Swirve Blog

The Blog is a day early today as it contains information many of you have been requesting. Please post comments in the Forum as usual:

Hi All,

The attacks against Utopia over the last ten days or so have left us with no option but to permanently retire the old code. Genesis has already ended and WoL ends at midnight BST tomorrow (Wednesday).

This turn of events has forced us to change our plans for the roll-out of the new code. In this blog post we want to clearly specify the new plans so we all know what’s happening next.

1) WoL will restart next week on the new code. We will import all Accounts, Credits and Kingdoms into the new code. When WoL freeze period starts on the new code all transferred accounts will have the option of re-joining their kingdoms from the previous age. WoL freeze period will start next week (targeting Wednesday 21st) and WoL will end 12 weeks later (middle of January). Freeze period, protection and tick time will all be normal lengths.

2) The new age of WoL will be primarily based off age 42 as per here. Undeads will NOT be there. However, we propose re-introducing Avians for this age. Adding a race is quite self-contained and can be done relatively quickly. As a starting point for a discussion on what mod values Avians should have please see this thread.

3) Bug reporting will be done via the forums. The current bug forum section will be cleared (existing threads will be archived). We’re already receiving more bug reports every day than we can handle, so we need to change the system. Bug reporting instructions and etiquette will be posted in a sticky in the Bug Reports forum.

4) Genesis will not restart for the time being. The original plan was to start with Genesis on the new code, but due to these attacks we’ve had to take down WoL. WoL is the lifeblood of Utopia and must remain available. We are left with no viable choice but to run WoL on the new code first.

The new code will remain in beta. While this is nothing more than a label, it is an indication that some aspects are still a work-in-progress. We will continue fixing bugs while WoL is running, but we will be deploying those fixes less frequently and will give advanced notice of any significant scheduled downtime.

Thanks,
Brian

A bit later today comes the new Blog from Sean. Please comment Here as usual:

Hi Everyone,

Wow, what an eventful week. The beta has been going well, with lots of activity, and the bug count finally beginning to come under control. Those of you playing will have noticed that we put a bit of work into cleaning up the layout. So far the feedback on the changes have been quite positive, which is great.

The real news of the week however is what has happened with the old codebase and the currently running ages of Genesis and WoL. Most of you will have received by now the announcement from Jolt that, as well as Genesis being ended on Thursday as planned, WoL will also be ending in one week’s time. Although we’ve been focusing on the beta code, we’ve also been tangentially aware of what’s been going on with the existing game, and can offer some comment on it. In short, it has been under attack from multiple locations on the internet, causing the site to run extremely slowly and for a lot of different kinds of errors to surface as secondary effects. The folks in Jolt have been doing a huge amount of work trying to keep the game up. Unfortunately, beyond the steps that they have already taken to try to mitigate the attacks, there’s nothing more they can do without a significant investment of time. To make the old codebase secure against these attacks would take a great deal of work, and wouldn’t be possible to complete any time soon. However, as it stands right now, it is unplayable for a lot of people, and at the mercy of unknown assailants. As a result, Jolt have taken the decision to retire the old code early. In our opinion at Front Square, they had no other sensible choice. Perhaps this was the attackers’ intention all along.

The bad news is that the new code isn’t up to a sufficient standard yet to be officially launched. So, next Wednesday when the current WoL age ends, the next WoL age will not be ready to start on the beta server. Instead, we will restart the test age on the beta server at the end of next week, so that people who want to join in now can do so on an even footing. The game will then remain in beta until we think its of sufficient quality to start a real age on it.

When we leave beta, everyone’s accounts, credits and kingdom groupings will be moved over, so that you can access any credits you previously had, and choose to remain with your former kingdom if you like. At this point, everyone will be notified, so if you have just taken a break for a while you’ll know when to come back.

We’re going to continue to think about how to make this transition as easy as possible for everyone, given the less-than-ideal circumstances. Please let us know through the forums any constructive suggestions you have for Brian and I.

