DavidWest's Discussions

Hello everyone!

cdd has been hard at work updating our fleet of sites. Whenever so much time is spent pouring over and updating old things, there are always some things that you think, "Should this come forward with everything else?"

This time around, we gave a lot of thought to, and have decided to retire the following:

If content was part of the Alpha Coders Creator program, you could let people buy licenses to that content for a price. This is separate from getting paid for views on your content!

What the issues were:

• Who in the world trusts the validity of a license bought from a wallpaper site?
• Limited selection/site support.

The first issue is effectively the main one. We spent a good amount of moderator time making sure our offerings were legitimate. But I personally wouldn't trust any other wallpaper site, so the ecosystem within our niche just isn't there.

Alternatives:

• Creators are able to, and we recommend, that they put links to their most successful licensing platform in the Additional Info section of their submissions.

Some users have extra ACP - I made some mini games as a sink so people could have fun with their extra ACP

What the issues were:

• I'm spending all my time working on Space Abyss

I'm not supporting the ACP Mini Games very well right now. Part of that is me spending a lot of time on Space Abyss - part of it is a massively increased workload due to distance learning.

I LOVE the idea of little fun things that users can do to spend extra ACP. So I would expect this concept/idea to move forward in some form, but there aren't firm plans right now

Alternatives:

• Currently none - I would imagine something pops up eventually

Thanks for your understanding everyone!

David West
Alpha Coders

What are captions? Captions can be a description of an image. Either going for accuracy, or even being funny (but relevant).

Caption rules: https://communities.alphacoders.com/topics/view/6765

Scoring page: https://alphacoders.com/contest/score/87

If you aren't sure about what decent captions look like, always feel free to visit the recent captions on Wallpaper Abyss ( https://wall.alphacoders.com/captions.php ), or ask one of the mod team.

I wish everyone the best!

Below is a list of the Space Abyss updates in the last couple of months. If you want to see each update as they come, you can visit https://space.alphacoders.com , or check out our Discord!

## [0.2.10] - 2020-11-2

### Added
- Bodies can now give a bonus or negative to researching
- Manufacturing body now also gives a +2 to researching
- MLM body gives a +1 to research
- Science Vessel - Gives a +3 to research stations on it
- Fuel display for ships that require engines
- Acid Egg
- Event with lower difficulty than the bug spawner - spawning an acid egg that turns into... something!

### Changed
- No longer clearing assemblies and researches when the player switches views. This should make manufacturers, forges, research stations, etc, show what
they are doing more often.
- Increased Voonita, Transporter, and AI Dust spawn amounts on Desert Planets
- Voon Egg sprite

### Fixed
- The initial wreck type in the galaxy won't disappear if you move onto it anymore

## [0.2.9] - 2020-10-28

### Fixed
- M HP and M AT will now stack properly

### Added
- M Man - manufacturing boost created from moss.
- Clients will now receive limited information about spawned events associated with the game's storyteller
- Galaxy news messages when a player defeats a negative galactic event
- Warnings are displayed on a planet's information if there is a dangerous galaxy event happening on the planet

## [0.2.8] - 2020-10-26

### Added
- More planet types that the initial storyteller event can spawn on

### Fixed
- Old spawned events will now be deleted when a planet is destroyed by an admin
- Ice blocks not spawning on Frozen Planet
- Lots of bugs with events spawning
- Diamond asteroid display

### Changed
- All planet coords now load when the server starts up. There were too many issues with trying to selectively load planet coords at startup
- Increased the chance of a successful monster spawn
- Increased the spawn rate of AI Dust Deposits on the main level of the desert planet

## [0.2.7] - 2020-10-23

### Added
- Error message when trying to switch bodies from too far away
- Global message when a player logs in. Eventually I'll turn this off, but I feel its important for community buildint at this stage of Space Abyss's development
- Option to have your browser notify you when another player logs in.
- Line of Sight for ranged weapons (only active on players for now )

### Fixed
- Inventory being taken from non active bodies while assembling
- Manufacturing Augment can now be assembled again - in the Augmentation Station

### Changed
- Default chat set to global
- debug mode is using browser local storage instead of a cookie. The server doesn't need to know if you are using debug mode or not
- The way walls are drawn. This should make them look better overall.

