News

New duellists tend to easily get distracted by all the opertunities in Second Life and may forget about En Garde - or simply lose their connection to the community that once inspired them to play. To help bring them back into the game, I've developed the RO En Garde Reminder system.

This system regularly checks for duellists who haven't played a single duel in the past 30 days. If one of them is online in Second Life, the system sends them an Instant Message (IM), which includes their registration date, current Elo rating, number of duels played, a link to this website, and a motivational note. The text is randomly selected from a list of templates. Inactive duellists receive only one reminder every 30 days. If you play a duel again, the reminders stop automatically. If you never play again, you will get no more than 5 reminders in total.

In fact, it can take much longer than 30 days when a duellist remains offline and because the system only checks in small and random batches every 15 to 180 minutes.

The system setup will likely be fine-tuned over time based on usage and feedback.

I hope this new feature will help our community grow.

Feel free to send me your feedback.

Today I updated the Your Profile page for the En Garde Ranking System. The new thing is an Elo Rating Progression Chart. You have to log in to Your Profile by touching the Your Profile poster, which you can find at the back of the Caledon Oxbridge Fencing hall. I had to change a lot of things to make this work, so I hope I got it right.

For some months now you have been able to export all your data, a ZIP-file containing your personal data and a list of all your duels, from Your Profile - as requested by the GDPR.

Over the past few weeks I have received several messages asking about the status of Team Play development. It started in February 2022 and I am afraid it will take some time. Frankly, it is the most complicated thing I have ever coded and unfortunately my time is limited. But I am still working on it. If you are interested, feel free to give it a try. You can either join and leave my team by touching the Team Sign-Up sign, which can be found at the back of the Caledon Oxbridge Fencing hall. This poster is the RO En Garde Team Manager. Please note, since it is still in development, it can happen that team memberships get lost due to bugs or changes to database. I consider to sell the Team Manager later for a fortune, binding it to groups and/or En Garde owners, so we don't get too many teams. The ones I have already shared were shared for testing purposes and may be disabled later.

In previous months many changes came to the SL En Garde Ranking System, most of them improvements under the hood, a duellist wont notice. The scripting of the entire project has 4712 lines of code (by using the most compact indentation style), and 517 man hours were recorded (including the mesh and texture creations, testing, releasing and discussions with users). The latest development version of the ranking system is always installed at Caledon Oxbridge Fencing. So, any duel played there, helps me improving the system.

More to come! Got any ideas? Then drop me a note card in-world.

Thanks to everyone who uses the system and gives me feedback!

Currently the hosting company is having a DNS issue. I have no idea how long it might take. Probably hours... Until then PaderGrid will not be available. I will announce updates here.

Update at 2025-03-21 04:31: For now it is working again so you can visit PaderGrid again.

Today, I have released an updated version of the En Garde Ranking System. There have been 42 changes made, including minor adjustments, optimisations, and fixes. The most important update for both owners and users is that the entire system now communicates with the web server via HTTPS for added security. Furthermore, the RO En Garde Rankings Board now cycles through four different views and includes new configuration buttons. Advanced communication has also been implemented to significantly reduce requests to the web server.

To upgrade, replace the RO En Garde Ranking Tracker and the RO En Garde Rankings Board as they communicate with each other. The RO En Garde Names Display, to be used with pistes created by Rifkin Habsburg, remains unchanged and does not need to be replaced.

You can grab this new version at Caledon Oxbridge Fencing.

Important: Previous versions will be deactivated one at a time and will no longer work.

Beside of this, there have been countless changes here on this website, too many to remember.

The entire project's scripting contains 3715 lines of code using the most compact indentation style. A total of 381 man hours of work includes mesh and texture creations, testing, releasing and discussions with users. The latest version of the ranking system is regularly installed at Caledon Oxbridge Fencing. So, any duel played there helps me improve the system.

Please, send me your thoughts, also about how you would like the upcoming implementation of team play.

More to come!

From today until the 31st of August, my hosting company is updating the operating system of their web hosting servers. I don't expect any problems for the En Garde Ranking System, but it is theoretically possible.

Update 2023-09-01: Updates completed without any issues.

Update 2023-09-04: The website was down for a short while. The hosting company is running more updates this month.

For the last 6 hours there seems to be severe problems connecting this domain, so I keep getting error messages from within SL, mostly from the Rankings Boards. The hosting company has already made it official on their status page. I think it will be fixed soon...

If there are any duels taking place that are not being properly recorded by the Ranking Tracker, I will add the results later somehow.

Update:  The issue is officially fixed.

Today I released a new version of the ranking tracker with the additional displays. Again 21 changes were made, mainly minor ones, optimisations and fixes. Main difference for owners and users might be, that the RO En Garde Ranking Tracker is now also compatible with Beware Hax's En Garde piste, newly released yesterday. The RO En Garde Rankings Board got updated as well, so you have to replace it on your land. The RO En Garde Names Display is unchanged - you don't have to replace it.

You can grab this new version at Caledon Oxbridge Fencing.

Beside of this, there have been several changes here on this website (read previous posts), most of them in the background, so not of interest for the average user.

Please, send me your thoughts, also about how you would like the upcoming implementation of team play.

More to come!

Another new feature on this website: The table columns in the En Garde section can be sorted (except the tournament one). Just click on the table headers. Maybe this little feature is of use for those managing fencing groups.

Btw, in previous months many changes came to the SL En Garde Ranking System, most of them improvements under the hood, a duellist wont notice. The scripting of the entire project has 2359 lines of code (by using the most compact indentation style), and 242 man hours were recorded (including the mesh and texture creations, testing, releasing and discussions with users). The latest development version of the ranking system is always installed at Caledon Oxbridge Fencing. So, any duel played there, helps me improving the system.

More to come! Any ideas? Then send me an IM in-world.

Many thanks to everyone using the system and giving me feedbacks!

Here is a new feature, you might welcome: When you hover a duellist's name on the SL En Garde Rankings page, the upcoming tooltip prompts a new line with a hint, about how this duellist could improve his/her/its ranking. Either playing more duels generally, trying to win more duels or playing against more opponents.

Today I released a new version of the RO En Garde Ranking Tracker. 21 changes were made, mainly minor ones, optimisations and fixes.

Main difference for owners and users might be, that the floating text can be toggled now by the owner, and it is off by default (it had been on on previous releases for debugging reasons only, so duellists could inform me as soon they discovered an oddity).

Another difference will be, that the piste coordinates send to this website will consider now an offset of 2.5 meters, so incoming visitors will not end-up on the piste, which might disturb during running duels.

The RO En Garde Rankings Board and the RO En Garde Names Display are unchanged - you don't have to replace them.

Beside of this, there have been several changes here on the website, but all of them in the background, so not of interest for the common user. Please, send me your thoughts, also about how you would like the upcoming implementation of team play. More to come!

You can grab this new version at Caledon Oxbridge Fencing.