Thanks,
Sean

Time for this week’s Blog from Sean, comments please in the forum as per usual -

Hi everyone,

As Brian mentioned last week we moved into Beta, meaning that the test server is no longer invitation-only, and anyone can sign up. And boy, did they… as of this writing there are 1200 testers active on the server, normally with about 50 people online at any one time. The main purpose of moving into beta was to allow us to collect real figures on site performance, so that we could estimate what needs to be in place before starting Genesis on the new code. This has been very effective, and we’ve made a number of significant speed improvements to the site. Additionally, I’ve just finished upgrading the test server so that its now running on much beefier hardware. Over the next couple of days we’re going to continue monitoring performance closely to see what kind of difference it made.

Unfortunately, there are still a large number of bugs outstanding. A side effect of having so many testers is that we’re now receiving more bug reports in each day than we can triage. By triage, I mean the process of categorizing the reported bug, looking for duplicate reports of it, figuring out if there is really a problem, deciding what next actions to take on it, and prioritizing it. At the moment, we’re at capacity just triaging the bug reports, with little time left over for actually fixing them. In order to move forward, we’re going to concentrate on just fixing known bugs for the next while, and are not going to spend much time processing new bug reports. Because of this, you may find us slow(er) to respond for the next week or more.

The current, over-long, age of Genesis is going to end next Thursday 8th of October. At the earliest, Genesis will be restarted (on the new code) the following week. Having quickly read through the forums, let me say that we intend to improve the look and feel of the site before then. This includes redesigning the mystics pages, reviewing the names and labels used for various things, and tightening up the layout. These visual issues are quite easy to fix.

We’ll provide a clearer estimate of when the next age can be expected to restart next week.

Sean

This weeks update from Brian - comments here as usual please.

Hi All,

Brian here this week.  The big news this week is that Alpha testing has moved to Beta testing.  This means we’ve opened up the test server so that anyone can sign up to take part.  Visit utopia-game.com to get started.

Please remember that this is still a test server.  Generally we suspend testing a few times a day for 10 mins or so to deploy new code to the server.  The game is currently ticking every 15 minutes (this is four times faster than WoL and Gen tick).  We also may restart ages at any time, so don’t get too attached to your province.

If you find a bug click on the “Report Bug” link in the top-right corner of the screen.  The bug reporting page contains a list of outstanding serious bugs.  You can check the list to see if your bug has already been reported.  When reporting a bug, please provide us with plenty of information so we can understand the problem and get the bug fixed as quickly as possible.

So where does this leave us in relation to the next age of Genesis?  While we’re still fixing bugs, our focus is increasingly turning to performance.  We need to to prepare for the increase in load that will come when we’re running Genesis.  It’s easier for us to find performance bottlenecks when we have more people testing.  So sign up, build, explore, train, attack someone, make friends, make enemies… anything - If you’re on the server you’re helping.

We’ll be monitoring performance, making changes and adjusting settings over the next few days.  If we can, we’ll announce an end-date for Genesis before next week’s blog.

Thanks,
Brian

An early Blog this week from Sean - please comment here as usual.

Hi everyone,

Sean here this week. This is coming to you a bit earlier than usual, so I can try to get a clear shot at the rest of the day. We made a huge push at the end of last week to close off remaining bugs and get the alpha back online before the weekend, so that we could start this week with the benefit of feedback of a few day’s feedback. We pulled this off, just about, getting the server online at around 7pm on Friday. Saturday turned out to be more interesting than we hoped, with a huge server slowdown making the game nearly unplayable and causing plenty of disruption to play. Thankfully, we were able to analyse the performance problems that were being experienced, and fix them in stages over the course of the day. One of these problems meant that a lot of the code optimizations from the last month weren’t taking effect on the production server. When we solved it we unlocked a huge performance increase in one go, massively increasing the speed of page loading.

