GMC Jam Discussion The Fuzzy GMC Jam 41 Discussion Topic

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Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
* I've put in what I hope is a reasonable limit that the supply and demand loop doesn't increase the price by more than ten thousand times the base price: like, that's already excessive I feel, but we were already an order of magnitude above that and a good half order more.
Noticed that I now can not get any stock

* I've removed any rounding from the server because obviously we've outgrown that here in money printing land.
Noticed that now im loosing far more money that the server is holding hostage below 0.1

I am now going to sit and wait for my hosting provider to send me an email asking what the hell I've been up to.
Please write 100 times, I will not let alice and pat play with money again
 

bandman28

Member
Wouldn't it be fun to just restart the entire server and database, and let everyone have a go at first again? Y'know, start fresh without random stocks quadruple blitzing everywhere?

Edit: Every stock is now worth more than I have, so I have promptly given up on all hope I can gain any money (unless @Pixel-Team gives some insider market tips, which I will gladly receive), and have devoted my time to watch @Pixel-Team make the market curve in strange ways.
 
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bandman28

Member
Screenshot (15).png

As you can see, my vision of the amount of money people have and the news is very minimal. Resorting to use the inspect tool to move things around, which I'm not very good at.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
As you can see, my vision of the amount of money people have and the news is very minimal. Resorting to use the inspect tool to move things around, which I'm not very good at.
I think magnus patched the exploit everyone started using tho
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
I think magnus patched the exploit everyone started using tho
Kind of. Instead of rampant inflation we now limit people to only multiplying their money in sets of 5000000%, which is.... better? Honestly I have no idea. We'll see how it goes.

What is a more pressing issue is that I've now noticed the voting ends on the 21st, not 14th as I had previously thought. That leaves the question if we should extend the market for another week, stop it on the original date of 14th of June, or some third option.
 

Pixel-Team

Master of Pixel-Fu
I would be okay with starting the simulation over again. There's plenty of time to play before the 21st, to get new players to join in, and have a meaningful chance of winning this time. I don't know how the community feels about a do-over though.
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
Myself, I'm fine with restarting altogether and going back to my original "purchase BOOM! and stick to it" approach. If possible, I'd like to purchase the stock before the bonus from votes is applied.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
All right: round 2 it is!
Unless someone has any major complaints with this plan we'll have it that way.

  • On June 14th at 9:00 UTC the current YoYoCoin market will stop updating and will refuse any further transaction orders. The leaderboard will remain as is while I make cute little banners for the top players, apply patches to the server, and prepare round 2.
  • On the same day at 12:00 UTC the market will reset. @yoyo will drop to $500 a share, all the games will drop to $100 a share, and everyone will drop back down to $10.000 with no investments. The market will start ticking again and the server will accept new orders (unless we're delayed, things can always happen after all).
  • I'll give you 12 hours to get your initial investments before an automatic job will trigger at midnight which will add the voting bonuses in. I'd recommend investing in BOOM and STEA given those two are I think at the top of the votes by a good margin. I'd probably advise you to not invest in @CANT given it likely will drop somewhat.
  • Exactly a week later, at June 21st at 12:00 UTC, the market will stop once more and we'll have a new batch of winners that can wave their poorly drawn banners around!

I'll be applying the following patches, If I'm making a glaring mistake or omitting something to let me know:

  1. I'll be changing up the news stories. Maybe not all of them, but enough so that for the few of you who actually play by monitoring those you'll have a few new jokes to laugh at.
  2. I'll be re-balancing the stories a bit so that we don't get quite as drastic swings. There was a point where the yoyocoin "targetValue" went from $400 to -$690 over the span of two hours. A bit dramatic.
  3. I'll be upping the "baseshares" value for the games. Currently they are set so that each bought share multiplies the price by about 1001/1000. I think I'll be dragging that down to at least 5001/5000
  4. I'll be patching the exploit. I'll still reward you for buying stuff by boosting your chosen stock, but I'll limit the boost to a maximum boost of 5% per invested player instead of having absolutely no limit at all. Still allows for exponential growth, but if even if we assume a 15 minute turnaround that will limit the cheese to doubling your money every 3-4 hours. If you spend 8 hours a day for a solid week doing nothing but trading you would reach about 327 millions, which sounds like a lot until we remember that currently 9 players have more money than that in the current market: so it's almost reasonable. Technically you could all work together to get an even bigger boost, but I like community teamwork so be my guest.
  5. I'll enable lazy price updating. Instead of running a Cron job once per minute that calculates the price even if nobody is watching and nobody cares I'll instead make the server not do anything until someone asks for the information, at which point it will go back and calculate the prices on-demand for however many minutes have passed since someone last asked.
  6. I'll add two more decimal places of precision. I'm hoping we won't hit 60 digit decimals in the next week, so why not shift a few of those digits to the other side of the floating point? You will be able to buy 1/10000 of a share, which will be nice in case we hit hyperinflation again somehow.
 
