36 of them. You could reach the end of the game before you get to 11 cards, really, so this was allowing the game to potentially continue, having you meet up with nothingness after nothingness, throwing cards at it in vain until all 36 of them were used. Only then would it show you the game over screen. Fixed that.

Also fixed the conditions for which to show information. Since it's all in one page, and I have at least four different "pages" to show, I have to use boolean (true/false) variables to say "is the game over?" "is the round over?" and so on. Well, the game-over variables was defaulted to true, so when you log out, it doesn't have any reason to set it to false, and it erroneously displays a blank game over screen. Now, there's a new variable, which doesn't require it's own "page," it just assists the existing processes, and executes code depending on whether or not there's a cookie set with a username in it.

Now, I just need an automatic (or at least efficient) way to blank out the scores and reshuffle the deck. That shouldn't be difficult. I already have a way to add or remove players on the fly, from wherever I am. It's not the best way of doing it (far from it) and I should probably do it better, but I was lazy, so it is what it is. Is it secure, though? Well, it requires a very particular input in a very particular way, or else there's no functionality, error message, or directions, and I frequently forget what that particular input is, so read into that what you will.

Now, off to my paying job!

#62

Well, aside from a game length of a week, my side-project is about as functional as it needs to be. There are only 10 monsters, and you can only play through once, and I'm pretty sure when it ends you'll just get a blank screen (I'm too lazy to click 20 times and find out), but it's a big step for the three days I've put into it (about 12-15 hours, thanks to thinking I could redesign part of it to be better, encountering errors in that process, trying to solve those errors, and then returning to the original way that worked just fine).

That is all.

#61.5

A Small Departure

Taking a couple days to work on something a little different. A game that should exist on paper, but doesn't, yet. I wanted to see if I could make it work in a web environment, and so far, it seems I can. I also want to see if I can make it all work in a single file. Not a huge accomplishment, in fact, it ends up looking horrendous, because so many thing should be handled externally. But, I'm not doing it for anyone to critique, I just want to challenge myself. And it is challenging. Having a single page manage different submission buttons, displaying entirely different page content based on variables... I'm not crazy, I know this is a very silly way of doing things. When I'm done, maybe I'll split it up and make it look nicer. Maybe I won't. I probably won't.

Anyway, that's what's happening. It's been two days, about 12 hours of work, and I've accomplished a lot more than I expected to. A lot of the pieces just fell into place, which helps. And I'm using the same database as The Grainhouse, just different tables, so I didn't have to set up anything terribly new or complicated. Four tables is all I expect to need, to contain everything i need them to contain. It's not a complicated little game.

Oh, and it's available, if you can find it.

#61

Fixing my Own Errors

It's one thing to find errors that I didn't foresee, and then fix them. It's another to find giant errors that occurred because I put a line in the wrong place.

First, I ended the current game, because it's been like 2 months. For some reason, all the previous games were given January's game ID, so they merged together. Had to go in and manually change the IDs to the right month, and eventually everyone got the right ID and displays properly.

Then, the main page indicated the wrong person had won last month, which had to do with how I was retrieving the previous game's information. Initially, I was pulling all records out of the table that matched a mathematical expression that I hoped was right, cycling through them in a loop until I grabbed the first entry (so, not even a full cycle of the loop), then abandoning the rest, just to get the name of the previous winner. It was a waste of a loop, and it didn't even work. I did not know that I could select "all records" out of the table "in reverse order" (most recent game first) "limited to just 1" record (or as many as I want), so only one record gets returned from the database, not potentially hundreds that I don't need, and it's just a name. Now, that's fixed, and the process takes about 25% of the lines of code that it did.

It was called to my attention that there was an error in the previous end-game, where shares weren't sold properly. Actually, it would seem they weren't sold at all. Well, that took some tinkering. First, I set up an output text file to store the status of the player data before it gets modified: their money, how many shares they were selling for how much, etc. Even the queries that were sent to the database to make the changes, just so I could see exactly what was going on.

It didn't work at first, and I couldn't tell why. I thought it was just how I was sending information to the file. I didn't know it wasn't doing anything at all. Ironically, the spot in question where nothing seemed to be happening was also the spot where shares were supposed to be sold. It's a FOR statement, so it starts at a certain number, and does things (sell shares) while counting the number of times it's done it, until it's done it enough times. Well, my upper-limit (the number of times to sell shares) is supposed to be the number of stocks that exist. Basically, it starts at stock 1, sells it, then goes to stock 2, sells it, repeat. When it gets to stock 7, it sees that doesn't exist, and it stops repeating.

