Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

New Monthly Mementos, dev update
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-12-05 18:16:40 [Permalink]
Hey everyone, December's Monthly Memento is Solstice Squirrel's Christmas Number One! We're also doing a special bonus MM to commemorate Harley, our late Improbable Island Official Cat.

So let's chat about the Stamina system for a sec. Back in 2008, you didn't have a pool of Stamina points to use - you had separate turn points for travel, fighting, building etc. If you ran out of Travel points out in the middle of nowhere then you were just stuck, even if you had ten Jungle fights left for the day. It sucked. So I wrote various Wee Thingies to let you swap jungle fights for travel points etc, and those sucked too, but they provided the basis for the Stamina system which we started using at the beginning of Season 2 in 2009.

I had big plans for the Stamina system! Originally we were going to have five main actions (Hunting, Gathering, Fighting, Travel and Crafting), you'd have sub-actions within each, and experience gained would trickle up to the main action category. For example, hitting "Look for Big Trouble" would give you XP in "Hunting for Big Trouble" and "General Hunting," and going up a level in "General Hunting" would get you Stamina cost discounts in "Hunting - Standard," "Hunting for Easy Fights" and the other sorts of looking for trouble.

So why do we have the current weird system, where there are eight friggin' different actions for Travelling, and you can be level twenty in travelling specifically over shallow water and level two in travelling specifically over swamplands? Why does Budget Horse get too tired to travel along beaches but then find more energy to travel across plains? Why doesn't Hunting for Really Big Trouble give you some XP towards Hunting for Big Trouble, which surely is the same thing but easier? Why does it cost fourteen hundred days' worth of Stamina to go from level 98 to level 99 of Travel Across Plains in order to get the same 25-point cost reduction as you got for spending 8% of your Stamina to go from level 3 to level 4?

Well, I ran out of time before the Season 2 deadline, basically. I felt the deadline looming and cobbled something together and it's kind of worked for fourteen years while pissing me off the whole time.

Anyway, I'm in the mood to Correct This Mistake because I'm working on two things; first, refreshing the way Rallies work, and second, having the Drive move around the map rather than lurk in the jungles outside outposts, and giving a bunch more cool things to do in the endgame. Both of those things involve reconsidering the calculations for monster encounters on the map - for years I've wanted to give y'all "Sneaky" and "Stompy" travel options that reduce or increase map monster encounters, but to do it Properly would involve us having twenty four friggin' different actions for Travel, and frankly fuck that so yeah, returning to the Original Plan for the Stamina system is how we're gonna do that. Expect it late this year or early next.

Have fun!

~CMJ

Return of the Wiki
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-11-28 15:27:28 [Permalink]
Hey everyone, the Improbable Island Wiki has returned! In fact it's returned twice - that link there is to the New Wiki, which started off completely blank, and here's a link to the Old Wiki which is read-only. We've separated out the old wiki and the new wiki because the old wiki was so full of outdated stuff that it would've been a bigger job to remove/alter its outdated info than it would be to copy-paste the still-relevant stuff into a shiny New Wiki. Make sense? Pfft yeah right

Anyway if you wanna start filling the New Wiki up with stuff then you'll need to make a wiki account, your regular Improbable Island game account is no good there, at least at the moment. In future I plan to make One Account To Rule Them All, where you log in with your email address and choose from a list of all your alts to play, but that's a thing for next year.

Have fun!

~CMJ

Super Fancy Fun Club!
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-11-16 16:00:57 [Permalink]
Hey all, in a rare moment of Actually Trying To Make Some Money From This Game, the old Hunter's Lodge has been upgraded into the new Super Fancy Fun Club! Permanent customization items have been restocked too. Prices that ended in .95 or .99 have been rounded up to whole dollar increments, because the whole "Hmm, it's only $4.95, if it were $5 that'd be too expensive" thing demeaned us all.