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Mr Magnus

Viking King
It's still updating. The last value in the system is timestamped as 14:50:03, on the 11th of June 2021.

The issue is the BOUN curve. Despite having fallen somewhat it's still many, many orders of magnitude larger than everything else. You likely won't be able to see what the other prices are on the graph without going to the website until that monster-curve leaves view. You can't really draw a line at 200.000 when you also have a point to draw at 50.000.000.000.000

A quick look at gmcjam.mmagnusson.net/yoyocoin suggests that BOUN's giant curve will have leveled out somewhere after midnight. The day today is a bit of a wash as far as the graph is concerned, but hopefully it's going to get a bit better tonight.

I also changed the update interval from 1 minute to two minutes after the server crash for stability reasons. The website graph is struggling a bit on how to align the values back up.
 
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Mr Magnus

Viking King
Less than 23 hours remain of round 1. if you want to try and drive your final score a bit higher before the reset today's the day to do it!



Round 2 is all set, tested, and ready to be rolled out, with a cron job set to 12:00 UTC tomorrow primed to press the big red button labelled "startNewRound.py"

1623579821447.png
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
YoYoCoin Market by Mr Magnus

I had high hopes for this being a cool little widget to play with - but maybe I've come to it too late? (playing on June 13th). The shares are all quite expensive, I poured 5,000 into @yoyo and 5,000 into @ROBO - beyond the obvious motivation of backing my own game these were some of the only shares I could actually afford! The share prices change ULTRA ULTRA slow, IDK if there's some interactivity I'm missing which influences them. I left the game open while doing other things and all that happened is my share price dropped (very veeeery slowly).[/spoiler]

You're a bit late. If you've been following the discourse around this game we've hit a bit of an exploit / hyperinflation bump making playing a bit tough for newcomers. Additionally if you've played between midnight UTC and about ten today I kind of broke the thing, the prices didn't update properly in this time period. Should be fixed now.

However:
  • If you want to give it another go in a more fair / even / affordable environment we'll be resetting the market at 12:00 UTC tomorrow morning, patching the exploit and bringing everyone back down to square one. Round 2 will last for a week until the end of the voting period.
  • The prices update once per minute, you're right in that they update very slowly. Balancing how fast the market should move is surprisingly difficult. It's something that I'll have to seriously user test and reconsider in the post jam version.
  • There is some interaction programmed in: outside of the news and the random variance shares that get bought get boosted.
  • I really wanted to have more complicated interaction like shorting stocks or limit orders or whatnot, but sadly time betrayed me so simple buy/sell had to do.
  • If you have good ideas, tips, or suggestions for a more permanent community-oriantated post-jam yoyoMarket I'm open for all suggestions, especially since this is intended as a community-game.


However your Van Helsing's review was exactly correct, so thank you so much to both you and everyone else who's been rating it highly. I didn't expect it to do so well given how extremely rough it is.
 

GameDevDan

Former Jam Host
Moderator
GMC Elder
You're a bit late. If you've been following the discourse around this game we've hit a bit of an exploit / hyperinflation bump making playing a bit tough for newcomers... etc.
Yeah I've been neglecting the discussion side of this jam a bit because I've been busy working on a game for the YYG Amaze Me jam! I did play half the games between 9am-11.30ish this morning so not only did I play yours late but also during the period you had broken it lol. I did read back through some of this topic after posting my votes so now slightly more aware of how the game works, and thanks for the explanation!

I don't know if I'll get around to play round 2 before the jam period ends but if you're leaving it running as a long term thing I'll check in on it from time to time for sure :)
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
if you're leaving it running as a long term thing I'll check in on it from time to time for sure :)
It'll probably be a few months until the permanent version goes live, as you may have noticed the current iterations is a bit patched together. However the past three weeks have been very informative, so I have a lot of data to work with. :)
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
Evanski's Raccoon Adventure by EvanSki

Well that sure was a game! I don't know that the C--- word is appropriate for the GMC Jam, but other than that the story was good, pretty funny. Thanks for hosting the jam Evan!
Yeah I was going to have an option to enable and disable swearing but I totally forgot about it, whoops
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
ROUND TWO OF THE YOYOMARKET HAS STARTED!

If everything went to plan everyone should have had their balances reset to ten thousand even. The market should be ticking away albeit I can't promise I didn't mess anything up. Just try it out and yell at me if something isn't working as it should. You'll have exactly a week until the market closes again. I may jump in and tweak things here and there if I see something is off, but I did try to test this as well as I could.