Since then, the game seems to have been running with very good performance, but still with some bugs that are serious enough that we need to fix them. Some of these are crash bugs that have been turned up thanks to new permutations of spells and attacks being tried at the same time. Others are behavioural. There have been some strange reports to do with production of runes and horses. Yesterday we identified a subtle but serious issue that could cause miscalculations of various figures throughout the game under certain circumstances. We’ve made a fix for it, and will be deploying it today. Hopefully it will clear up some of the more confusing issues that have been reported. It also appears that sometimes old data is displayed on pages instead of up-to-date information, which can be very confusing, which we are also going to look at today.

Since the weekend, we have received a bunch more bug reports, which we are trying to prioritize and work through as quickly as possible. Some of these are duplicates of open issues. Possibly the most duplicated are suggestions/complaints about the layout of the spells pages, which are currently broken up in to self spells and combat spells, and then further broken up by spell type. All of these issues will be resolved when we get these pages redesigned, so there is no need to continue reporting it.

We have identified a few steps that need to be made before we start genesis:

1. fix all remaining high-priority issue reports
2. test age end/stay-with-kingdom/age start cycle
3. run new age with full public access. The point of this age is to try to get a few hundred more people to hit the server at the same time, so that we can get real-world performance measurements. We plan to do this with an announcement in the current WoL game.
4. start genesis.

The intention of all this is to make sure that genesis, and after that, WoL, go smoothly. We also need to give everyone a bit of notice about Genesis ending, so its not going to happen this week. We are trying to fix all bugs this week, so that we can make a date to restart Genesis. Although it’s very hard to predict how long bug fixing will take (since every bug is different, and normally a complete mystery to start with), we want to make this announcement this week. Between the announcement and the actual restart we test steps (2) and (3) above.

Before moving on to questions, I’d like to acknowledge the help of all the testers so far. It’s unbelievably helpful to have so many people willing to dedicate their time to making the game better, who are able to lend their expertise in the game and put such careful attention into identifying and reporting issues. It’s a pleasure dealing with everyone in this way, and both Brian and I would like to say thanks.

So, here’s some Q&A:

Lordwarallied: S and B: do you think this work could require for you to hire a 3rd programming ninja? I trust in your abilities, but is trust that some doesnt share needs to be had at any cost?

There’s a famous software engineering book called The Mythical Man Month that answers this question for me, although every programmer knows the answer intuitively anyway. The answer is that throwing extra programmers at a late programming project can only make it later (it’s called Brook’s Law). Basically, getting a new guy up to speed on this project would take months (at a guess) of full time training by either Brian or I, meaning that resources are actually taken away from completing the project.

Lordwarallied: b. id also like to know how did so many bugs came in? was some of the logic of the game replaced by glutten and preservatives hoping to recreate the same look? i know its impossible for programs to come in bug free. but Id still like to know why some of the coding that were all supposed to be together is reacting weird like that.

We have constantly discussed between us what went wrong that caused this project to go late. The ultimate answer is that the project was going to take this long no matter what, it’s just that we didn’t predict it correctly. So, the next question is why we failed to predict it properly. The answer we’ve arrived at is that we made a mistake initially in thinking that it was an advantage that there was an existing codebase that we could replicate, thinking of it as a kind of very specific design document that we could work to. We realise now, that if one were to write a design document for all the work we’ve had to do, it would be hundreds of pages long (and no way would we have given the original estimates that we did).

So, Issue One was that the it turned out to be very hard to judge the amount of game design complexity encoded into the original codebase. Issue Two was that it was encoded, and has taken a huge amount of work throughout the entire project to decipher both the intention and the behaviour of the original code, so that we could recode it in a way that we felt we could maintain. Issue Three, I think, is that we unwittingly set a huge expectation in the community in replicating the original code, i.e. that the new code would be completely identical. As a result, we have ended up spending time making sure that things like numerical and rounding errors are reproduced, and that fairly arbitrary algorithms and mathematics are faithfully reproduced. Not to mention that changing anything visual for the better or the worse creates a outcry among some folks. If this had been a different game, written from scratch, these wouldn’t have been issues.

So, all that is to kind of outline the complexity of the task. The number of bugs is basically proportional to that. Although you could make an argument that some of the numerical bugs are so minor that no one would have noticed them if there wasn’t an existing codebase to compare them to.

