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Topics - GerbilSoft

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61
Information Kiosk / Timezone Settings
« on: December 30, 2007, 05:47:42 pm »
It seems that the old timezone settings on TSC were messed up and broken, so I added a new timezone system. This timezone system works on POSIX tzdata, so daylight saving time is handled automatically.

To set your timezone, goto User Settings, Display. Select your timezone from the dropdown box.

In case you're wondering why there's so many timezones in the list, I'm using PHP's timezone_identifiers_list() function, which returns *all* supported timezones. Better to have more timezones than not enough. :)

Also note that this does not affect times displayed on the forums (yet), so you'll still need to adjust the SMF time offset via the SMF profile editor.

EDIT, 2007/12/30 06:26 PM: It seems that some parts of the timezone listing were confusing. If you're in the US and you can't figure out which city to select, scroll to the bottom and select a "US/" timezone. This will work for most of the US, but if you live in some place like Phoenix that has weird DST rules, you should select the specific city.

62
Bugs / "Printable" skin is broken.
« on: December 30, 2007, 01:43:41 am »
The "Printable" skin hasn't been ported to Skins2 yet.

Also, the "Printable" link is broken on /controls/skins due to a bug in addparam(). addparam() needs to be rewritten.

63
Information Kiosk / Skins2 and Zero-Point Leadership Awards
« on: December 29, 2007, 01:14:35 am »
Over the past week, I've been rewriting the TSC skinning system. Today, I switched everyone over to the new skinning system, which I call "Skins2". (Yes, very creative, I know. <_<) Most of the new features of Skins2 are more on the backend rather than user-visible features, so you probably won't notice anything different.

Oh yeah, and Classic Stardust and Classic Cerulean work. (Classic Cerulean doesn't have the automatic frame redirect yet, so you may have to go back to the TSC main page manually after changing skins.)

Also, I added the Zero-Point Leadership Award today. Players get this for 0p'ing a division in a game. (This does not count Freestyle or Overall categories. 0p'ing Overall gets you a 0p Championship award, anyway.)

UPDATE, 2007/12/30 01:37 AM: Classic Cerulean's frameset redirect script is working now, so selecting the skin in "Pick a Skin" should automatically redirect you to the frameset.

64
Competition Central / TSC Awards 2007
« on: December 26, 2007, 10:45:43 pm »
On December 31, I'm going to be hosting a TSC Awards 2007 event. Basically, I will be giving out awards for various things that have occured this year.

These awards need your input! Nominate your choices in this topic. Later on, I will add a user poll so everyone can vote for their favorite video. I'm not sure how we'll select the top video yet (whether it'll be based on the forum poll only or via admin consensus, etc), but I'll post how we'll decide once we figure out a method.

Awards for nomination:
- 2D Player of the Year
- 3D Player of the Year
- Overall Player of the Year
- Rookie of the Year
- Comeback of the Year
- Fadeout of the Year (i.e. a player who was formerly at a very high ranking but fell dramatically throughout the year [e.g. lost sitewide points, lost championships, etc.])
- Best Video of the Year

PS: This is a serious topic. Don't make stupid nominations. That means you, genus. Also, you can't nominate yourself. And I don't care if you made an awards topic before - I actually implemented awards.

(Also note that while you can't nominate yourself, if you do end up getting nominated and appear in the final polls, you *can* vote for yourself.)

UPDATE, 2007/12/31 08:00 AM: We don't have the award graphics ready yet, and there aren't enough nominations, so we'll have to postpone the awards event until sometime in January. :(

65
Information Kiosk / User Settings Rewrite
« on: December 24, 2007, 08:25:25 pm »
I rewrote the User Settings page. The new User Settings page is split into three pages:

- General: This page has your name, bio, and IRC ident information.
- Display: This page controls display settings on TSC.
- Stardust Skin: This page controls settings for Stardust-derived skins.

66
Information Kiosk / Icon View is now available
« on: December 24, 2007, 06:27:39 pm »
For the past few weeks, I've been working on a new feature called "Icon View". Icon View replaces text with icons in certain areas of TSC. Right now, Icon View is only set up for the main Rankings page.