To gain access to the Super Fancy Fun Club, you'll need to deal with the extremely polite bouncer, and he will only permit entry to the fanciest of people: those who can prove that they can afford two U.S. dollars. In real life. That's right, give me two bucks and you get to mingle with the fancy-cheese-eating secret rulers of the world, resting your feet on the butlers' backs while tossing darts to determine the next pope. Practice your Posh Horsey Laugh so you can fit in better whenever someone looks out the window at the poors. Say things like "Ahwahwahwahwa, jolly good, h'of course h'ai have nyiever used a decomposing chicken carcass h'as an h'ashtray," nobody will ever suspect a thing. Say "He's gorn ento tha hice" instead of "'e's gonn in'er thee 'ouse." Practice "We only wear three-stripe tracksuits in my house," etc. Notice that someone's chucked a bike into the dumpster round the back, and leave it there because you're the sort of person who puts things into dumpsters, that's how posh you are.

Have I say jolly good fun what what,

~CMJ

November Monthly Memento, Official Cat change
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-11-13 15:15:48 [Permalink]
Hey folks, November's Monthly Memento is the Guy Head, and it gives a totally normal buff as a result of your totally normal annual effigy-burning ritual.

Harley, the Official Cat of Improbable Island, died last Tuesday after a short reign succeeding Stewart, who succeeded Leo. Next month's bonus MM will be an Official Cat Coronation Bowl in accordance with our traditions.

In a somewhat unorthodox spin, Improbable Island's new Official Cat will be a dual reign of two Official Cats, since it's unclear which of Harley's two potential successors was born first. Introducing your new Official Cats in ascending order of mass:

Carl
Carl is black, sleek and pointy. He enjoys riding on shoulders. He will drink only from a cup in the kitchen sink. He is quiet but believes in physical reciprocity, and will wait at the stairs landing for you to be at eye level with him so that he can pat you on the head.

Nola
Nola is black, round and confusing. She is vocal and enjoys the sort of conversation where she says brrt and you say hm? back and forth rapidly a dozen times or so. Her body language is frequently at odds with her behaviour, to the point where she will lie on your belly hugging you and purring while scowling with her ears folded back.

Long may these two Official Cats reign.

Crate hoarding alleviation, free Quill Bundle upgrade
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-10-18 14:45:51 [Permalink]
Hey folks, remember my last MotD mentioning hey maybe let other folk get some crates instead of hoarding tens of thousands in your inventory, well you know what happened? You know what fucking happened?

What fucking happened is on me. I've been doing this for fifteen bloody years and there is absolutely no excuse for me not seeing this coming:

"Hey everyone, try to leave some crates on the map 'cause we're kinda running out here."
"We're..." *putting on hat* "running out, you say?"
"Yeah it's a whole thing, there are a quarter of a million crates in people's inventories, folk are walking around with thousands or even tens of thousands of crates in their backpacks and they're still picking up more."
"What, they're picking up more?" *grabbing keys* "Like, actively right now?"
"Haha yeah weird right"
"So..." *picking up Crate Opening Crowbar and lacing up running shoes* "crates are becoming rare, is what you're saying."
"Yeah, in fact at this rate we'll run out completely later on today, and anyone who doesn't have one will just be basically shit outta luck. Uh, where you going with that crowbar?"
"Nowhere BYE"

Yeah I've got no excuse, sorry. To anyone who's spent more than ten minutes around other humans, never mind someone who runs an online game, it was forehead-slappingly obvious what'd go down there. Chalk it up to my advancing age.

Anyway, there are some changes to the map pickup routines - you can't pick things up with no stamina, or with too many crates in your backpack. This doesn't remove crates from people's inventories, but it should at least stop the problem from getting worse. Banter had some good ideas about the funniest ways to reimplement crates in the future, and things like "Giving crates little metal legs" have been discussed and are in my notes folder.

(I mean, that'd be cool, right? If crates loved people but hated other crates. If a crate got lonely and had the chance to move once per midnight, it could move away from deep water areas where nobody wants to go for example, and it could even sneak out of the backpacks of players who have 43,876 other crates.)

Anyway, speaking of arbitrarily thieving shit out of your Inventory like the total bastard that I am, I'm in the process of retheming the Hunter's Lodge into the much funnier and more user-friendly Super Fancy Fun Club, and part of that process involves removing obsolete Lodge items. Older, crappier versions of our Quill bundles (which give you Special Comments, which you can use to post chat without your name attached for special effects) have been upgraded to the more recent, more generous versions, so that I can finally remove the old definition files from the game and quit tripping over them trying to support two different versions of Quills.