Kees: Would like to know the extent of the testing they did on different browers example how far back in IE and firefox did they do testing on, did you make sure that there were no problems in opera or google’s new browser as well as safari and symbian? Will the new code be usable on older browsers or does it use newer css and php styles which are not recognized by pre XP browsers. And finally: which browser did they optimize there code for?

What browsers to support is a question of cost/benefit analysis. Internet Explorer 6 is a particularly difficult browser to support, since it has the greatest number of bugs that need to be worked around in its renderer. However, the great majority of Utopia players use Firefox, so its not as big an issue as it is for some other sites.

This isn’t an official statement, but we expect to support IE7+ and Firefox, but the site should also work on any standards compliant browser including Safari and Chrome. Supporting browsers on mobile handsets can be very difficult, but the site should work pretty well in the end on the iPhone, Symbian and WinCE browsers.

khedrei: Do you guys have plans to address, and try to fix some of (imo) the more serious issues of the game and the main reasons why people stop playing or older players don’t come back? These would be abuses of the game systems. Fake wars, farm wars, farming in general, abuse of GBP, banks, bottomfeeding, most of which comes from the flawed relation system. If not, at least state your stance on these things. IE, OMAC has nothing against FW, Farming, GBP abuse. That way we can all know the game is doomed and its just a matter of time before it crumbles so we all may as well leave now.

We’ve answered various forms of these question a bunch of times now. The broad answer is yes, on the basis that we don’t want the game to crumble and die - that would be a Bad Thing for us. Specifically we can’t give you any details because we haven’t worked them out yet - we’re still working to get the new code launched. Unlike the old code, it will be possible to make changes to the new code to address these issues.

Thanks,
Sean

Here is the Blog for this week from Brian - please post comments here as usual:

Greetings Utopians,

Sean and I have been trying to get all those bugs fixed over the last week. There were about 260 bugs, most of which we’ve already fixed but there’s still a few left. We’re not going to reopen the Alpha until those bugs are killed. We want the next Alpha round to be a big improvement. We’ll email all the Alpha testers when it’s back up.

A while back, we announced the Utopia wiki. A small group of volunteers put in some great work to get it where it is today. We all know there are a few mistakes in it, but it’s a really good basis from which to build a rich and accurate resource for Utopia players new and old. Today, we’re opening up the wiki so anyone can edit it. Let’s all help make it better.

http://wiki.utopia-game.com

So, questions from last week:

Luth: Can we PLEASE just end genesis now?

That’s not going to happen until the new game is ready to go.

Luth (re, Spell page redesign): Are you still going to split them into “instant”, “timed”?

We haven’t decided yet. We’ve gotten both positive and negative feedback on that.

Palem: As I take this, when they start up Gen on the new code and end WoL at the same time. Then assuming the start goes smoothly, WoL will be launched on the new code. My problem is, what if the start doesn’t go smoothly, which is exactly what I’ve learned to expect out of OMAC?

1st: We make sure the Alpha is running smoothly.

2nd: We run Genesis on the new code and make sure it is running smoothly.

3rd: Once Genesis is shown to be stable, we’ll end WoL and start a new age on the new code.
We want to minimize the risk. We’re working so hard on the Alpha because we want Genesis to run smoothly. If there still happens to be problems with Genesis, then at least we can be 100% focused on getting them fixed as soon as possible.

Hurlin: When you open up the beta to try and get real time testing done …. will you let people try out multiple accounts at the same time ?

Perhaps. We’ll see how many players we have at the time and decide if we need to do this. Thanks for the suggestion.

Luth (re. Spell page redesign): It was my understanding that we were supposed to be receiving essentially the same product we have currently … So why, exactly, B&S, are you making such changes? because it seems to me that could be contributing to the continual delays.

We said from the outset that save for a few navigational changes the game would be the same. We knew that this was important to the community. We’ve gone to incredible lengths to ensure that this new version is a true representation of the original. If anything, it’s largely our dedication to faithfully replicating this game that has delayed us, not making fanciful changes on a whim.

