DICE AND WHATNOT!

by Rick_Slick

On April 27th, like hundreds of thousands of Therians were forced to stare impatiently at their computer monitors, with a translucent strand of drool dribbling out of the corners of their mouths, clicking on the There website incessantly while waiting for our virtual world to come back up after a long-awaited system update.  This week, after spending over 20 hours downloading the patch on his 1200-baud modem, Rick_Slick takes a thorough look at some of the exciting new features in this latest update...

This week, so long as Geea doesn't make me re-write it 50 times like the last one and then still censor it, my article is going to detail some of the new changes that were brought in by the new system update.   Most of these changes were alluded to in the State of There address back on March 1st, but if you were like me, you were all like "Yeah, right."  Having seen these changes actually go from the beta servers to the production servers, now I'm more like "I told all y'all it was coming!"

I spent the last four minutes testing out some of these new features and abilities for you so that you can live vicariously through me (free of charge because I'm such a humble and generous guy like that) and share all of my excitement, because clearly no one can be as awesome as me.  Now keep in mind, I only spent like four minutes checking this stuff out right quick, so if I've missed something or got it all wrong, keep your yapper shut because writing is HARD and I don't see you up here doing it!

The first and most important new feature is Dice.  I know what you're thinking... "What are dice, you punk?"   Well, let me tell all y'all a little about the history of dice from what I looked up on the internet, which is the best source of 100% accurate information about everything.  Dice were invented in 1982 by a man named Jeremiah Dice, and started out as a large 6" x 6" x 6" white cube with no spots or indentations that indicated which side was which.  After several boring games of Yahtzee with his family, during which no one ever scored any points, this ingenius inventor decided to paint little spots on each side of the dice to correspond with the numbers one through six.  Microsoft bought the rights to this new-fangled "dice" concept, miniaturized them to the standard size you're familiar with, and began mass-producing them for gaming enthusiasts all over the world.  Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons and also the inventor of living dateless in your parents' basement until age 35, improved upon the original dice design by adding more sides and numbers.  Today, dice have become a part of almost every game, such as Bunco, Monopoly, Craps, and Whipping Dice At Your Little Brother's Head Because He Ratted On You About Stealing His Banana Pudding.

Since I didn't have $1,000,000 Therebux handy to purchase a set of dice of my own because I spend all my money buying presents for RavenTresses, I decided to seek out one of the two existing sets of dice in-world and conduct an interview with them to gather some insight into this new feature:

Rick_Slick, the Greatest Interviewer Ever:  What were some of the challenges you experienced in your transition from the test server over to the production side to join us here?

Dice: 3

Rick_Slick, the Greatest Interviewer Ever:  Um, okay... where do you see yourself six months down the road?   Do you see yourself evolving into any complex and fun games, or do you think it will be a much longer time before that level of work is done?

Dice: 4

Rick_Slick, the Greatest Interviewer Ever:  Four indeed.  If you could send one message to Therians who are eagerly awaiting the scripting tools necessary to create and sell custom games, what would that message be and why?

Dice: 2

Rick_Slick, the Greatest Interviewer Ever:  Clearly you don't want to provide any useful information.  I can tell when I'm being shunned.  Good day to you, sir.

What is so fun about dice in There?   Nothing, really.  But according to the State of There address, introducing dice into the world is the first step at the developers providing us with a random number generator and scripting tools to create our own games of chance.  As testing continues, you should see further opportunities to incorporate different sorts of dice into games for which users can design huge game boards, such as the already popular ThereSleuth.  Also expect to slowly see scripting tools become available for interfacing with the dice display and allowing users to create and sell their own custom games and whatnot!

