Automation, automation & more automation

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Mike
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Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Mike » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:16 pm

I must admit I have not yet worked much on the pets and pet quest recently. The main reason for this, is because of the lack of time I have for programming these days.

I do have some spare time at work, where I can work on PkHonor. However, programming both pets and the quest requires me to do research and testing in the game - and I can't very well open a PkHonor client and game while at work.

During evenings, I usually spend most of my time answering e-mails and posts in regards to various things, such as donation problems, donation chargebacks, donation refunds and some in-game cases the staff cannot handle, along with bug reports etc. Which leaves little time for actual in-game development.
Plus, I already need to work 8 hours a day, so I'd rather not spend the whole evening on PkHonor as well. Still, I do what I can.

In order to save time in the long run, and enable myself to focus more on in-game content, I've been busy writing an automation tool that will automatically handle all chargeback cases, while at the same time allowing me to perform a full refund in less than 10 seconds. The tool will check if the player has enough items and automatically take the correct items from someone's account.
The upside of this system is that I was able to write it mostly while at work, since I didn't need to be in-game to work on it. I did however have to perform some testing which happened during the evenings. So the little time I still had for programming in the evenings, was spent on testing this system.


The good news: 2000 lines of code later, it's almost as good as finished! Now I simply need to integrate it yet with PayPal's API (which automatically notifies us about chargebacks) and with my personal control panel to very quickly and easily take care of refunds. I will even be able to perform all refund cases at work since I won't need to log in to the game.
I'm hoping the system will be up and running tomorrow, definitely no later than Saturday.
As of then, I will have much more time on my hands for in-game development, and I will focus entirely on dem pets :) I'm still going for a release before the end of March!


On a side note: Rapsey has recently been working on another automated system that will allow me to deploy server updates much more easily. With just a few clicks, I'll be able to release the latest server and I won't even need to be in-game to restart it.

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Rawr
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Rawr » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:19 pm

Just a question, *if* the automation works off ::prices, or something similar, won't it take 1B Tickets to be 2000M?

If work is taking too much time up, you should totally just say you're ill and take a few days off, just to stay home and sleep ;3
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Jon
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Jon » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:21 pm

Yay :P
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Kylo ren
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Kylo ren » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:22 pm

Sounds like a pretty useful system. Hope it works out as well as you want/hope!
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Harry pooter
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Harry pooter » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:23 pm

This is off-topic, but what exactly does Rapsey do? I literally just don't know lol. I've only seen him post a few times.. (I'm not trying to talk bad or anything about him.)
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Mike
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Mike » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:24 pm

Hashtag wrote:Just a question, if it works off ::prices, won't it take 1B Tickets to be 2000M?

If work is taking too much time up, you should totally just say you're ill and take a few days off, just to stay home and sleep ;3
The automation tool mostly checks the value (in credits) of your in-game items. For example, your donator credits, donator status, premium status, honor status, custom whips, mboxes and mboxes you have opened (we have logs for that too).
Only if the total sum of these items is not enough to cover a whole refund or chargeback, the server will look up the value of the remainder of your items. It will indeed use the ::prices values for that, but don't worry: I took into account the actual value of coins and tickets (1 coin, 100M coins, 500M coins and 1B coins).

As for saying I'm ill: I need a doctor's certificate. And I've already done that once during my second week at work. It's not like one or two days off are going to help me that much anyway.
A little over 7 more weeks to go, then I'm done working there. But then I still need to write up a thesis in order to graduate, which also takes up a lot of time.
Thankfully, once the thesis is done - somewhere end of June I think, I'll have loads of spare time again.

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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Hayden » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:25 pm

Hashtag wrote:Just a question, *if* the automation works off ::prices, or something similar, won't it take 1B Tickets to be 2000M?
Why does it say they're 2b in prices ::l0lwut

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Rawr
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Rawr » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:37 pm

One last thing, will that automated system be able to prevent people from staking, winning & charge backing etc? Otherwise there could be issues abusing that.
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Kaopps
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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Kaopps » Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:56 pm

Hey Mike, if your reading this, could you check on 21968 and 21881. Thanks, also check on Zema's 100B refund, he says hes waited for a whole month on it :)

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Re: Automation, automation & more automation

Post by Hayden » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:08 am

Kaopps wrote:Hey Mike, if your reading this, could you check on 21968 and 21881. Thanks, also check on Zema's 100B refund, he says hes waited for a whole month on it :)
Mike wrote:Forum thread advertisement:
It is not allowed to advertise forum threads in regards to player reports, staff reports, applications, recoveries, refunds or forum posts that are in violation with our rules. This is considered spam.
http://forums.pkhonor.net/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=13239

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