VT2: So, I ask you - again - why should we give you more of our patience?

For too long this game has been in decline. Bugs have gone ignored and new features haven’t been possible because the code base became too unwieldy to amend and the original developer lost interest. Sean and I decided to open this can of worms, make sense of it and get it back on track. We’ve been working non-stop on rebuilding it for over 6 months. In just the last week we’ve fixed over 150 bugs. Ask yourself, when was the last time that so much work was being done on this game? This game now has a fantastic chance of renewed growth and long life.

Brian

This week the blog is from Sean :) Please post comments in the thread as normal.

Hi everyone,

This week, it’s me, Sean, bringing your weekly report. It’s been a long week of bug fixing and performance testing. At this point I think we are both either working, eating and thinking about work, or sleeping and dreaming about work.

Last week, to help us try to catch up with the 260 or so bug reports that had come in, we took the alpha down. The rationale for this was that we were receiving so many new bug reports each day that we didn’t have any time left to get any of the existing ones fixed. We’d hoped that we could make a big enough dent in them to get the alpha back up this week, but realistically it’s going to take some more time. Of the 260 reports mentioned above, there are fewer obvious duplicates than we expected, and more than expected are turning out to be very time consuming to properly investigate. Often, after investigating a reported issue it turns out to be a symptom of another bug, but each one still takes a lot of time.

At the start of this WoL age we were aiming at mid-September to re-launch on new code, but that’s not going to be possible now if we want to get these bugs fixed.

As things stand, we are aiming to get the current bugs fixed and the alpha back online next week. We will then want to orchestrate a few tests with everyone’s cooperation, and then lift the white-list and try to encourage a lot more people into it so that we can get some real-world performance figures that we can extrapolate from. If things go well, this means that we will start a new Genesis age on the new code in 2-3 weeks (16th-23rd September), which is about when we were hoping to end the current WoL age. If Genesis goes smoothly, then we can restart WoL more or less at will. However, assuming that it doesn’t go entirely smoothly, and that we want to leave the two server ages staggered, it will be sensible to assume that WoL can’t be started on new code until week 1 or 2 of October, in total 2 or 3 weeks later than expected.

We’re sorry to break the news of a further delay, yet again, but hopefully people can start planning now for this longer-than-anticipated but shorter-than-normal age. We feel it is a better option than launching the game in a buggy state, as many companies would.

In other news, we’ve made lots of improvements to site performance. We’ve made a 10-fold increase to the tick speed, which was one of the major factors slowing down page loads before. We’ve also made a lot of other small speed improvements, that are adding up to much improved site performance. The ranking process was also causing problems when it ran every midnight. We’ve completely changed the way this works to actually make it several thousand times faster. In fact, it’s fast enough now that it runs in real-time, with new ranks written to it every tick (instead of every 24 hours).

I’m going to continue to hunt down the last of the performance gains, and will probably be doing so for the next day or two. After that I’ll be back to solving bugs with Brian. Working together on the remaining bugs that we’ve prioritized is going to take us into next week, at which point we’ll open the alpha again.

On to questions…

… There were a couple of general points I can address to start with:
1. Starting resources in the Alpha. When we re-open the alpha we can reset everyone, so that everyone starts at the same time. Hopefully this will help.

2. Site visuals. We understand people’s concerns about visual issues, and are aware of them ourselves. We will improve things when time permits, but getting the behaviour of the game correct is an issue with higher priority. There are some improvements that we plan to make sooner - see below.

3. Frames. As Brian said the other week, we’re going to take a look at the possibility of pinning the nav bar using a different approach. Frames are nowadays considered bad web design, which is why you see less and less of them around. Some of the reasons for this are listed here:

http://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html.

Palem: That’s a lot for 3 weeks. Care to comment? *set alarm for 1 week*

Well observed.

Allanon KT: This should be a major concern. [re: mobile version]

Thanks for your feedback. There’s a lot of major concerns at the moment, but we’re doing our best to give all of them time as soon as possible.

Bishop: I do agree that the splitting up of spells is something that i still dislike.

