Well… in honor of my pending interview with Three Rings this week, I figured it was high time I checked out some of the “competition” if you will.

And by checking out the competition, I mean I just beat Sid Meier’s Pirates! with what I guess can be considered a maximum score. At least, there wasn’t anything left to check off on the scorecard when I was done. That is to say, I scored 126 out of a possible 126 fame points. I was made a Duke by all 4 nations, rescued/avenged my family, found all of the lost cities, vanquished the other 9 named pirates and took their treasures, accumulated a bucketload of money, married a cute little Dutch girl, and settled down as governor of a city I conquered very early into the game. And I ended the game on max difficulty level.

My only regrets are that:

1. I never once saw (much less had an opportunity to capture) a Ship of the Line
2. I retired an old and burnt out man (it would have been nice to have finished the game in better health and retired willingly).
3. I played most of the game on the middle difficulty level (would have been nice to have been able to bump up to higher level sooner, but by the time it occurred to me to do so, my health was poor enough that I couldn’t win a duel against a blind puppy).

Near the end of the game, I discovered an interesting bug (at least, I assume it was a bug). Every time I spoke to my father-in-law (governor of Tortuga) while wooing my wife for treasure maps (yeah, it sounds weird), he gave me 50 acres of land. I think I got a total of about 400 acres this way before I realized what was happening.

Then, the one time I tried to talk to him in the hopes of getting more land, he decides to give me a mission in stead of free wealth. So I ignored him and sailed off to collect the last big treasure in the game and retire.

Other than the governor bug, there was really only one interesting event that happened throughout the entire game. I took a Spanish Flag Galleon with a rowboat.

Enter me, accidentally losing my fully equipped large frigate because I had switched my flag onto my sloop to sail back into town before dividing up the treasure and hiring on a new crew (light ship functions better against the wind). With my sloop in hand, I capture the first three enemy ships to sail by… and then I get greedy.

I’m hoping for a Ship of the Line, and am not really paying attention. So, when I see a large “New Warship” sail by, I pounce. I had taken a serious beating in the three battles before, and hadn’t taken on any more crew members since setting sail. So, after casualties, I had something like 60 men between four moderately damaged ships. The galleon has 200 men and 40 guns.

I attack the warship and whittle at it for a while before I take a heavy dose of chain shot to the sails and am immobilized. The galleon fires another salvo (something like 32 guns remaining), and I sink.

Somehow, since I have multiple ships in my fleet, it just transfers me to the next boat in the line. So I attack again, same result. He’s down to like 180 men and 28 guns and I’m down to under 40 men and two ships, a fluyt (notable for being the absolute worst ship in the game), and a heavily battered little brigantine. So… I try one last time with the brigantine since it’s personal now, and I figure I can always sail away on the fluyt if worse comes to worse.

My brigantine isn’t as heavily damaged as I thought it was, it still has a full 20 guns and no hull damage, just a bit to the sails. So, I reef them to avoid damage and start kiting the big meaniehead who sunk my other two ships. Things go well for the first little bit, I quickly hammer him down to something like 10 guns and 50 crew. Unfortunately, he gets one last good hit in, and completely destroys my sails.

I return fire and realize that my only hopes of winning are to somehow board his ship, so I get out and start pushing. Have you ever pushed a sinking warship? It’s not very effective.

It probably took 20 minutes (RL) before my little raft drifted into the computer’s ship. Something was wrong with the computer’s targetting because once I got within chain shot range, he kept overshooting me. I mean… it’s not like I was going anywhere.

When we collide, I somehow have 17 men left. Computer is down to 18

Posted by Ammon as games, pirates, play, three rings at 10:54 PM EDT

2 Comments »

http://www.worldofwarcraf…ll/draenei.html

Well, I’m a bit late in posting on the subject, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was right.

Ok, granted. Lots of people were right. Nobody who did any real serious thinking about the new Alliance race ever came up with any other viable conclusions, but still. I was right. Three months ago, I was right about something

A few deviations to note from my prophecy:

1. My comment about the concept art showing a draenei was completely wrong. Upon further inspection of the image in question, the lump that I had assumed was a shoulder turns out to be a face - probably that of a rather pale orc. The head is just that of whatever Outland critter he has roped into serving as his lvl 70 mount.
2. The draenei we’re getting aren’t ugly. Heck, their females are downright cuddly when compared to what they could have been.
3. They’re not gonna be assassins. They’re gonna be paladins.

