Happy New Year!

Well, I didn't get EverHarvest released before Christmas (would have made for a great Christmas, for all of us) - but I have made a great deal of progress in the previous weeks. I'm close to a release, matter of fact - lots of changes, for the better, to the macro engine, and to the state machine itself. No longer does it require such a long pause at the start for 'initialization,' which is probably the best part. Also the saving and loading of walkpaths has become quite fast as I switched from human-editable walkpath datafiles to compiled datafiles. This makes editing walkpaths manually impossible, unfortunately, but I didn't see much capacity for manual editing anyway as walkpaths typically get quite huge.

Anyway - with the release of EverHarvest looming ever-so-near on the horizon (by the end of the week, in fact), the question is now starting to focus on what must be done about Evercraft. Some of you have noted that Evercraft's performance of late has suffered, mostly due to an incompatibility on Windows XP between Evercraft and .NET 3.0/3.5. Well, the answer to that problem is here - I have just posted an announcement on the Macrocrafter.com forums revealing our plans for the development of Evercraft 6, which will be written using the .NET Framework 3.5 and Autocrat 3.5 (which is in use in EverHarvest).

I'm excited. =) Evercraft 6 is going to be a massive improvement over EC5 (which itself was a massive improvement over EC4), and is going to allow us to do soooo much more with the system. We're going to build it from the ground up with extensibility and maintenance in mind, so recovering from changes (like RoK) will be a piece of cake. Also we'll be able to add new functionality to the system to do things Evercraft has never been able to do before. I'll expand on that later. *devilish laugh*

So - that's this month's update... heh - no, seriously - I'll update more frequently as I get the chance.

TTFN. =)

Status Update

It's been a short while since my last update. Things have been pretty hectic around here, I have to say. Rise of Kunark really screwed us over in terms of Evercraft's compatibility with the game, though the changes that were made seem to be for the greater good. In particular the auto-configuring hotbar on the tradeskill window is especially helpful to us (as well as to all the non-macro crafters out there), which can only be a good thing.

In response to RoK's release, we've made several changes to Evercraft that amount to essentially a band-aid on the gunshot wound... We removed the Hotkey Setup step, taking full use of the new hotbar. We also did the Vista users a favor and changed the Coordinate Setup system such that it is *much* faster - near instant on Vista and XP machines alike. As a consequence of this change, Coordinate Setup is also easier to use - you don't need to mouse-over the white box anymore, and because we perform Coordinate Setup at the beginning of each job, the tradeskill window itself can be moved around - no more frustration! =)

The harvest bot beta was also disrupted by the RoK release, in particular the fact that the memory data collected was no longer correct, and with SOE's habit of patching on a daily basis for two weeks after a major release it made little sense to try and collect that data again until the game was more stable. I only recently got the bot running again, just in time to release the next version yesterday. As far as the hunter bot goes, I'm not sure what Faldo's progress on that is - which is a shame since I'm really anxious to see it working.

Work on the new pathing system is pretty much at a standstill while Evercraft is being worked on. All my proofs of concept still function and are relevant, but I just haven't had the time to devote to it. As such, I think I'm going to go against the majority of my beta testers (who have expressed the desire that I delay the release of the harvest bot in order to get the new pather working) and release the bot (once finished) with the walkpath pather instead.

One thing I am devoting some time to, however, is the next version of Autocrat, which will be built on top of the .NET Framework 3.5. Autocrat35 will be a massive improvement over the current version, but mostly in terms of developer productivity - that is to say, it'll take *much* less time to get something out the door with this version.

So that's been my life lately. =P Sorry for not updating sooner - just hasn't been on my mind until recently.

Perspective

I knew I was asking for trouble when I posted this poll on the forums. Give people a chance to give their opinion, and they'll give it. And because people are more likely to say something when they're unhappy (as opposed to happy), I knew this thread would end up being the soapbox for people's frustrations regarding our software.

One thing I'd like to point out is that providing support for software out in the wild is not easy. Our users run Macrocrafter.com software on a vast number of different configurations - operating systems, processors, video hardware, ISPs, .NET Framework versions - all of which make predicting the fixes for an issue a pretty daunting task. Luckily over the year and a half I've been working for this company, I've learned that most of the problems people encounter stem from the same set of issues, and I've learned how to respond to them.

When SOE hands us a new patch, the very first thing I do (like all the rest of you) is wait for the servers to come back up after the patch is complete. I can't do anything until then, but that doesn't tend to matter when nobody else can either. After that, I have to examine all the changes the new update brought to us. More often than not, the changes are small, and I'm able to release a hotfix after an hour or so. This is almost always the case. When it's not the case (like GU#39 for instance), it can take days for the changes to be accounted for and resolved.

None of this, however, accounts for real life. Macrocrafter.com is not my only job. I run a local network shop for small businesses out of my home as well, and sometimes that job takes precedence. That happened this weekend, in fact - one of my clients contracted a virus in all 15 of their workstations, as well as their server, and I was called in to resolve. I was about halfway finished with that job when the game update was released, and I couldn't stop what I was doing - their business (a nearly paperless dental office) relies on their computers being operational in order to function at all.

My other job is taking care of two kids, a two-month old and a 3-year old (one of which is mine, the other is sort of my step-kid), both of which demand a *lot* of attention. They come first, before Macrocrafter.com, and anyone with children will understand why.

 

So I hope this helps to provide some of you with some new perspective on why it can take a few days to fix some of these patch issues. This most recent patch delay was a combination of all these factors - large patch with many changes, my rl job, and my kids.