## [0.2.6] - 2020-10-20

### Fixed
- Some spawning was looking for a socket that was never there and throwing errors. Now passing in an empty Object
- Jelly should now stack properly all the time
- Blue Algae should now stack properly all the time
- Inventory items sometimes going to the wrong body

### Changed
- Eating and addiction linkers will now stick with the body they originally were on. This also gives players the ability to go from body to body, healing them up.
- Getting to the point of researching AI Fragments was INCREDIBLY difficult. Failures on researching weren't increasing skill fast enough. I'm now using the same
system as with manufacturing. Increasing skill by the full complexity of the item on a failure.

## [0.2.5] - 2020-10-17

### Added

### Fixed
- Various menus would still show all inventory items from all bodies a player has as being immediately usable. No more!
- Quite a few events weren't spawning properly. The Water planet in particular was pretty barren. I should have drastically improved this.

### Changed

## [0.2.4] - 2020-10-17

### Added
- A task system. The idea with this system is to help players that don't enjoy the organic discovery inherent in the Space Abyss sandbox style environment.
- Forager NPC job. Will go around to different planets, harvest things, and will sell them to players.
- Bug Attack NPC job. Will travel to a planet and royally screw it up
- Admin warp to npc
- Events can spawn NPCs
- Acid flies now drop Exodium (there isn't a super relevant tier 3 drop for them, so this will at least be useful)
- Player logs (they're kind of almost event/galaxy logs now) can have a ship_id or planet_id attached to them

### Fixed
- Blue Algae can now be picked up
- Wrecks and Zuran Cruiser Wrecks weren't spawning properly in the galaxy
- Desert Storm floor tile
- Admin spawning objects
- Only active events will spawn in the galaxy
- You can now move onto a portal from any tile that it is on, not just the base tile
- Events will now listen to the planet HP requirements to spawn

### Changed
- Lots of updates to the NPC system code

## [0.2.3] - 2020-09-30

### Added
- Milk Slerm Egg
- Milk Slerm Eggs can grow into Milk Slerms
- Milk Slerms can drop Milk Slerm Eggs
- When you switch bodies, you now have the option of moving your inventory with you, or leaving it on the previous body. This lets players setup bodies
with different sets of inventory based what tasks they want that body to accomplish.
- Slerm Berry Egg
- Slerm Berry Egg as potential drop from Slerm Berry Tree
- Vooard now drops AI Dust
- Icer Pistol
- Diamond
- Diamond Deposit
- Diamond Armor - chest/body, legs, and helmet
- Diamond Asteroid
- Slerm Armor - chest/body, legs, and helmet
- Rare Inferno Core drop to AI Forge

### Fixed
- The body of an inventory item was not being updated after the creation of the inventory item
- Display for plasma skill
- Game file index for Corrosive Goo

### Changed
- Slerm Berries no longer have the potential to spawn things. This didn't work anyway since Slerm Berries stack. Replaced this functionality with a Slerm Berry Egg object.
- Voonita spawn levels from 0 to -3 to 0 to -1
- Scrapslog spawning from rare to common
- Desert Cruiser Wreck will now de-spawn after about a day and a half
- Updated sprite for Hull Welder
- Updated image for Coral Bloom and Coral Fragment
- Added a spawn to The Great Nomad

## [0.2.2] - 2020-09-23

### Added
- Object Types now have two additional properties - is_portal and attaches_to_object_type_id. This lets different object types be portals, and lets the look
of the enterance/exit be different.
- Event linkers now have a spawns_off_grid property. Events can be created that will spawn something (right now ships with portals in them) off grid to make extra
caves and areas to explore beyond the default planet makeup
- Added Desert Cave #1 event
- Burster spawning on Desert Planet
- Corrosive Goo
- Vooard spawning on Desert Planet
- Water Ship
- Living Wood Ship
- Coral Bloom
- Coral Fragment
- Silk Ship
- Increased Bionic Crab hp, exp, and damage
- Increased Sea Urchin hp, exp, and damage
- Increased Jellyfish hp, exp, and damage
- Decreased Laser Rifle damage from 10 to 6
- Decreased Laser Gun damage from 5 to 2

### Fixed
- Monsters and players showing up in the wrong view
- Ships wouldn't load into memory if not owned by a player unless a player saw that ship in space.