Folk who had an old-style 4-pack of Quills have been given a new style 5-pack.
Folk who had an old-style 25-pack have been given a 50 pack.
Lucky bastards who had an old-style 60-pack have been given a 500 pack.

The version 2 Quill bundles are functionally identical to the old ones, the only difference is the amount you get (and the old graphic was a bit crap).

Have fun!

~CMJ

New Monthly Memento, Witchbloom Seedpods, server move more or less complete, crates on the map, injury update
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-10-11 23:33:21 [Permalink]
Hey everyone, October's Monthly Memento is the sizzling Server Sausage, yum yum yum, get it while it's e-waste.

Our server move is more or less complete; I need a day or so to tidy up a couple of DNS-related things that shouldn't result in any downtime, but the Big White Box is still up directing folks towards our Mastodon account as a precaution.

Back in the pre-global-banter days, Common Ground used to be our most popular chatroom, because of its accessibility from anywhere. We haven't had much RP in CG for a while, which makes me nostalgic. A while back someone in chat had the bright idea of having One-Shot Teleporters take you to Common Ground on the way to your destination, and I liked both the social/mechanical idea of that and the sudden combat-violence-fight-going-poorly-must-escape followed immediately by this really chill garden space, sudden mood shifts like that are catnip to me. So, One-Shot Teleporters are being gradually phased out in favour of Witchbloom Seedpods, which do the same thing but in a cooler and more folklorey way.

I've been writing better auditing systems that help me to keep a better eye on what's going on on the Island, what's working well, what needs improved, which pages take a long time to load, that kind of thing. With it I saw 1,200 crates disappear from the map today - that's a lot, folks.

There are exploits in the game that I've left unfixed for a long time, because they were often being used for generous ends - it's possible, with the right combinations of doodads, to have effectively infinite inventory space, and to use that space to move stuff around for the benefit of new players. Wandering around the map with a thousand crates in your back pocket isn't exactly what I had in mind when I left these viable techniques in place. If you don't need crates, leave them where they are, cheers.

My wrist is slowly improving, and I'm spending more time each day on the Island again! I've got a whole laundry list of new features to work on; please keep your bug reports and feature requests coming, I always love to hear your ideas.

Have fun!

~CMJ

Server migration (mostly) done, some new bugs, injury
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-09-26 17:08:48 [Permalink]
Hey folks, we're on our new server and whoa it's fast. Midnight now happens in under ten seconds where it was a minute and a half before, and Long Midnight is down from nearly an hour to two damn minutes. Thank you everyone for helping me to test it.

Some new bugs came up in the transfer; folk are getting auto-logged-off very quick, replying to Distractions is a ridiculous text-eating mess when including the original message, email notifications (and confirmations) still don't work, there's a button missing from Place inventory management, buncha little stuff, but honestly on the whole we got pretty lucky. Please use the "Tell us about a problem" link to report any other bugs you come across, because I'm sure there'll be more.

Tomorrow, the 27th, our domain name moves over to our new host, so we can expect some more downtime for a little bit. You remembered to bookmark the Mastodon page, right? It's at https://mastodon.social/@ImprobableIsland, keep that address handy because it's where I'll be posting updates about downtime.

I'll be fixing these bugs throughout the next couple of weeks, but at a heavily reduced rate; I've injured my right wrist! And all it took was moving a bunch of pinball and arcade machines while pulling twelve-hour days at the computer for months on end and then doing one of those Test Your Strength things at the ren faire, you know the ones where you take a big paving mallet and hit the thing and the thing flies up and dings the thing, well I told that thing pretty good but about a week later after doing a bunch more Long Computer Days my fingers/wrist/forearm/elbow told me right the fuck back so now I've gotta keep the Island stuff to like an hour a day tops while I heal up.

So yeah, we're fixing bugs, but we're fixing them pretty slowly until I'm in a bit less pain. Then I'll finally get to code up some fun new stuff for y'all to play with.