To enable Icon View, go to User Settings, Display, check the "Icon View" checkbox, and click Submit. Then, click the "Rankings" header to see the new Icon View.

I'm currently missing some title screens, so for some games you will see "[No Image Available]".

The next part of TSC I want to iconify is (some) division headers. That is, instead of showing "Sonic", "Tails", etc., it will show a picture of the respective characters. (I'll use the Life icon from each game.)

67
Information Kiosk / More brokenness fixed...
« on: December 24, 2007, 03:22:19 pm »
Recently, we've been having a problem where multiple RANKSNAPs were marked as CURRENT, causing incorrect points and sitewide points to be displayed. Apparently, this was caused by MySQL 5.1's partitioning system. In some cases, a partitioned table won't update correctly. :(

I turned off partitioning, so it should work correctly now.

68
While optimizing some functions last night, I managed to introduce a bug in the CENTITIME processing function that mangled times with centiseconds. I fixed the bug, but anyone who submitted a CENTITIME stat since last night may have been hit by it. If you submitted any stats with centiseconds since December 22nd at 11:29 PM EST (but before December 23rd at 6:45 PM EST), please double-check those stats to make sure that they are correct.

EDIT: In case anyone doesn't know what CENTITIME is:

TIME = 1:23
CENTITIME = 1:23:45 <-- this is the one that broke
MILLITIME = 1'23"456

70
Information Kiosk / New TSC Profile Link
« on: December 22, 2007, 09:58:04 pm »
I added a new "TSC Profile" link on the left side of posts. In addition to linking to the user's TSC profile, this link also indicates if the user's forum name is different from the user's TSC name, which can help out a lot in some cases (e.g. all the users who renamed themselves after Pokémon a while ago).

71
Information Kiosk / Mega Performance Improvement in Submissions
« on: December 22, 2007, 04:55:46 pm »
For those of you who were here back in 2004 and 2005, you may remember how the Submissions page took forever to confirm a page of stats. As I recall, it took over 1,000 database calls to confirm a single stat! Rolken optimized that some time ago, but it still took quite a while if you submitted over 50 stats at once. Last night, I looked over the processing code to figure out why it was taking so long. It turns out that there are (were) two major performance problems:

1. When inserting queue updates, the script built a long string using the PHP concatenation operator and then sent it to the database. This seems like it's more efficient, since it only does one query, but it's actually worse because the database has to process a long string.

2. The queue system checked the temporary queue for duplicates before adding new stats. The checking system was linear; that is, it checked all elements in the array to see if there were any duplicates. This works fine for a few stats, but the time grows exponentially as more stats are added to the list.

How I fixed both of these:

1. Instead of building a huge string, use prepared statements. This makes it so the script only sends the query once, and then it simply sends the data. The data is sent in binary form, so it's much faster for the database to process. I've converted the biggest user of this method so far, and it knocked off around 20 seconds (~120s vs. ~140s) for processing 100 suspended stats. There's still some more functions that are using the old concatenation method that I need to convert later.

2. Maintain two arrays; one with the original data, and one as an indexing array. This increases memory usage, but it changes execution time from exponential to linear.

Overall: TSC should now be able to confirm your submissions faster. :)

72
Wikkity! / Feature Idea: Browser/OS Icons
« on: December 21, 2007, 11:07:53 pm »
I have a random idea for a new feature: Two icons next to a user's name indicating what browser and operating system they were using the last time they were on TSC. It shouldn't be that hard to implement.

Any comments?

73
Leaderboard Disputes / SonicFan23: ...
« on: December 21, 2007, 01:08:16 pm »
On your Sonic Heroes / Bosses / Team Two / Sonic stat:

"Ps2 version, I do the death glitch, and when I started, before his presentation I attack they, and then, he die at 5.50 seconds, only ps2 version..."

Did you even bother to read the rules? Actually, I'm pretty sure you read the topic discussing this exact glitch, and the resolution was that the glitch was banned.