### Changed
- Expanded The Great Nomad

## [0.2.1] - 2020-09-11

### Added
- Silk Fragment
- Spiders on Azure Planets now drop Silk Fragments
- Broken Nanite Clusters now drop AI Dust
- Algae King now drops Living Wood, Algae, and Blue Algae
- Protein Powder
- Voon eggs can be made into Powder
- Human bodies can eat Protein Powder
- Kick Plants can now be farmed on Spaceships (Use Ice or Life Water to heal them, same idea as Algae Vats)
- is_damaged property to ship coords. This should make it easier for the server to go through and find damaged tiles to heal, and undamaged tiles to damage.
- Support for ship walls and floors that aren't the normal ship wall/floor. Water, desert, and more coming soon (the reasons for this are also coming soon)!
- A new monster movement type - warp away.
- Burster Monster
- Observer Monster

### Fixed
- Multiple beam fixes. Mining beams would sometimes disappear, or laser beams would show up at the wrong destination (looked like monsters were attacking each other)
- Additional effect fixes. Resetting things like rotation and sprite origin for a re-used sprite.
- Broken Nanite Cluster Animation having an empty frame.
- Slerm Milk can now be picked up.
- Admin ability to spawn monsters on ships wasn't working. This really only applies to testing monsters.
- Bug with monsters moving on ships. Turns out the ship coords were never actually saving that a monster was on them.

### Changed
- Players will no longer get a skill increase for attacking objects that don't attack back (doors, walls, etc)
- Increased the dirt pile amount that Mag Dust will drop from 1 to 4
- When first docking at or otherwise going to a ship, if that ship has an airlock, the server will try to place the player near the airlock first.
- Did another pass at using neighbor coords to place and drop things. I'm slowly getting a good and fast system working.
- To repair a ship, you will now need the material that ship was made out of (commonly Territe for beginner ships, Exodium for the next tier of ships, etc)
- The order of the 'Switch To' and 'Dock At Azure Planet' buttons. Switch To is now the first button
- Started up The Great Nomad moving in and out of the galaxy
- Increased pod health from 10 to 30. Pods were insta-dying in the area around the sun. I think it was too confusing for new players.

## [0.2.0] - 2020-08-29

### Added
- Energy Blade
- Consumables for Slerm player body types
- Players now have the ability to move up stairs they are currently on. Right Click -> Move Up Stairs

### Fixed
- Bug with trying to add an adjacent index back if the adjacent coord was not found
- Bug with pathfinding going out of bounds of the grid when we fail to find a path, and then try to find paths around it
- Mutliple other bugs with pathfinding, as well as efficiency changes

### Changed
- Warmind spawning removed from level -7 of machine worlds
- Reduced Glitched God damage
- All current monsters on the Water Plant are now weak to Electric attacks.
- Voon Matriarch spawning changed from Rare to Epic
- Message when you can't increase HP of a spawner further (e.g. an Algae Vat) from a failure message to a success message, just letting you know that more
is pointless.
- Recoded how monster drops happen to use the new coord_index system
- If an object type can be walked on, it will now drop undeath a player/npc/monster
- Drops of a Warmind. Warminds can now drop AI Fragments. This gives players multiple paths to get AI Fragments. Manufacturing from AI Dust, or monster battling.
Removed Battery drop of Warminds. Changed Power Cell drop for Warminds from Rare to Common, and increased amount from 2 to 4
- Increased Portal complexity from 20 to 26
- Monsters that move adjacent now use the new coord neighbor index system
- Basic planet movement now uses neighbor indexes. We also send the player's updated information before sending the additional off screen coords
- DDrone hacking defense modifier changed from -4 to -3
- Warmind hacking defense modifier changed from 0 to -3

You're spot on, it's usually SMS hijacking via social engineering. Mostly you see this with high value targets; they'll call up support and verify enough with the support tech that they get the number switched to a different phone.

If a service only offers SMS, it's really not something to be super worried about. But if a service offers 2FA through multiple means, the general recommendation is to use an authenticator app if offered.

Nuyube,

I'm sorry you had to go through all that; security breaches snowball really fast.

Quick note for those that aren't going to read the entire thing. The BEST thing you can do on Alpha Coders is to have a strong and unique password.

As far as Alpha Coders and two factor authentication goes, it's something that we could add in the future, but don't see a huge need right now. I know that might sound odd in a response to a well written experience like yours. Also a side note, 2FA through Authy or Google authenticator is MASSIVELY better than 2FA through SMS. Anyways:

Alpha Coders isn't generally a huge target, for a variety of reasons. We take measures to prevent brute forcing of passwords. So even if an attacker thought you used the same password on multiple sites, brute forcing via Alpha Coders is not going to be a viable way to go about it. There will be logins that are far more lenient behind the scenes.

We also don't feel we are a high or medium priority target. We don't store much information beyond just an email. No financials, not really much of 'value' to an attacker.

By far the most value would come from attacking Alpha Coders as a whole, rather than an individual here. Either for mass harvesting, or ransomware, so we put a lot of focus and effort there. Keep in mind we're a small team, so we do end up having to put focus in specific areas.

