pftq.com
December 23rd, 2007
Posted by pftq

Creations Index Upgraded

The Creations Index has looked pretty sloppy for some time, though it featured a search engine and sortable pages. Ironically, I made similar database programs for various other people, using my Easy Page Creator, but I never used it to sort my own site.

I’ve finally replaced the old junky version of the index with the Easy Page Creator, so everything should go much smoother now. The layout - I kept the same, but the internal workings should be much better (load faster, more organized, etc).

Seeing as the index already features a search (more powerful one too) and sorting, I’m curious as to whether I should even bother with the Ladder, Scripts, and Web sections as they seem redundant. I’ll leave them be for now.

106 unique view(s)
November 4th, 2007
Posted by pftq

Gallery Reconstruction

All the pictures have been wiped and re-uploaded onto the gallery. Had a few issues with the naming scheme in that pictures of the same area and time did not line up together and the gallery as a whole was becoming too unorganized.

Pictures from now on will be named and sorted accordingly to a numeric value. All videos displayed will be in flash.

On a side note, I’ve also added a Europe section… maybe a few of you guys out there will recognize some of the pictures. :D

112 unique view(s)
October 3rd, 2007
Posted by pftq

Derivative Tool

Finally studying Calculus - might be a surprise to a few of you who don’t know me that well. The teacher went through with some overly long processes on how to find the derivatives; for those interested, I also wrote a program to find/estimate the derivative (check your work? :P ).

Of course, it will not be 100% accurate (answers are in decimal). It will not determine whether derivatives exist or not (it assumes they do) and it will not find derivatives of infinite slope (it should return a 1/0 error though, which can be assumed to be infinite). Finally, a few rarer functions may have sign switches, so I’ve added an Apply +/- option for these cases.

All the math tools on the site now accept trig, powers, and roots.

115 unique view(s)
September 8th, 2007
Posted by pftq

Fort Wars is Dead

So it goes that the latest ES patch to Age of Empires III has caused the map to stop working. Units do not spawn or something of the sort. I was pretty sure that was going to happen, have quite a good idea of what caused it and how to fix it.

But I think it’s safe to call it a close for now. Given that the 2nd Expansion is due to be released soon, there is no point to create another version, just for it to be abandoned yet again as everyone leaves the 1st x-pack. Then again, I honestly do not feel up to following ES’s every little (but FW-fatal) change with a new version of the map. -_-

One nice thing about this though is the fact that this wipes out all FW clones as well, which were based on FW 1.x and caused OOS. Reason being is that FW 1.x never had its code scrambled or hidden - therefore anyone could freely edit it. Hence why I scrambled the code from 2.x onwards for those wondering or asking for the released source. If I were to release FW again, the modded versions would simply not work in the presence of patch 1.04, thus leaving only the real one standing. :P That’s a wishful thinking though as I do not even have the game anymore.

On the other hand, there are other maps you can try - from what I can tell in the ladder stats, Castle Blood seems to be taking off fine (it has no spawn or special triggers). AOE3Racer and Cannon Fodder are also not as “trigger-heavy” as Fort Wars and may not have taken the patch changes as hard. If anyone tries these maps on Patch 1.04 - let me know how it goes! :)

129 unique view(s)
August 30th, 2007
Posted by pftq

AOE3 Ladder Updates

Bah, I still can’t believe I bothered to do this.. haven’t done anything related to AOE3 for 6 months. Anyways, the ladder now skips over days without games (when using the Next and Previous buttons). Also available is the Skip to Last or Skip to Latest day with games. Hope someone out there finds it convenient.

125 unique view(s)