Lanzer's Work Diary

[Lanzer]

Less work on Gaia stuff this week.  Just working on backend scripts to help keep old tables pruned properly and fixed a bug that kept some tables from being pruned since... 2021.  Yikes.

Instead I spent some more time digging through zOMG source code.  Found a few custom java code in our large repository that was made for an XMPP/Jabber server.  Inside the comments I finally found out which chat service we used for zOMG back in the day.  If I can actually find the original software and get it working, we can actually get clan chat working in zOMG again.  The server we used was released literally 20 years ago, and it was no surprise that it's no longer online.  After contacting the original author, he actually found the old version and I was able to get hold of it.  Now the challenge is to compile some 20 year old source code.  This task require related libraries that are equally as old, and the whole task became a rabbit hole that would take another couple of hours or even days to solve.  Putting this on the back burner for now until I actually managed to get zOMG running under Ruffle.

Still putting time in compiling the zOMG FLA files for fixing a core Ruffle bug that kept it from working properly.  Compiling through Flash Builder directly didn't seem to work right so I'm trying the approach of using a compiler on the command line.  As usual, I came across a series of errors, many of which were very hard to debug as I had to look for documentations and forum posts form 20 years ago as that's how old these tools are.  Hopefully I'll get somewhere by next week, but more like in 2 weeks as I'm headed to Yellowstone park next Thursday.

[Lanzer]

We spent July 4th to the 10th on a road trip to Yellowstone National Park.

Laine's sister was in town and she wanted to visit Yellowstone Park.  Finally we have an excuse to go for the first time!



We decided to drive there because it's generally pretty expensive to fly there, and the drive wasn't too bad.  We also get to visit other parks such as Tetton Park along the way.



I had no idea what to expect and we were blown away by the park's beauty.  It's no wonder why they formed the first national park here.




The park itself is huge.  It takes 4 hours of driving just to drive around half of the park, with many delays either because of bisons crossing the roads, or you would see a traffic jam because everyone stopped to take pictures of bears or other wild life.

We were lucky to have spotted many animals, and Alita had a great time pointing and calling out the animals she saw.





We even had bison as neighbors near our cabin!  We saw bisons, foxes, deer, elks, goats, bears and even saw wolves chasing a herd of bisons.  Supposedly wolves were hard to spot so we got real lucky and checked off quite a few animals on our bingo card.

We stayed 3 days inside Yellowstone.  We spent the first day on the southern part of the park, the second day was the north, and the third day we drove to the north eastern side up the mountain.  It was a long drive but the view was well worth it.






We had a great time and would highly recommend anyone to visit this majestic park during the summer.  

On our second day we noticed that one of the parks' hotels were complete blocked off.  We later found that there was actually a shoot out involving a park worker.  At the end the shooter was shot dead and only a police was injured, thank goodness.  Laine found out that we actually had a reservation at that hotel but ended up switching to the cabin.  We dodged a bullet there. 

It took another 2 days to drive back home, and I was pretty exhausted from all the driving.  Needed to take an extra day just to recover.  Now back to fixing bugs!

[Lanzer]

Last week's updates includes:

• Revamping Avatar Builder's undo system, porting over to use database for undo data ensures that undo data is persistent over time and doesn't randomly reset to zero.  Also allows more room for large undo slots. 
  
• Recent item search upgrade carried a bug that stopped users from seeing new items.  Fixed the user based caching system which caused this problem.
  
• Added button in search result for bringing back previous page.
  

Work on zOMG continued.  I was finally able to compile the core SWF files but they caused many errors when used in the game.  Still more debugging is needed.  This part is painful as things can either work next minute or it'll take many days before I figure out what exactly went wrong.  It's a shame there wasn't much documentation on how the development environment was setup.

[Lanzer]

Apologies for the lack of update for the past 3 weeks.  Things had been really rough at the beginning of August and I've been doing a lot of work not related to programming.

The work on zOMG had hit a snag.  I aimed to get all the libraries in order and compile the FLA files to the point where I'm not getting any errors, thinking that will be the key to making the transition to Ruffle compatibility, but the compiled Flash SWF file simply produces errors when played, and I was completely stuck as to why things wasn't working.

At the same time our IT manager had handed in his resignation due to personal reasons, and we were 30% into the great database migration project, so now we're dealing with potential stability issues with our database as a continued issue, and a lot of work that is generally pretty specialized for anyone to just come in and take over.  We're still looking for an IT manager to help us in both maintenance and migration.  Meanwhile, I'm the one wearing the IT hat and crossing my fingers that no emergencies would randomly take up 12 hours of my time.

Since last week I've been working on compiling the zOMG FLA files through the command line compiler, hoping that this would yield better results.  Work on this is still on going, and going pretty slow because I can only dedicate every Friday for this task.

Most of last week was spent on the invite system.  It's going through a re-vamp with shortcut invite code link instead of email invite moving forward, and a QR code generator for QR code is coming later this week.  Also needed to add prevention for abuse so there's an admin panel to go with this.