For a site like ours, I'm of the opinion that we do an above average job utilizing best practices (most of this happens behind the scenes). But 2FA is definitely something on our radar if it becomes prudent.

Hey everyone!

To enter, all you need to do is add author information to the content you submit, or to content already on the sites!

Responsible discovery and sharing is an important goal of Alpha Coders. We like to reward user activities that make both our site and the rest of the internet a better place - and we greatly appreciate everyone who joins in!

The scoring url: https://alphacoders.com/contest/author-score

Let me know if you have any questions!

Alexis,

Sometimes the machine learning models will get it wrong. You can always request a review. We then use that data to improve the model.

RolloBollo,

Having to wait for a moderator approval is normal until you become a trusted user. If you receive any private messages about changes to your submissions, try and take note, and you'll be a trusted user in no time!

Hello everyone!

For the month of September, we are going to have a special contest for tagging! You earn points by tagging either your content, or other content on Alpha Coders.

Please make sure that you follow the tag rules. Tags should be relevant to the image. The point of the contest is not to spam low effort tags. https://communities.alphacoders.com/topics/view/6766 Low effort/spammy submissions will immedidately disqualify you from the contest, and potentially get your account banned.

You can find our scoring page at : https://alphacoders.com/contest/tag-score

Hello everyone!

Today we've started moving our traffic through Cloudflare's network. Cloudflare's network is designed to filter out more bot traffic than we previously filtered out.

What does this mean for me?

Hopefully, it doesn't impact you at all! It is possible that if you view hundreds and hundreds of pages, you may be presented with a captcha. It is also possible that if you use a VPN, Tor, or other anonymizing sources, you may be impacted.

Why make this change?

As unfortunate as it is - there's the real possibility that bots are having a really big impact on our traffic quality, and putting us in a bad spot with our advertisers. No advertisers, no $$$. It's a pretty simple equation for a free site. This hasn't been completely verified, but it's what I believe is going on.

Hey - I have a bot that relies on your site! What about me?

If you use our API: That will still work the same as normal!

If you scrape pages outside of the API: Please use our API! https://wall.alphacoders.com/api.php is 100% still active. Even if your bot can't access user pages, it will still be able to access our api! 150,000 free queries/month is a lot! I personally don't have a problem with anyone scraping the site in nearly any fashion - but the negative impact I'm currently seeing is completely unprecendented, and I absolutely have to try this route.

Please let me know if this negatively impacts you. Thank you for your understanding.

Another month, another batch of updates! You can keep more up-to-date with our Discord channel!

## [0.1.28] - 2020-08-20

### Added
- Admin can warp a player back to the Azure planet in limited circumstances now
- Monster attacks can now have an additional effect. The first example of this is going to be the Trae having a thorn effect show up on the player
- Ice Sleem. Consumable by human bodies.
- Portal image added
- Voonita can now drop AI Dust

### Fixed
- Bug that was allowing players to pick up things no matter how far away they were
- Bug that would cause some objects to not immediately update on the client when a player harvested them

### Changed
- Minimum HP requirement for Blue Algae to spawn from an Algae Vat has been increased from 100% to 101%
- Cyberskell HP from 200 to 100 (will probably go back up if I decide to increase attack - which I think I will)
- admin spawning monster type command changed from using an ID to a name
- Updated the object ID of The Great Nomad to match production server
- Gave the Reinforced Human Body additional defense to all damage types
- Building a portal now needs to be done in a Manufacturer. Increased complexity from 10 to 20
- Reduced Voonita HP from 50 to 25
- Increased Transporter drops to 50 Credits/200 AI Dust/10 Exoskeleton Fragments.
- Changed how the server finds additional ship coords to send to the player as the player moves. Tiles are now grabbing and storing the indexes of their up/down/left/right
neighbors - and once they know that, traversing space around the player is extremely quick for the server.
- Removed Nano Bonder drop from Macro Viruses

## [0.1.27] - 2020-08-13

### Added
- Warning message when players attempt to dock at The Great Nomad
- Admin function to tick The Great Nomad
- Danger message if a player is thinking about attacking a monster that is likely to near instantly kill them, or insta kill them.
- Admin ability to gift items to players if they lost items somehow

### Fixed
- Objects that can not be assembled will now not show up, even if those objects have assembly linkers associated with them.
- Issues with placing objects with multiple tiles
- Bug with researching while the player is offline
- Maggot Burgers and Mech Take Out can be picked up and attacked
- An error or two when players died
- Players can no longer be attacked on Spaceport Merchant tiles

