KAF Baking is a unique feature that allows members to send and receive virtual baked goods. Goods are created via the oven, and members must wait three hours between uses of the oven. Access to the baking feature appears only after a member has receievd a baking item from another user; until then, the link to the baking feature is not shown. Over the course of KAF Baking's existence, a multitude of baking items have been created.
Baking was implemented 6 January, 2006, which interestingly enough is sk89q's birthday. The inspiration was sparked from his own birthday and the birthdays of members who just had theirs a few days before. The baking ability was started off by sk89q who sent out the first five goods with the message "^_^ Whenever you receive an item from someone else, you get baking ability".
The baking feature has evolved to host a number of bakable items and non-bakables. Generally, the non-bakables are in limited supply and cannot easily be obtained. Non-bakables are usually made for a select group of people as a result of events, mostly in the KAF chatrooms. Other items only are bakable for a short period of time, effectively making them limited releases. Some of the items are wacky. For example, you can bake popsicles, sushi, and a variety of strange things.
Baking is an art. An unprofessional can easily burn what he attempts. In KAF Baking, one can burn part of or all of a batch. Two systems of baking randomization are implemented.
In the first and original implementation, each item has a batch size (how many items will be created when it is created) and a random factor (the higher it is, the lower the probability of burning). The number of resultant items is calculated using the psuedo-code:
p = randomNumberBetween(1, randomFactor + batchSize)
if p <= batchSize
resultantBatchSize = batchSize - p
else
resultantBatchSize = batchSize
The items that do not come out are considered burned.
In the second chance-oriented implementation, an item contains one chance value. The result of getting the whole batch is determined as getting one out of the chance value.
One of items added was the Raisurinu Baby. Originally, due to a small calculation error, the Raisurinu Baby was impossible to bake. After sk89q discovered this error, he implemented the second randomization system.
Usaki Ikasu was the first member to bake the Raisurinu Baby.
sk89q was away over the weekend starting 1 September, 2006, and over this period of absence, member Sandal Phone (multiple account of Aurora_sword) discovered that due to bad bounds checking, one could use a negative amount when sending an item. Essentially, as a negative amount was always less than the amount of items you had, you were able to proceed with the operation. The recipient of the negative amount of goods would lose the specified amount of items, leading to possible item stealing and causing "item debt." On the other hand, the sender would get the reverse consequence; they would only increase the size of their own inventory.
Several members joined in on abusing the system, including:
The members that were stolen from, excluding those listed above, included:
The lists above are not comprehensive, as they were collected after all transfers had settled.
Per member Frostburn's words, it was the "first time someone [had] actually managed to pull one over on sk89q."
After sk89q got back on the 4th of September, 2006, he restored the baking database to a copy from a few days before he had left.
There were plans to set up a cooking level system. It was never completed.
KAF Baking was not integrated with the KAF RPG system.
Last updated 00:10, 15, May 2008.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 United States License.