Have fun,

~CMJ

September Monthly Memento, getting ready for the server move
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-09-11 15:57:07 [Permalink]
This is an important MotD that affects everyone who enjoys playing Improbable Island, so please read the whole thing. Most MotDs are either chatting about new features or just me doing general bullshitting, this one's actually important, please do read it.

Hello everyone, September's Monthly Memento is the Fucking Nothing. That's right, for your ten dollars, you'll receieve something that looks remarkably similar to the space in your wallet where ten dollars used to be. Weirdly, this has been a really highly acclaimed Monthly Memento over in Banter, so buy it I guess.

Why is it Fucking Nothing this month? Well, because I haven't had time to make it not Fucking Nothing, y'see. Why haven't I had time? Because of our upcoming SERVER MIGRATION OH NO

Now, if you weren't aware, both myself and Improbable Island have been hit with what I'm calling the 2023 Sticky Ball Of Bullshit.
* March-May: cascading financial emergencies related to plumbing, roofing, cats and cars
* Early May: our web host informed us that their older servers (one of which hosts Improbable Island) would be shut down on the 28th of September, and we've gotta move to a new server
* May-August: intensive work updating the entirity of Improbable Island's codebase so that it works with the modern technology that the new web server uses
* Early August: had to take two weeks off for family stuff
* Early September: last-minute change of New Server Destination because I found out our old host got bought out by GoDaddy back in 2016 and entered its final death spiral back in early August while I was doing the family stuff
* Today: We have a new server (with a new company, in a new country), we have the updated Improbable Island code and data that will work on the new server, and I've spent the last week pulling twelve-hour days at the computer, testing and fixing bugs as they come up.

After months of really intensive work, we're in the final stretch, and I need your help to get us over the finish line. We have a testing server configured at gamedad.club that uses the new Improbable Island code, and a copy of the Improbable Island data as of the 6th of September - I need you to go have a damn good poke around at that new server, test every feature and function, and generally try to find places where shit breaks. Note that stuff you do on the test server doesn't affect anything on the live server and vice versa.

When the time comes to perform the migration, which will probably be early next week, the Island will be down for at minimum a few hours, but possibly a day or two. Our Mastodon account at https://mastodon.social/@ImprobableIsland is where you can go to get updates on the migration, please bookmark that page so you'll know where to go if you try to log on to Improbable Island and find that Improbable Island is Not There. This is our only official social media - any other accounts on other websites claiming to represent Improbable Island are nothing to do with us and you shouldn't rely on them for information.

Thank you so much for your patience through all this, and for your support both financial and moral; fingers crossed we can get the final little bits tidied up smoothly and enjoy our wonderfully fast new server.

Wish me luck and have fun!

~CMJ

August Monthly Memento, more migration
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-08-03 01:56:20 [Permalink]
Hey folks, August's Monthly Memento is a continuation of July's Monthly Memento because holy shit is there a lot in that attic. Yikes.

Server migration work continues, and is incredibly dull to talk about, but we're on track to get the actual migration done a week or two early, so we're looking at early to mid September.

Have fun! Looking forward to getting out of this boring crap and onto cool new game features! Any day now! I'm slowly going mad with tedium!

~CMJ

July Monthly Memento, migration process
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-07-03 15:57:39 [Permalink]
Hello everyone, it's July now and that means we've got a new Monthly Memento (newbies note, this is a special item that you get for giving me a tenner). This month's MM is the Attic Hatch!

Remember the May Emergency MotD? Yup, that's still going on, I'm still rummaging around the Dark And Ancient parts of the game code in preparation for making it not bork in PHP8, I've still got a September deadline, and so this month's Monthly Memento is a trip into those dark and dusty places. You can use the Attic Hatch once a day to ascend into Improbable Island's Weird Technical And Social History and return with a horrible souvenir of a worse and weirder time.

What will you find? The vast expanse of beige we all put up with until Covid lockdown? Ill-advised status-based text replacements? The disastrous way that a Bush/Blair-era codebase handled gender pronouns? Who knows, but there's still enough left to do that August's MM will probably be a sequel to this one.

Have fun!

~CMJ

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