### Changed
- Implemented the start of a new system I've been thinking about for quite a while now. Tiles/coords will grab the array index of their neighbors to the top/bottom/left/right,
so we can traverse those indexes rather than searching the entire array. Currently this is only active for grabbing new ship tiles/coords in ships. If I don't notice
any large issues with it, I'll keep expanding this system. It takes the lookup times on a pod from 300ms to 1ms and should scale much better
- Reduced 'Crush' attack damage from 150 to 75 for Trae
- Regenerated the BioGrove, Inferno, and Frozon Planets

## [0.1.26] - 2020-08-11

### Added
- Temporary script to fix the extra 1400 or so ships

### Fixed
- Couldn't land on Azure planets
- Potential fix for the infinite assembly bug (not tested yet)

## [0.1.25] - 2020-08-11

### Added
- Admin function to regenerate the floor of a planet level
- Generic message when moving to a tile isn't going to work
- Fire Wall
- Fire Lava and Fire Simple floors
- Two advertisement drones (monsters) on the Corporation Planet
- Maggot Burgers
- Mech Take Out
- Cherry Blossom and Cherry Blossom Sipmle floor
- Cherree (monster)
- Boomtis

### Fixed
- Warmind should now show up
- Clients will no longer think they can move onto a tile with part of a monster on it
- When monsters that take up multiple tiles die, they will now be removed from all tiles.
- Asteroid Ship display

### Changed
- Most monsters on the Machine Planet Type spawned on 3 different levels. I want to increase variety, and have reduced that to an average of 2 levels.
- Reduced Warmind HP
- Complexity and tier of some items. I'm going to try and standardize the complexities of the different tiers a little. Otherwise things get a little too confusing.
- Ice and Ice Simple floor tiles
- Ice Wall spite
- Fire floor spite
- The Great Nomad sprite
- Maggot sprite

## [0.1.24] - 2020-08-06

### Added
- Monsters can now have a 'move away' attack movement type. This will generally be the default movement pattern for ranged monsters.
- Admins can now send a new 'admin' type of message globally to notify everyone if the server is going to shut down or something else important.

### Fixed
- Autopilot
- Message warning players that if you build a ship in someone else's shipyard, it will not belong to you when it is complete.
- Manufacturing Thiol Drives and Blasters
- Monster beams were not following the monsters. It will now follow the monsters as they move.
- Bug that would cause many of the same effect sprites to be created needlessly.
- Bug that would cause all beam sprites directed towards a player disappear when only one needed to be removed.
- Continuously redrawing hp bars unnecessarily
- A bug that was immediately deleting new battle linkers when a player moved down a hole or up stairs

### Changed
- When switching ships, only pods will be abandoned. Other ships will remain yours, and you can command the ships you aren't using to dock/warp to the Azure planet. Eventually I want them to autopilot to the nearest planet, but that's a lot more difficult to implement.
- Made credits a more common drop on monsters - especially on corporation planets

## [0.1.23] - 2020-07-27

### Added
- Things you can eat can now impact your manufacturing abilities
- Support for events generating new planet coords above level 0
- An event that spawns a building with special enemies to be defeated (event is not yet active, just waiting on the sprite animations to finish). More of this coming!
- Ability for events to spawn monsters on a coord that didn't have a floor prior to the event
- Admin ability to despawn events
- Players can now assemble the Octopus Body
- The start of content for Water planets (basic enemy types + objects on level 0 to -2)
- Monsters can now poison players. Poison stacks.

### Fixed
- Not leveling up until the server restarted

### Changed
- Switching Font Awesome (it's what we're using for icons) from a kit they host, to self hosted.
- AIs now take 10 Power Cells instead of 10 Batteries to manufacture
- Lots of sprite updates
- Lots of code refactoring

For me... it's just plain Sonic. Gotta go fast!

farhana nusrat,

You just need to enter information into the category and subcategory field when submitting content and then hit 'Add/Submit Info and Refresh'

What are captions? Captions can be a description of an image. Either going for accuracy, or even being funny (but relevant).

Caption rules: https://communities.alphacoders.com/topics/view/6765

Scoring page: https://alphacoders.com/contest/score/81

If you aren't sure about what decent captions look like, always feel free to visit the recent captions on Wallpaper Abyss ( https://wall.alphacoders.com/captions.php ), or ask one of the mod team.

I wish everyone the best!

I'm pretty excited about the new Pokemon Snap announced for the Nintendo Switch. I hope it's decent😃