It will be a bit until the website comes online, but not too long.

You have 12 hours to get your initial investments in before the boosts from the cast votes in the voting topic are factored in. The script runs on midnight UTC.

I got quite busy yesterday and this morning, so I'll be compiling the results from round 1 a little while longer. However the top five results are:


1. Bandman28 with a final value of $10.536.339.245.821.060.956.673.750.480.000.000.000.
2. Pixel-teampat with a final value of $329.144.313.201.202.355.998.176.240.000.000
3. Eric with a final value of $3.034.379.707.292.359.955.777.313.935
4. EvanMusk with a final value of $68.717.918.751.318.298.304
5. Alice with a final value of $384.838.890



A more detailed result will follow later, but until then happy investing!
 

bandman28

Member
Whoops! I totally forgot that we were resetting the market 😬. Time to go rush to the market and make random last-minute buying decisions!
Edit: How is this going to work? Are we only allowed to watch market trends, or is there another secret exploit we have to figure out?
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
is there another secret exploit we have to figure out?
So, I've patched it a bit so that you can't force share prices to the ten digit numbers anymore. HOWEVER:

  • As usual the news (should) affect the market. The games are more sensitive to the news this time around, but only about 25% as sensitive as yoyocoin. Paying attention to the news articles that pop up can tell you if the general market will trend up or down.
  • Prices do shimmy shammy a bit in a random walk, so even without any news prices will tend to go up over time.
  • Shares still react to you buying them. You can buy cheap stocks, they will go up in price, and you can sell them for a profit. Repeat ad nauseum. It's a bit of work as before, but I assume is still the most reliable way of making a profit. However in order to prevent the same level of exponential growth I have set it so that each player can only raise the price of a share by 5%, maximum. Let's say that it takes 50 shares bought to get to the 5% boost. If Alice buys 100 that only counts as 5%. If Alice buys 50 and Pat buys 10 that's 5% + 1% = 6%. If Alice buys 100 and Pat buys 50 that's 5% + 5% = 10%, and so on. I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and found that even if you spend seven full workdays doing this you'll "only" get to three hundred million by the week's end.
  • Votes in the voting topic give boosts to their associated game, starting at midnight tonight. Games with many votes have their base prices increased, Games with few votes have their base prices reduced. Do with that information what you will.


I don't know of any other exploits, but then again this iteration of the market isn't *that* complicated so there is a limit to how creatively you can buy and sell.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
It seems people aren't really that hyped for the second round; I counted 22 accounts that still have 10.000
1 ) A lot of people in round 1 weren't active investors. A lot of those that participated only made one or two transactions over the two weeks. It's understandable, it's not exactly a high-intensity game and most people were just playing trough the games to vote.

2 ) Now, now, it's only been up for four hours. People are at work or asleep or in entirely the wrong timezone. However even then I don't mind: the fact I've managed to keep anyone playing my game for a solid two weeks makes me feel incredibly happy. This jam has been incredibly fun just because of the ruckus I managed to cause in the community. Thank you all so much for sticking with this mess.


In other news: Behold the many armed trading beast of virtual capitalism!

1623687226178.png
 

bandman28

Member
I'll enable lazy price updating. Instead of running a Cron job once per minute that calculates the price even if nobody is watching and nobody cares I'll instead make the server not do anything until someone asks for the information, at which point it will go back and calculate the prices on-demand for however many minutes have passed since someone last asked.
How is that going to work? How do we ask for information?
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
How is that going to work? How do we ask for information?
What Evanski said. The prices won't actually update in the database until someone needs to know what the prices are. If you open yoyocoin and the game asks the server "hey, I need to know the prices for the last 24 hours to make my graph" that's when the server goes and calculates them .

Currently the prices update when:

* Someone buy something

* Someone sells something

* Someone's client asks for the latest market information

* Someone loads the website

* I run a script that works with the latest values


If none of these five are happening the server doesn't bother doing any work and just sits quietly doing nothing, because players neither notice nor care if the prices for 12:15 *actually* got calculated at 12:15 or just the moment they open the client.
 

Micah_DS

Member
It's taking me longer than expected, but my votes & reviews are all pretty much done. I probably won't have them up until the weekend though, especially since there is one review I keep rewriting.

Is anyone else still working on their votes or has everyone moved on to the Amaze Me Jam? :p
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
It's taking me longer than expected, but my votes & reviews are all pretty much done. I probably won't have them up until the weekend though, especially since there is one review I keep rewriting.

Is anyone else still working on their votes or has everyone moved on to the Amaze Me Jam? :p
That wouldn't be E.T. would it by chance?!?! It seems several people go from frustrated to either bored or halfway liking it once they figure it all out.