This is a consistent theme in a lot of the bug reports we’ve received. We are planning on getting both kinds of spells back onto one page.

The past two blogs have been either Sean or Brian, but never both. Is everything ok between you two?

LOL. Since we ended up actually taking turns to write the blog, we thought we might as well drop the impersonal pretence and write a bit more directly. Maybe if I ask him nicely, Brian might say something now. [Brian: Can't talk, bug fixing...].

Cheers,
Sean

Wednesday again folks, a little later than usual, the latest from Brian and Sean below. Comments here please.

Hi All,

Last week we mentioned that we had invited all remaining alpha testers to the server, yet it emerged that some of you didn’t receive your invites.  It’s possible that some of these were lost in spam folders etc, but we suspected that some of the mails were not delivered.  During the week we changed our mailing software to avoid ending up in this situation again.  We have re-sent the alpha invite emails and now have a 70% take-up on the invites.

With new testers there are always new bugs.  A significant amount of styling issues were raised during the week, particularly by people browsing at low screen resolutions.  We took some time to solve these issues to ensure that the game is playable by all.

There are two main categories of work for us this week:
1) Fixing the remaining functionality bugs.
2) Improving performance.

Fixing bugs is always important, but the bugs are now settling down and performance is emerging as the key issue. At the moment, the site is sometimes extremely slow, with people experiencing occasional timeouts loading pages. Sean is currently focusing on finding and eliminating these performance bottlenecks in the code. Performance tuning will be ongoing until the release.  Bear in mind though, that sometimes the server will be slower - this is when we’re gather more data on ways to make it faster!

On to your questions:

Sir Nasty: Will you be using frames with the new version?
No. Frames are a thing of the past.  However, I know some of you like to have the menu remain still while the page content scrolls.  There are other ways to achieve this without using frames.  Frames won’t be coming back, but later I’ll look at allowing the menu to remain fixed while the page scrolls.  This won’t take priority over fixing bugs or improving performance, so is very unlikely to happen before the Genesis release.

Palem: That said, it looks like things have progressed quite a bit, so could we get an estimation on when you’ll launch the beta?
Of course, we have our own schedule and a target-date but we’re not sharing - yet.

Sir Nasty: I remember mention of possibly using other ’styles’ or ’skins’ for the game. When would that be introduced?
Yes, this is something we’ve said from early on that we’d like to do.  It won’t happen until after the first release.

Sir Nasty: Maybe some of these can be added since you are programming from scratch:
- Links to kingdoms
- Auto fill in on the mystics and thievery page.
Yep, some of these have already been added.  We don’t have auto-fill on the mystics page yet, but it’s likely to come soon.

Hurlin: Have you run alpha/beta tests on the new utopia from a mobile phone ?
We’re not yet at the stage where supporting mobile devices is our priority, however it definitely is something that we want to do long term.  We’ve re-written Utopia using standards-compliant HTML and CSS.  This should make it much easier for mobile devices to render the game pages.

Finally, the “Post of the Week” award goes to …

TheRock:  Don’t silence Brian. We want to hear from him too.  We wouldn’t watch Sesame Street with just Bert or only follow the adventures of Butch Cassidy. Bring back Brian!

Nice :-)

Thanks for reading,
Brian

An early Blog this week!

Please comment on the relevant forum thread as usual.

Hello fellow Utopians!

We have an general update, question time, an anti-FUD statement, and a clarification to make.

UPDATE

We invited all the remaining testers in last Friday, bringing the total number of white-listed email addresses up to 240, of which 110 have registered so far. The weekend was a little bumpy, with a negative peasant growth bug rearing its head (which Brian came in on Saturday to fix) and a crash bug in messaging and forums rearing its head (which we got fixed on Monday).

Despite these obstacles, the testers have been doing a great job of rooting out issues, and have been keeping our bug support system busy, with the number of outstanding alpha support tickets surging back up to about 140 from roughly 10 on Friday. Thankfully, most of these bugs are less severe than the ones we were typically getting a few weeks ago, so despite the large number of them, we know we’re making progress.