The WoWWiki article on the subject has some good stuff. Apparently the racial cooldown ability will be a 15 second HP regen buff that scales with the character’s level - similar to druid healing of the same level, and their chosen crafting profession will be jewelcrafting (big surprise there).

I’m excited. I’m giddy. I’ll probably even re-activate my account whenever the expansion decides to come out

Posted by Ammon as burning crusade, games, shamadins, sleep, warcraft at 12:00 PM EDT

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Yargh!

I'm currently involved in some very heavy manipulation of XML data in a Flash application. For such purposes, I am compelled to use XPath. It's a decent enough language. Ok, I lied. It's good. Saves mounds of time that would otherwise be spent iterating over xml tree structures and searching for elements.

When using XPath in Flash, one has two options. First, Macromedia Adobe has a first party implementation. Apparently it's not that wonderful and nobody who knows better uses it. Second, there's the XFactor Studio API. This is what I use. It's what a lot of people use. It is nice. It has never failed me before.

Until today.

I have a very simple favor to ask of the library. I want to select all of a node's siblings. Now, granted, I am doing some searching to determine which node's siblings I need here, but it's really basic.

The XML doc I'm working with looks something like this:

<configurator>
	<group>
		<products>
			<p>1</p>
			<p>2</p>
		</products>
		<choice id="a"/>
		<choice id="b"/>
	</group>
	<group>
		<products>
			<p>3</p>
		</products>
		<choice id="c"/>
		<choice id="d"/>
	</group>
</configurator>

What I want is all <choice>'s in the same <group> as a <product> with a given <p>. Sound simple enough? Well, it is. The XPath statement to do this might look something like this:

//group[products/p='3']/choice
or
//group/choice[../products/p='3']

Both search paths are equally valid and return the same results when I try them out on other xpath implementations.

The XFactor version returns nothing. I know the lib works, and I know I'm using it correctly since my program continues to function up to this point (and I'm making 4 or 5 selections before this point).

So, I'm mildly peeved here. I've tried breaking it up into a pair of sequential queries (first select the appropriate group, then select the choices within that group), but that doesn't do anything either.

So far, this problem has cost me 2 hours this morning and it doesn't look to be clearing up any time soon. Sigh.

update

After another hour, I have determined that the XFactor XPath implementation is broken when it comes to searching based on text node values. Chris (coworker) swears up and down that it isn't broken, so he's trying to prove me wrong now

In the mean time, I have implemented an ugly brute-force solution to the problem. So, in stead of:

var path:String = "//group/choice[../products/p='"+pid+"']";
var list:Array = XPath.selectNodes( configurator.firstChild, path );

I have had to settle for something like this:

// grab all products
var path:String = "//group/products";
var pNodes:Array = XPath.selectNodes( configurator.firstChild, path );
var gNode:XMLNode = null;

// iterate over products until we find the one we want, YICK
for( var k = 0; k &lt;pNodes.length; k++ ) {
    // look at all &lt;p&gt; children
    var tmp:Array = pNodes[k].childNodes;
    for( var j = 0; j &lt;tmp.length; j++ ) {
        if( tmp[j].firstChild.nodeValue == pid ) {
            // parent.parent
            gNode = tmp[j].parentNode.parentNode;
            break;
        }
    }
    if( gNode != null ) break;
}

// grab the appropriate wad of choices, finally
var list:Array = XPath.selectNodes( gNode, "//choice" );

update

After about 20 minutes of headscratching, Chris seems to have given up as well

Interestingly enough... the first party api doesn't do it either:

var path:String = "//group/choice[../products/p='"+pid+"']";
var list:Array = mx.xpath.XPathAPI.selectNodeList( configurator.firstChild, path );

So... I'm very curious if anybody actually does these kinds of searches in Flash? They're valid according to the W3C spec and they work in Java... for a language like Flash (which is currently handcuffed to XML as its only reasonable means of communication with the outside world) to have a broken XPath implementation is... not good. Sigh.

Posted by Ammon as as2, flash, howto, programming, rant, work, xpath at 12:50 PM EDT

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