And I decided not to mess with the other jam. I'm still finishing up the docs so I can have the audio system ready by this weekend since it is a prize for the Jam winners(both full rating and category). It would be kinda crappy to offer a prize but not have it ready on time and have to be like "coming soon(tm) )
 
It's taking me longer than expected, but my votes & reviews are all pretty much done. I probably won't have them up until the weekend though, especially since there is one review I keep rewriting.

Is anyone else still working on their votes or has everyone moved on to the Amaze Me Jam? :p
Bro, I still haven't played any of the games yet. I've been flat out with some music projects, and then Game Builder Garage came out on Switch which is eating time too. Need to make some time this week, I'm very thankful for the longer voting time, I needed a lot more time to rest than usual after this jam.
 

Micah_DS

Member
That wouldn't be E.T. would it by chance?!?! It seems several people go from frustrated to either bored or halfway liking it once they figure it all out.
Waaaaait a minute.. I always got this fatal error as soon as I start up the game:
error message said:
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Create Event
for object objMainController:

Unable to find a handler for exception FHINPUT: fhInputInitialize(): Project Directory #macro setting is not set to a valid directory(or you forgot to turn off the sandbox).
NO CALLSTACK
at gml_Object_objMainController_Create_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_objMainController_Create_0 (line -1)
But I realize now that there is a fixed version on your itch.io, so I just downloaded that and gave it a quick run and it started with no issue, so apparently the version included in the jam zip is wrong? Is the fixed version post-jam? I feel like I must've missed some discussion about this..

Anyway, I'm going to assume the fixed version is valid unless someone tells me otherwise. So it looks like I still have one more game to play and review then. I'm glad you said something, @kburkhart84, because I was about to rank your game dead last, and the review was basically an error report and a joke made in disappointment. 😅
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
@Micah_DS Yup, my entry was indeed DOA, so I did a quick fix so people could play it. Some people seem to have included the ratings for it(even though they technically should not have), and others went ahead and either didn't rate it or rated it last despite having comments on playing it(which is 100% fair since it IS technically a post-jam build).

The issue is that I had forgotten to turn off debug mode for my input system. When that mode is on, it looks for the project directory(the actual GMS2 project) because it stores configuration stuff there as part of the "included files" that are now external to the IDE for the most part. It is a bug however, because things should still work even if you leave debug mode on for release builds, so I'm going to fix it with my next release of the system.
 

Micah_DS

Member
@Micah_DS Yup, my entry was indeed DOA, so I did a quick fix so people could play it. Some people seem to have included the ratings for it(even though they technically should not have), and others went ahead and either didn't rate it or rated it last despite having comments on playing it(which is 100% fair since it IS technically a post-jam build).

The issue is that I had forgotten to turn off debug mode for my input system. When that mode is on, it looks for the project directory(the actual GMS2 project) because it stores configuration stuff there as part of the "included files" that are now external to the IDE for the most part. It is a bug however, because things should still work even if you leave debug mode on for release builds, so I'm going to fix it with my next release of the system.
Ah ok, thanks for explaining. Since you seem to have fixed it quickly and it was just a fix that was implemented and nothing else (right?), I see no problem with ranking it, personally.
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
Ah ok, thanks for explaining. Since you seem to have fixed it quickly and it was just a fix that was implemented and nothing else (right?), I see no problem with ranking it, personally.
Yup, it's up to you. It was a really quick fix(changing a #macro from true to false). I slept a little later than usual that day since it was a holiday here in the USA and I was off work. In any case, most of the votes I've been seeing put me somewhere in the middle to lower average, so I'm not going to be winning or anything. And either way, it is technically fair that it doesn't get ranked so I'm not upset. I certainly appreciate the feedback, etc... regardless of winning or ranking.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
1 ) A lot of people in round 1 weren't active investors. A lot of those that participated only made one or two transactions over the two weeks. It's understandable, it's not exactly a high-intensity game and most people were just playing trough the games to vote.

2 ) Now, now, it's only been up for four hours. People are at work or asleep or in entirely the wrong timezone. However even then I don't mind: the fact I've managed to keep anyone playing my game for a solid two weeks makes me feel incredibly happy. This jam has been incredibly fun just because of the ruckus I managed to cause in the community. Thank you all so much for sticking with this mess.


In other news: Behold the many armed trading beast of virtual capitalism!

View attachment 40598
0/10 EVAN isnt bright neon green
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
I must warn streamers and video producers of this
the entrie
"I will win the GMC Jam 41" can give you a dmca and copyright strike

I apologize that I've not said this sooner, I've been busy/forgotten about it but that's no excuse for me not mentioning this to people while wanting to promote streaming and content from the jam.
I won't get into more details about this game at this current time. But I will either make a post explaining some comments behind the scenes or explain it more on the next jam.
 
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