Initially, I wanted this game to be expandable, have a variable maximum number of stocks, so I could add or remove them. So, everywhere in my code that it's told to cycle through the stocks, the upper-limit is a variable. At the start of any relevant page, it pulls out a row of the stock table, counts how many stocks there are, and then uses that number everywhere it's needed. And everywhere it's needed (except for the end-game script), it works. I did not realize that on that one page, where it matters the most, I tell it to count the number of stocks retrieved from the table *before* I retrieve any stocks from the table. So, the variable never gets set to anything. I don't even think it gets set to 0, it's probably just null, which is worse. So, my FOR loop, which wants to start at 1 and go to 6, starts at 1 and goes to nothing. Not 0, not a real number, just nothing. So it doesn't do anything at all, because it doesn't know how to count from 1 to a black hole where numbers are supposed to be.

Well, I say "supposed to be" because I know it's supposed to be a number, but the script doesn't. It isn't smart, if you don't tell it what goes in it, it doesn't know. Say you have a cup in your cupboard that you only drink milk out of. It might look different from your other cups, but it's still just a cup. Anything could be put in it, it doesn't care. It's a cup. So, if you say "pour from the pitcher into the cup" before you say "put a milk bag in the pitcher," then the cup is full of nothing, and regardless of how many times it's had milk in it, it will never assume it's supposed to have milk in it. It's a cup.

A bit of rearranging later, and it should all work fine. And if it doesn't, I'll be able to see why, and hopefully fix it. Can't do anything for the countless thousand shares that might have been lost this month, though.

Oh, I also told the script to stop immediately erasing all the previous month's player history (buying/selling/etc), but I don't think that will necessarily help anything. It doesn't show current amounts of shares, so that's pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. I'd have to make a new page to retrieve that information and total it and whatnot before I could make use of it.

Now hopefully I remember to uncomment all the database-updating scripts that I had to comment out in order to test the page (I tell it to display the queries on-screen rather than run them, so nothing gets changed, but everything runs as if it's changing things)

#60

Distractions

School. Can't do much about that. Have been thinking about making some modifications to the game, but I've been thinking about other projects, too. Perhaps the login page for The Grainhouse will instead be more of a dashboard of web projects. Eventually, maybe I'll move to a dedicated server, rather than my own computer.

What's likely to happen is that as I learn new things to do with HTML and PHP and whatnot, I'll put them to use in The Grainhouse. Learn by doing, and all that. Maybe they'll be back-end invisible things, maybe they'll change the way things look or function, who knows?

On that note, the game may gain the ability to upload a profile picture, just so I can get into file uploading.

#59

Sharing My Thoughts on Shares

I wonder if there should be an upper limit on how many shares can be owned? Or, perhaps, how many shares can be doubled. Spend all the money you want buying more shares, but if your stock splits, you'll get the monetary equivalent (@ par) instead of another million shares. That sort of thing.

Say you have only 500 shares. Splitting that to 1000 seems fine. But if that splits several more times, do you really need your 10,000 shares to become 20,000? You might say yes, but what if the alternative was to get $10,000, while retaining your 10,000 shares. It's like the ultimate dividend. If you think about it, 10,000 shares get doubled to 20,000 and could then drop below par. Sure, you still have 20,000 shares, half of which were essentially free, and you're still making a profit, but they could drop off the chart entirely before you have a chance to assess the situation. So wouldn't it be nice to have a buffer of money guaranteed to be yours, rather than an excessive amount of shares that could betray you? I think so.

Could be this makes things worse, but I'm willing to give it a try. For the month of December, shares will split a little differently. If your shares would exceed 10,000 when splitting, you'll be set to 10,000 even, and the excess will become money, at a rate of $1 to 1 share (the par value).

By January, we'll see how this affected things, and reassess.

#58

Now, I Just Feel Silly

I've put in place a bit of code that should hopefully order the players properly at the end of the game. Won't know until then, because I'd have to create a backup of the database for a 30-second test and then restore it, and I can just wait, in case other problems arise along the way anyway.

I modified the "stock shift" file that controls the movement of the stocks such that I could say "every time you shift, go up by 20" or whatever I like. It's not ingenious, I just went to the point in the script where it checks to see what the results are and right before it checks, I manually enter my own results. I'm glad the RAND function doesn't have feeling, because I invalidated it's entire purpose by doing that. Could have deleted it, so it didn't have to sit there feeling miserable, but since such functions aren't sentient, I left it. The end. (I'd like to point out now that for some reason certain combinations of SHIFT+letter on my keyboard seem to be non-responsive)

The purpose of this was to manually control the database without going as far as having buttons to make each individual stock go up or down, so I could see how it reacts when it gets to certain points, like 0 or 200. I've been made aware that sometimes the stock will just sit at 0 or 200, and if it doesn't continue beyond those extremes, it might just start going back the other direction and neither split nor crash. Seems like something that should be fixed. It took about 3 seconds to get a stock to split with all of them randomly going up by 20. Gold hit 220 and split properly, but Oil hit 200 and sat there. Odd, I thought. Looked through the logs I create for every roll (which I reset before this test to avoid thousands of lines of rolls) and saw that before Gold split, it was sitting at 200. Obviously, since it went up to 220, and the only way to get there is to stop at 200 first. So what was happening here?