The next new feature I'd like to showcase is the ability to name your portazone (PAZ).  This is pretty self-explanatory... you just go into the This Place menu and select the Info window to gain the opportunity to name your PAZ something different than "50m x 50m Portazone".  This will also help you keep track of all your random, poorly-designed PAZes you have cluttering up the landscape and lagging out innocent bystanders.  In addition to being able to name your PAZ, you can also teleport to your PAZ from both the Info window and your inventory.  Just remember, mighty Space PAZ owners, that you will teleport OUTSIDE of your PAZ boundary, so usually this will involve you plunging many miles to your death.  Additionally, you can save PAZ layouts just like you can a house or a funzone, which further de-values those sorts of properties as portazone features come closer and closer to their unique capabilities.   So unfortunately, had you not bought that clubhouse for 4,000,000 Therebux over a year ago, you could be playing with four brand new sets of your own dice right now.   Oh well... who knew?  Another awesome new feature regarding PAZes is the ability to remove foreign objects from your PAZ such as disparaging signs certain groups -- say, for example, the outgoing MAB -- might place because hypothetically, you may or may not have written a news article a few weeks ago making fun of them.

As you can see, there's a lot of griefing that can potentially be done with the new PAZ naming feature, a screenshot capture program, and your own column in the top There newspaper.  This will give creative people a chance to have more fun designing PAZes and labelling their work for all of their visitors.   This is one of the first steps towards giving users the tools they need to showcase their PAZ design talent and create and sell their own specialized landscapes or building structures to others who are more PAZ design-challenged and can barely stack two BLOX together right.  As far as removing foreign objects, I actually first thought one of the menu items said "Remove Foreigners", and I thought that was a bit discriminatory for such an innocent game, but then I became slightly more sober and realized what the PAZ menu option was really for.  The foreign object removal feature was a long-awaited capability that will certainly please all sorts of people like [CENSORED BY EDITOR] that probably deserve insulting signs and scrolls placed all over their PAZ in a fit of vigilante justice. 

The final feature I wanted to cover in my article is the debut of the AvNotes system.  This system is for keeping a database of all the annoying habits, dehabilitating medical conditions, and juicy gossip of everyone you meet, and can be accessed by hovering over someone's nametag.  The bottom item in the resulting menu is for adding, viewing, or editing notes on the selected avatar.  The window that pops up also shows how many times you've interacted in other ways with this person.  Some other interaction tracking tools I would like to see in the future are "How many times this avatar has pretended to go AFK when I was talking to him/her", "How many times this avatar has talked about you behind your back", "Number of romantic partners this avatar has had since the last time you were together", and "How many times this avatar has run you over with a vehicle".  Once you've made your secret, insulting notes about an avatar, a little note icon shows up in their nametag to let you know that you've recorded some juicy details on that person at some point in the past.  Perhaps in the future, enterprising gossip moguls can auction off their sets of avatar notes to profit from the misery of others.

I did an informal poll around the Voice offices, mostly by IM from outside because they keep locking me out, and asked a few of the staff members what they will be using the new AvNotes system for.  RavenTresses says she's going to use it to keep track of which flattering comments were said to her by what avatar.  Geea intends to use AvNotes to document our infractions and use the performance information when she makes employment decisions against us.  MichelleC plans to use the system to keep track of all the guys that hit on and stalk her after reading her Emotes in the City column.  NigelBlackthorne told me that he was keeping track of everyone who had negative comments regarding his recent published book so he remembers who to look down upon and laugh at when he becomes rich and famous.  ZachC and Rose_Blossom had me on ignore because I kept inviting them to all of my awesome 3- or 4-person groups I keep making.  Personally, I intend to use AvNotes to rate everyone in terms of how much less pretty they are than RavenTresses, and also to keep track of possible undercover aliens that are secretly assembling to prepare for the impending invasion.  With the new PAZ teleport options bringing you to the outside of your PAZ boundaries, manning up the Space PAZes in a hurry to mount a defense against an incoming attack fleet will be next to impossible now... it's only a matter of time before they discover this severe vulnerability!

Overall, this was a relatively glitch-free patch that couldn't have happened without all the people who spent hours helping the programmers test these new features on the beta server.   So thank you for your time and effort spent working through all the bugs and headaches so that I may enjoy the fruits of your labor without any of the hassle!  Also, thank you to those of you who helped suggest and press for these new features to be added to There.  Also, I bet the There developers probably did some work on all this, so in the spirit of the popular beer commercials... here's to you, New Computer Game Feature Programmer Guy!