74
General Sonic / Records / AntiRecords
« on: December 21, 2007, 09:02:17 am »
Right now, the Record and AntiRecords pages and awards include totals, overalls, and freestyle records. Should these be removed or not?

Also, in addition to voting in the poll, please post reasons why you selected your choice in this topic.

75
Information Kiosk / TSC Awards!
« on: December 20, 2007, 11:55:32 pm »
Today, I implemented the basics of the TSC Award System. Currently, it supports non-automated stats (i.e. given out by administrators) and several automated stats, including:

- Most Records
- Most AntiRecords
- Most Submissions
- Most Championships

These awards will automatically be given out to users who qualify for them. If you no longer qualify for an award that you have, you will not lose the award; however, it will be marked as "expired". Note that the award display system doesn't show if an award is expired right now.

To view awards, you can click the "Awards" link in your profile, or click the "New Awards" button in the navigation menu to see the awards given out in the past week.

Also, if anyone can make some good base images for the awards, please do so. By base image, I mean it should have areas where the member's name and the award date can be overlaid using PHP's gd library. (Oh yeah, and PNG format is preferred.)

EDIT: If you click on an award name in the "New Awards" page, it'll take you to the same page. Likewise, clicking on an award name on a member's "Awards" page will take you to the "Awards" page. This is because I haven't implemented per-award pages yet. <_<

76
Bugs / Submitting no stats results in a TSC Fatal Error
« on: December 20, 2007, 04:17:54 pm »
1. Go to Submissions, select a game, fetch divisions.
2. Click "Submit" without entering any stats. The Confirm page will show up with no stats.
3. Click "Confirm". A TSC Fatal Error occurs.

Expected Results:
"You haven't submitted any stats!" message should appear instead of the Confirm page.

77
Bugs / Duplicate Directory Names
« on: December 20, 2007, 02:01:23 pm »
Apparently, there's a member named "Mr biz" and another member named "Mr. Biz". The problem here is that both of them end up having a directory named "mr_biz". I encountered this problem while trying to change the `directory_name-parent` key on the `directories` table to a unique key.

Not only does this prevent the unique key from being created, it prevents access to one of the users' profiles. I'll need to figure out some way to work around this problem. (Maybe use "__" for the period instead of "_"?)

Also, registration will have to be updated to check for this type of nick collision.

78
Bugs / Forum: Search goes through all boards, not just current subsite.
« on: December 20, 2007, 09:49:04 am »
The Search function isn't limited to the current subsite, even if the user's settings have the forum site mask set to "Site-specific boards".

http://www.soniccenter.org/forum/index.php?action=search

79
Information Kiosk / IMPORTANT: Verify your stats before submitting!
« on: December 20, 2007, 09:24:12 am »
Please make sure you verify that the stats you submit are accurate. We've been having a ton of new users submitting stats that have been flagged as fake by the Automatic Fake Statistic Checker™ when they aren't fake at all; rather, the user managed to typo the stat. (As an example, someone recently submitted an SA2 score that didn't end in 0. They fixed it shortly after, but still - that shouldn't happen.)

So, make sure you don't typo your stats, or we'll send the Typo Police after you. :o

80
Leaderboard Disputes / ATTN: elecmouse101
« on: December 19, 2007, 08:43:57 pm »

81
General Sonic / Sonic 1 / iPod
« on: December 19, 2007, 08:41:01 am »
Sonic 1 was released for the iPod yesterday (5G and Classic, not Touch). Apparently it's a fairly good port, unlike S1GBA, though I've noticed that some reviews have listed weird issues:

- It occasionally loads the wrong music.
- Control scheme is awful.
- It's 62.9 MB.

Yeah. 62.9 MB. S1/MD was 512k, S1/GBA was 4MB. The only reason I can think of as to why S1/iPod is so huge is because they use AAC or MP3 audio instead of emulating a YM2612.

Also, apparently S1/iPod lets you use a custom soundtrack. A first for Sega. :o

82
Information Kiosk / Maxpoints Being Recalculated
« on: December 16, 2007, 08:46:47 pm »
I'm running a script to recalculate all previous maxpoints in preparation for the new Awards system. This recalculation may take up to 10 hours, so submissions probably won't be working until at least 7 AM EST tomorrow.

