March 2021 - The Rebirth
Note: All the above sections were written on 5/11/2021. I am just now sitting down and adding another
entry to this on 11/5/2022. much has changed since then, and I will try to accurately recall things, but no guarantees
that I'll be correct. ;)
Picking up where we left off - I had moved out to Arizona in August 2020 and stopped playing Runescape as much as I previously had.
HOWEVER, during this time, I had been practicing with creating GUIs in Python using Tkinter. This
was something I had originally tried long ago but did not pick up on it and just avoided my whole life.
At some point I decided enough was enough and I had to buckle down and learn.
I had decided that my ultimate exercise for learning Tkinter would be to create the Giveaway in a way that
I wouldn't have to look through a sea of text in a console to operate the game; I could have a nice GUI
with colors and buttons and information!
I also wanted to implement the idea of data tracking so people could see how much they've won and how
much I've given out over all of these sessions. I managed to find a solution!
But the way I did this was super hacky and I don't even want to
talk about it.
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Alright, I'll talk, I'll talk.
So, I had to pretty much find a way to store data for any player that would play, but also store it separately
from the Giveaway program itself, so the data wouldn't just reset every time I ran the Giveaway program.
Not only that, but I would also need to have the program read and interact with this data to display during the Giveaway.
The only type of external file manipulation I had experience with was with .txt files, and something told
me that using a text file to store all of this information was NOT a good call.
I ended up storing all the data for this entire game in 3 separate .ini files: game_data.ini, player_data.ini, and roll_data.ini.
Yeah, .ini files; configuration files.
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ANYWAY, I knew I was building the foundation of my data tracking on something rocky, but I had no idea just
how problematic it could be down the road. But we'll get there when we get there.
So, every time a New Player traded me, a new entry would be created in the player_data.ini file with all of their information like this:
Fun Fact: ShuggieK was the first person to trade me since I started keeping track of data on 03/01/2021.
Also check out that "standing" parameter. I was originally going to use it to flag people who end up being
disruptive, but I never actually had to use it because you guys rock.
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The general Game Data was kept in the game_data.ini file that looked like this:
The Jackpot didn't come out until May, but I don't have any backups of the Giveaway 2 files predating May of 2021
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I'm sure you all get the idea, but I'm going to share what the roll_data.ini looked like as well. This is
oddly enough where I kept all the data for each and every roll that happened in the Giveaway:
The "Real Roll Number" is the number that was chosen in the spinner analogy explained HERE
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While these pictures are all fine and dandy, allow me to introduce the REAL looker of the Giveaway program, the GUI:
I was, and still am, super proud of this. It made me life soooooooooo much easier than before and I could
really focus on just adding more and more to the game now that the gameplay was smooth on my end.
What's that? You want a tour of what's going on here? Say no more!
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Let's start off with the lower left (uneven) quarter of the GUI. This is where I had all my buttons to
control most of the general things I needed to do:
The Giveaway starts once I press that Green "Advertise" button. That's what triggers me to say "Yo. Trade Actually Tim for free stuff".
I used to actually need the Advertise button because I never used to have this many regular players, and I couldn't reroll players unless
there were a certain number of total players first.
After I do the initial advertisement, the four buttons at the top become usable. Clicking the "Check Trades" button
reads the trades.txt file explained HERE and populates the list
of Players to choose from. If there are any New Players, the Roll button will be highlighted green, and once
pressed, selects the next Player.
The Re-roll button is what I press when there are no more New Players and we move on to rerolls. This triggers
the Player selection explained HERE.
The Slow Message button is what sends the "reminder" message to the player when they're taking too long.
3 Presses and they get skipped.
The Over-Trader, High Roller, Top Winner etc. buttons are used to announce their respective title holders;
it was just information that was so frequently requested that I made convenient buttons for quick access.
The Jackpot button announces the current value of the Progressive Jackpot, and the number below it is the
current value.
The final lower section buttons aren't really used in the Giveaway, but are more for testing and maintenance
purposes.
The text entry field is paired with the Test Rolls button below it. I can type in a number of rolls to simulate
and the program would simulate that number.
Honestly, I don't recall what the Jackpot Test button was for, it was probably just something I never got
rid of after finishing implementing the Jackpot in May.
Finally, the Get HTML Codes button takes up such a small portion of the GUI, but it is a huge part of the
website. It is worth noting that this GUI screenshot is from a backup from July 2021, and the website was
not yet around in March.
Aside from that, since I did not yet have the knowledge and skill to let my python program communicate with my website,
the workaround would be that at the end of every session, I would hit that button, and the program would read
all of the current data for each player and compile them into their respective leaderboards.
It would also compile all of the rolls to make the Roll History page.
If you ever saw me say something like "Alright, I'm gonna reset the list, update the site, and I'll be
right back!", the "update the site" part was me uploading all of the files that this button generated to the
website.
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Moving on to the upper left quarter. This is where all of the rolling takes place. Once a player is selected,
it looks like this:
Unfortunate example
Once the player gives me the number they choose, I manually type that number into the little field at the
top and press ROLL. That is when the prize is generated for the player.
The name and value of the prize is then displayed so I can make sure I'm giving out the correct item.
Once that happens, I then trade the
player the item that they've won, and once they've accepted the prize, I press Confirm Trade and it locks in
the roll and updates the stats for the game and Player.
If they want to try to multi their prize, I'll press the correct button. Simple, right?!
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Moving on to the next part, I call this one the Player Controller. It's pretty much where I can access
data for Players and relay the information to them. Like how much have they won this session? What about all time? Are they in the list?
I can just type their name in the SEARCH for them to see if I have any data on them:
Starting in the lower section, the Trades, Winnings, Rolls etc. buttons would announce the value of the
respective statistic for whichever Player was searched above.
I also had a little "how many players left" counter in this section so I could quickly see it.
The top section is where the real control is. As you can see, I can Add or Remove the Player that was typed
into the search bar. I can also Re-roll a player this way, but I only use this when a Player just barely misses
their turn, or if I am adding an Ironman to the game. (This is the only way I can add Ironmen to the Giveaway)
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Finally, the stat display part of the GUI. This was really handy to riddle off some stats at people when
they asked, or if I was at the end of the game and just wanted to share all I had.
Again, this was before the website was created, so nobody knew about all of this data except for me. This
was the only way I could share.
It doesn't look like it, but each of those numbers are actually buttons I could click to announce the data
for whichever statistic I wanted to share.
That just about sums up all of the changes that were made from July 2020 to March 2021. The complete
transformation of the Giveaway to Giveaway 2. It was amazing to see the progress of what this started as and
what it had become. But there was still so much more ahead.