Beginning of August was mainly the Runway ticket system and a few bug fixes that goes with it.  I was informed that there is a strange bug where one or two entries would not receive any votes.  Upon inspection I found that this is an issue that happens randomly about twice a month.  I've written a reporting script to inform me the next time this is happening so I can find the root cause.  So far I've ran many simulations against the system and couldn't replicate this issue.

[Lanzer]

Database backend stuff is soul crushing work, but if we don't keep up we'll be running into issues sooner or later.  Right now we have a few database backup issues to fix, then we can go back to database migration.  I can't handle the migration all by myself or nothing will be done on Gaia.  Currently still looking for an AWS management company to help us out with this.

Taking a break to work on some of the more requested features such as dark mode for Marketplace.  It's not technically difficult, but it's just a ton of manual adjustments that takes time.  After some debugging it should be ready in a day or two.

Finally tracked down the Runway voting related issues.  Everything is rock solid now and we can get decent performance while maintaining the even distribution on a per user basis.

Fishing trophies still weren't granting automatically, but with this fix we should have trophies granting on the 1st next month.

[Lanzer]

The work with dark mode continued. So far the following pages had dark mode added:

Inventory
Dress up
My Gaia landing page
Private Messages
Account Settings/preferences/signature
Wishlist
Friendslist
Invite

Work on dark mode for the guilds system is still underway and should be ready later next week.

[Lanzer]

Dark Mode for guilds is taking longer than expected to finish, only the compose page is left, but it has a lot of components including previews that makes life difficult.

Spent a day updating the Wishlist arranger. Items you own has an identifier, and a trash bin is added to easily delete items. Items in the trash bin an be restored just by dragging items back into the main wishlist window.

Also spent some time fixing the new zOMG servers. The system did a hardware upgrade on them, but the default server template had some missing config. On top of that, Gaia's system need some configuration and security changes since the new servers have new IP addresses. A painful process that I always forget to do since this happens annually or so. This time I bite the bullet and wrote a script to scan and automatically update the config, so if this ever happens again, the system won't encounter any down time.

The first attempt at dark mode for MyGaia had some terrible colors, thanks to the art team things look somewhat decent now.

The zOMG recompiling effort took a short break as the work had been gut wrenching since I don't have any documentations and there are no clues as to using the compilation tools correctly. Will muster up the effort in another shot next week.

[Lanzer]

Finally got dark mode for Guilds completed. It involved editing 102 files. No wonder it took so long to finish. It uses one of the oldest template system on Gaia and working on it was no fun.

Other fixes:
Fixed Spinami
Removed topics hidden notification on forums page

[Lanzer]

Sorry for the lack of update for the past 2 weeks. I've got some good news and bad news to share to everyone here. We gotta start with the good news, and it is that Laine is now 9 weeks pregnant! Which means Alita will soon be an older sister! I could hardly remember how crazy life was on Alita's first 12 months and now we're about to do it again.

Now for the bad news, which is that Laine had been experiencing some terrible morning sickness. Laine had always been prone to nausea from everything such as boat rides to medications, and now she is struck with debilitating nausea. She had to force herself to eat with no appetite, then wait and see if she would puke it all out, then wait a few hours and eat again or she would puke from being too hungry.

I've been supporting her by being her cook at 4am and handling all house work during this period, but unlike her first pregnancy, this time around we have a little one running around the house who needs constant attention! Now I really wish we live near our parents so we could get some relief. For the time being, we just gotta tough it out and hope that the nausea subsides after week 12, but for Laine's first pregnancy, the nausea didn't go away until week 20... We are just hoping for the best!

Meanwhile, I'm barely catching up fixing all the bugs and requests from ATS. I hope I can be productive again when our situation is a bit less chaotic. Will keep you all updated with Laine's progress.

[Lanzer]

Laine is coming close to her 12th week of pregnancy now, and we're all hoping that the endless morning sickness will start to subside. Hopefully I can start getting more sleep time soon.

Just launched a small marketplace update with the store favorite feature. You can now favorite user stores on the marketplace so you can frequent them easily. We will be adding additional features so that you can be notified when your favorite stores have new items listed. For now this feature is just a bookmark.

While working on the feature I finally found the bug where your own store description become somebody else's. It's caused by a cache that is shared between features. This decade old bug is finally fixed, so that's another good news.

Those who frequent the Avatar Builder feature should notice the layout changes, fixes to the previous stick to top issue, as well as the float to top window being draggable. Also lowered the brightness on the light mode.

Players for Lake Kindred should be happy to know that the bug where your active kin would disappear from the forum is also fixed and your favorite kin will always hang out with you in the forums.

[Lanzer]

Last month had been pretty rough, but we're starting to see the end of the tunnel. Laine's puking had lessened to nighttimes now, and she can finally drive during the day. Hoping for a smooth rest of her pregnancy. The baby is the size of an apple now. The next challenge is for us to name Alita's sister...

Got a bit of detour to update the payment library and fix some long standing issues with direct credit card payment. As well as adding more robustness so that even if a user's logged off, the completed Paypal payment will still grant items and gcash properly. The new Paypal server library is nice that any future changes shouldn't require us to change code on our end but just updating the library should be enough. Currently stuck trying to get Apple Pay to work. Starting to regret dealing with the 30 step instructions that only lead to an error that I couldn't troubleshoot...