I will also need to recalculate previous sitewide totals, but I will do that later tomorrow night.

Also, you may notice that everyone's percentage is listed as 0.0%. This is due to the recalculation process, since percentage depends on the maxpoints for a game.

Oh yeah, sitewide points are down for now, too.

83
Information Kiosk / What's with that Eggman icon at the bottom of the page?
« on: December 16, 2007, 03:25:44 am »
I added a new function that shows an Eggman icon () when I'm editing the TSC codebase. If you see this icon (it'll be located right next to the TSC version number at the bottom of the page), then parts of TSC may not work correctly, and you might get a TSC Fatal Error or a PHP parsing error.

84
Information Kiosk / My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
« on: December 16, 2007, 01:16:32 am »
I'm adding a bunch of Sonic-related icons to the Message Icon list. The first one I've added so far is the unused Sonic 1 Goggles monitor.

Stay tuned for more icons! :D

85
Information Kiosk / Database Upgrade
« on: December 12, 2007, 12:25:47 am »
I upgraded to MySQL 5.1.22-rc on my server, since 5.0.44 was having some odd problems. MySQL 5.1 has a new partitioning feature, which should allow me to repartition large tables to improve performance. I'll experiment with this feature sometime this weekend.

86
Information Kiosk / Per-Game Sitewide Points are back!
« on: December 11, 2007, 03:06:24 pm »
I re-implemented the Per-Game Sitewide Points functionality. You can view how many sitewide points you earn per game by going to your TSC profile.

NOTE: If you add up the points listed on your profile, you will *not* get the same figure as listed on Sitewide Rankings. It may be off by a few tenths. This is due to rounding errors, and unfortunately I can't do anything to fix it. :(

87
Wikkity! / Biggest Scam in Gaming History
« on: December 09, 2007, 03:52:51 pm »
From #soniccenter on 2007/04/23:
Quote
<&mike89> so i'm going to go on the record
<&mike89> and expose the BIGGEST SCAM IN GAMING HISTORY
<&mike89> sega... have nothing to do with sonic any more!
<&mike89> theyve outsourced all development to TSS

And now Sega has started up a Sonic blog, and one of the writers is from TSS! :O

http://blogs.sega.com/sonic/

88
Information Kiosk / New Topic Status Icons!
« on: December 08, 2007, 07:10:49 pm »
I added new icons to indicate the status of a topic: Chaos Emeralds and Super Emeralds. :D

First, the regular topics:

= normal topic.
= hot topic.
= very hot topic.
= normal poll.
= hot poll.
= very hot poll.

Next, the sticky topics:

= normal topic [sticky].
= hot topic [sticky].
= very hot topic [sticky].
= normal poll [sticky].
= hot poll [sticky].
= very hot poll [sticky].

Topics that you've posted in will have a small green arrow in the bottom-right corner of the icon. Locked topics have a grayed-out version of the icon.

Questions / Comments / Suggestions? :)

EDIT: I swapped the colors of the Hot and VeryHot topic icons. Poll icons are still the same.

89
Bugs / Rankings doesn't properly escape ampersands.
« on: December 08, 2007, 02:45:18 am »
On the Rankings tables (and probably elsewhere), the ampersand in "S&K" and "Sonic & Knuckles" is not properly escaped to &amp;. This isn't a serious problem, but it's not HTML 4.01 compliant.

90
Information Kiosk / New Message Icon Selection System
« on: December 07, 2007, 10:06:52 pm »
I haxed the Message Icon selection system to make it more usable. Instead of a single dropdown, all the icons are laid out onscreen. Click the icon to select it (its border will turn white; unselected icons have a black border). It works the same way as the previous Message Icons.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve how selected and deselected icons are indicated, please let me know. I'm pretty sure this selection system won't look any good on light-colored themes, e.g. Chaos Angel.

NOTE: The new Message Icon selection system won't work if JavaScript is disabled (or if your browser doesn't support it).

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