Went into the script and took a look at where it calculates the "future value" of the stock to assess if it's beyond the bounds of 0 or 200. Wouldn't you know it, the criteria for a stock to split or crash was to be less than 0 or greater than 200. It's right there in the script that if the stock hits exactly 0 or 200, nothing special happens. Two equal signs later, and there shouldn't be any further instances of that happening. Now, if it crashes or splits but does not affect the shares owned by the players, then that will be a bit of an issue.

Unfortunately, this little test affected the actual players, and certain individuals did see their shares double several times in quick succession. Had to disable the buy/sell widget to prevent them from selling any of these erroneous shares. Fortunately, my database tracks EVERYTHING, so I can easily look at who gained what, and reverse those changes. I'm glad there are only three people in the game this month; I'm already looking at 12 reversals.

So, if you see ridiculously high share numbers, expect to see them disappear back to the reasonable amount you started with. Don't expect to see shares take a pit stop at 0 or 200 before anything happens to them. The stocks will go back to normal and stop going crazy shortly after I finish this, and maybe no one will even have noticed.

#57

#html #obvious #php #split and crash #stock market #frustrating

High Score = Second Place?

An error where a particular stock hits 0 or 200 and doesn't do what it's supposed to do is frustrating, and currently beyond my grasp to solve. But an error where the top-scorer for the month gets ranked lower than first place seems like something that should be easy to fix.

Originally, there was an issue where it wouldn't display the names in the right order, and it was quite troublesome. The problem was that for most of the tables in the database, when I call up the content I do it in the order it's saved in there, or in reverse order. For example, when you look at the history of your activity, buying, selling, etc, I call up the history table, any records where your username appears, in reverse order. That's so the most recent entries (bottom of the table) show up first in the list. However, for the Score Board, I can't do it that way.

If I was to call up the score history in order, I could very easily display each month's results, but they'd be ordered starting by the earliest game, which could be confusing. If I call them up in reverse order, I can order them to be displayed in the proper order, starting with the most recent, but the ranks would be reversed. This is because every month I add the active players to the table in order of their worth. So, the players with the least money are added last. I tried sorting by gameID (the string of numbers representing the month) but then the ranks were chaotically arranged. What I had to do was call up the data sorted by each gameID descending, so that the newest games came up first, then sort by an extra column that is just an automatically incremented number for each added record. Has no bearing on the ranks, or the games, it just started at 1 and every time a record gets added, it goes up one, which means the lower the number, the higher the rank of the game. This way, once the games are sorted by month, they then get sorted by this "rank" column, and they come out right.

So, when I was informed that the ranks were displaying incorrectly, I was confused. Only the most recent month had done it, but why? The first- and second-ranked players were reversed, and the second place player clearly had more money than the first. Checked the page script, went into the table, and lo-and-behold I found something curious: the ranks were out of order in the actual table! Somehow, they were automatically added that way by the game-ending script.

I was driving in my car when the answer came to me out of the blue, and now that I'm aware of the problem, I'm amazed this is the first time it's occurred. Here's what happens: when the game ends, every player is called up into an array in order of their money (should actually be their money minus any loans they have, but I'm not certain it does this properly). Then, each player has their shares automatically sold for whatever the current value of the stock is, which might encourage players to sell manually before the game ends if the stock prices are high and might fall by midnight. Once the shares are sold, the player is added to the score history table, and their information is reset. And it works very well. Unfortunately, you might notice (or might not, since I didn't and I wrote it) that at no point does it reassess the order of most-to-least money after adding the values of sold shares. At no point do I factor in the amount or value of shares held by each player when sorting them at the end of the game. So, Player A with $20 but 100,000 shares could end up with a million dollars, while Player B with $5000 and 10,000 shares could end up with only $10,000. But because Player A had less money before selling, he gets called up last, and added to the score history last, and Player B, even though he has less money, appears to win because he had more money before selling shares.

