January 30, 2005: Weekend UltraCorps Party

So . . . on Saturday a number of staffers, and a couple of local MIBs, came by the office, and we had a LAN party for UltraCorps . . . with a few [Not Available At Your Clearance] logging in remotely. It went pretty well. The first couple of hours were rough, as in "Did we break the program?!?" rough. Then the problem was identified. One spurious character brought down the entire "battle reports" subroutine, not just on this game but on the others on the server.

Fortunately, Giles fixed it.

It was an interesting session. We are finding more and more reasons why small "blitz" games are just Not What This Code Was Made For. It really was designed for massively multiplayer games running once a day; it appears that if you try to run three ticks an hour, it doesn't get enough time for housecleaning. So we learned a lot. But we still had fun with our new computer game!
-- Steve Jackson

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