The solution should be simple: call up each player (in any order, really), sell their shares, add the new values back to the database, call up each player again but this time in money order, and then add them to the score history table and reset their information. I don't see a reason why this shouldn't work; previously, I've had issues where I called up the players to cycle through them in one area and then tried to cycle through them again elsewhere, and rather than start at the first player, it just continues on from wherever it left off (usually at the last player and then stops). But this shouldn't be like that. It'll just take an extra call to the database, which I was trying to minimize.

I theorized initially that I could just call up the players once from the database, add them to an array, modify their money values within that array without writing to the database, and then cycle through the modified array to add to the score table, but that would require cycling through the array twice, which, as I just mentioned, frequently doesn't work.

I'm sure I'll figure it out, but for now I've just manually modified the database to switch the two players. But honestly, I can't believe that this hasn't come up before. That means that every month, for the past however-many months, the final ranks have been the same as the ranks before the game ended, by complete chance. That seems unbelievable.

#56

The Tale of the Erroneous Extremes

Yes, the rumours are true: the stock market did, in fact, crash without taking away anyone's shares. It also split, and no one benefited from it. I can look at the history of each player and see who should have lost or gained what, and I could modify it accordingly, but that would take a lot of work, and I just don't think it's worthwhile right now. I did make a page to scan through each player's history and add up the non-erroneous entries to see what they should have, but it doesn't work 100%, and if I'm not pursuing this course of reparation, then I'm not going to work out the bugs.

TL;DR The stock market will, from now on, take away your shares when a stock crashes, and double your shares when one splits. As it should have been doing this entire time.

I understood immediately why it was doing it, and for the life of me I can't figure out why I ever modified it the way I did. Basically, what the script should do is load up an array of all players who have shares in the particular stock that is crashing or splitting. It does it like this:

$players = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM the_table WHERE {$stockTitle}>0"); //select players

but what I found when I opened up the file was this:

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM the_table WHERE {$stockTitle}>0"); //select players //echo ($sql); //$players = mysql_query($sql); //no need to load into separate array

what that second one is doing is just the same process but split into three parts, so that I can echo (or print on the screen) the actual string being sent to the database. I use that sometimes when I'm not sure what's actually being sent, and I did it here because up where you see {$stockTitle}, that's something I did not understand at the time and got from somewhere else. I previously explained this, how the curly brackets allow the variable to be just a word, without any encapsulating quotation marks, so it reads as: WHERE Gold>0, rather than WHERE "Gold">0. That makes all the difference. Point is, rather than actually contact the database with this information, with mysql_query, that line is commented out, and never happens. So the reason no one got their shares modified is that the script was never actually looking at any players.

Like I said, I get why I wrote it in three lines, I have no idea why I commented it out, and added a comment saying "no need to load into separate array," seeing as that line doesn't do anything like that. What "separate array?" It baffles me. If the line had used mysql_fetch_array, then it would make perfect sense, because that takes a single row returned from a table in the database and loads it into an array. I use that frequently. But this... it just continues to confuse me.

#55

Smooth Sailing

Nothing mechanically going wrong with the game, although I did let my Silver shares plummet without selling... So nothing new to actually update about, just wanted to make a post so that it doesn't seem like this project is out of my mind.

However, I am working on a side-project as well, what is shaping up to be an awesome deck-builder card game. Can't work too much on it, though, because I need to playtest before I can actually accomplish anything, and I don't have many playtesters in the area.

But this isn't the place for that, at least not right now. Shares in Grain was designed as a behind-the-scenes Grainhouse Quarterly, but I don't really see why I couldn't post updates on other things, too.

#54

Achievements

I'm not setting anything in stone, I just want to keep track of some possibilities, and this is the best place for that. In the future, I'll probably come back to edit this post (with an EDIT: heading) rather than scatter my thoughts on Achievements across multiple entries, but I'll refer to it when I do so nothing is missed.

Seems to me that a lot of games have achievements that you can actively seek out. And I bet that makes creating those achievements easy, because you can structure things for people to get them. But in a game where there is no skill involved, just random luck, how can I possibly come up with achievements for a system where anything can happen? Well, for now I'm going to look at what has transpired so far (that we have a record of) and start there. Basically, I'm going to look at how many achievements I can attach to the players who would have already attained them.

Most of these are going to be "firsts" and I'm sure some will be pretty noobish, like "Updated your profile page!" or something. Maybe not. Anyway, we'll have final-score achievements (ie winner, or winner by narrow margin or huge margin), ones for earning a massive dividend per stock, first split, first crash, maybe one for not buying any stock for the whole game (or at least ending the game with zero shares and $5000), first bankruptcy, first game finished (duh). These are pretty obvious ones. But looking at the score history, I noticed something curious: one of the players, I'll let you figure out who, has come in third place for every game so far. All three of them. He probably isn't impressed, so maybe that's worth an achievement, so he feels a bit better. "Three of a Kind" for earning the same rank three games in a row. Not likely to be earned by many people, though. A lot of these achievements for current players will be mysteries. Who knows when my first split was? Or when Brandon first lost all his shares of one stock? I guess there'd be "first split" and "split all 6 stocks," now that I think about it. Same for crashes, since I already suggested it would be that way for dividends. What about an achievement for risking all your money on one transaction? You have X dollars, and you spend all X dollars one one stock, whether it makes you money or not. Could I track whether that worked out for you? I have no idea.

And that's my main issue with this: monitoring the criteria for dividends. I mean, comparing the ranks for each game you've played is something than can be done while displaying them on your profile page, and only needs to be done if you don't have the achievement already. And the firsts, like crash and split, can be checked when it happens: "Bryan's stock split, double his shares, check if he has the achievement, update it if he does not" sort of thing. That only adds one or two actual lines of code to a structure that already exists and does most of the work. But at what point would it check to see if you've split all 6 stocks? Sure, it could check every time you go to your profile page, and check if you have the 6 achievements for splits and indicate that you earned the 7th, but then it would have to store that (easy) and never check again. Basically, I would need a ton of IF statements to check if you don't have an achievement, and then check if you actually do. And every achievement I add would require yet another IF statement. Unless I could build an Achievement table which stores the criteria for each one, and which could be cycled through automatically. But I don't know how feasible that would be. I guess I'll need to write down what the criteria is, in a static value kind of way, and then see if I can work that into an IF statement. Maybe it's much easier than I'm thinking it is, but we'll see. I would certainly need to store each earned Achievement in its own table, and then select only the ones with a common username in order to view the lot of them. That would be pretty simple, really. Reading it, anyway. To verify if you have the achievement, it would have to read from the database all achievements with your name on them, and then check for achievement names, which would require an excessive loop, because I can't just say "SELECT from achievements where the username is X and the achivement name is Y" and if nothing comes back, X doesn't have Y yet. Because then I'd need a separate SELECT statement for each check, and each statement would need to access the database, so I guess one statement to access the database once with a loop isn't as excessive as it could be. Man, writing this down really clarifies things for me. I'm sure half of it doesn't make sense to anyone reading it.

Sort of thought this entry would result in a list of Achievements, and possibly of players who already achieved them, but this is pretty long and technical, so maybe I'll make a supporting entry, a 53b if you will, where I'll list actual achievements as I think of them. Or as they are suggested to me by players who think they deserve an achievement for something they've done.

#53(a)

Another New Game

Noticed that the automatic headlines have been working fairly well, so that is good to know. They update when the month almost ended, when the new month started. Excellent.

New game start was almost hitch-less. I ran the page from work before we closed up, because I wouldn't have had a chance until I got home after the bar. I ran the script, and got a white page, not what I was expecting. When I checked from my phone later, the market wasn't set to 100, but then I noticed the caption below was set to 100, and the sidebar indicated the market was frozen. So it had worked, but why wasn't the picture accurate? It was a simple fix, and I'm not sure how I missed it. To render a chart, the page needs to include three javascript classes, and they weren't being included. I'm not sure why the includes aren't within the page that renders the chart itself, rather in the page that includes the page that renders the chart. It seems more complicated that way, but I do remember doing it, so I must have had a reason. Maybe I'll change it back and see what breaks. Maybe I'll just leave it be, because it seems to work. This month, I'll be more closely monitoring what numbers are rolled and how the stocks move (using the handy line graphs) to make sure nothing exceeds the limits and the splits work as they should. No more errors.

On a side note, even with three simultaneous splits for my shares, and selling as high as I was able, I still only won by $30,000, which is a pittance in this game. Bryan (HuskerCash) almost had enough to take the top spot, despite an enormous accidental advantage for me.

#52

#new game #html #php #stock #market #winner #javascript

Even I Feel Like Dividend Payouts Should be Capped

I'm not saying that's my plan, but when you have shares in the tens of thousands, and you're likely to get a dividend pay-out of 20 cents per share... It isn't even about who buys low and sells high for the most profit, it's just who squanders the most stock to get the highest dividends several times a day for a month. I don't want to win like that, but the mechanics of this game were designed to be played for half an hour, maybe 100 rolls in total, not potentially ( 24 hours x 2 half-hours x 3 changes per half-hour = ) 144 rolls every day. Maybe the market should only function at certain times, or on certain days.

If I ever implement any sort of "achievement" system, receiving a ludicrous dividend payout will have to be one.

#51

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