The outstanding bugs right now are mainly aesthetic issues to do with layout, badly generated grammar and typos. Some others are more serious, and are querying the correctness of calculations. This latter kind is significantly more time consuming to fix, because we have to very carefully verify current behaviour versus old behaviour, which can be hard to set up in a test environment. It’s going to take us a while to sort through all the outstanding support tickets, let alone fix them, so next week we probably won’t have a lot of news, except to report our progress through that bug list.

Since it looks like only about 50% of registered testers are actually signing up, we’re happy to let more people into the program. If you’d like to try out the test server, drop us an email with the subject “ALPHA” to utopiadev@utopia-game.com, and we’ll email you back over the next few days to let you know when you’ve been whitelisted.

QUESTIONS

Safri: how long do you plan to stay in charge of utopia for? will you be here for a few years at least, or do you plan to move on to other projects once you have utopia recoded?

We have a long term agreement in place to run the game, which should be for many years to come.

DHaran: So B&S, I have heard from Alpha testers that major gameplay elements are non-existent, such as GBP, and others are faulty, such as troop losses. Are these categorized as bugs, and are these types of issues being corrected?

Yes, these are exactly the type of things that are categorized as bugs. Gang Bang Protection initially had a bug which prevented it from working. This bug was fixed a few weeks ago. Other issues, such as incorrect troop losses under certain circumstances, are examples of the typical kinds of bugs we’ve been fixing for the last number of weeks.

Oh, hmmm, those seem to be the only questions directed at us. Oh well, on to other things…

FEAR, UNCERTAINTY AND DOUBT

In an unfortunate turn of events, mass panic ensued last week. What seems to have happened was:

1. Ezzerland asked if we could put Kingdom names in monotype, so that they could contain ASCII art.

2. Brian hypothesised that we “could consider” it in the broader context of customizing the kingdom page.

2b. Off-the-cuff examples of the kind of further customization that could be done were kingdom crests and alliance affiliations. Brian has assured me that he didn’t say “alliance” as part of a greater conspiracy to destroy the game, but instead was trying to find another example to finish his sentence with.

3. A series of forum responses resembling a game of Telephone/Chinese Whisper ended with us having apparently committed ourselves to turning Utopia into an alliance-only game.

4. Mass panic.

The thing to keep in mind is that we at no point were planning on building in an alliance-orientated feature. We simply gave a speculative response about the kind of customizations that could be put on the table for future consideration. We take some valid points from your responses, such as an official feature for alliances essentially endorsing and popularising them. However, the furore was premature. We will sometimes talk about the kind of features that we *could* do, and everyone has to remember that this is different than us saying that we *will* do them.

For the record: We don’t intend on turning Utopia into an Alliance-only game, or do anything that would ruin the game.

CLARIFICATION

Separately, we need to address the allegation that we’ve been spamming people. Every invite to the alpha we have sent has been in response to an email received containing “ALPHA” in the subject line. We have confirmed that we have such an email from the poster in question, and have contacted him to verify that he wants to be unsubscribed.

We are VERY anti-spam.

That’s all - See you next week.

Sean

Wednesday again already, latest from Brian and Sean below. Feedback on the forums as usual :)

Hi All,

We scaled up the Alpha testing last Wednesday by inviting 50 more volunteers into the game.  As expected, the new testers found new bugs and we’ve been working for the week on resolving these.  The bugs are becoming less and less severe, which is an indication that the fundamentals of the game are in good shape.  The bug count is down in the 20s now, and falling quite quickly.  We want to get the bug count to about 10 before inviting in more testers. This should be either tomorrow or Friday, at which point we might even invite in all remaining Alpha testers.

Questions from last week:

Ezzerland: and btw, I believe you meant the new code will replace the old code. Not the old code will replace the new code. Unless that was a subtle hint :p
Oops, yes, that’s right.  new code replaces old code… gotta remember that :-)

Luth: My next question is if it’s only supposed to be a 6 week age (which would put it at September 16th or thereabouts), why does the front page show October?
It says September now…

Luth: And when are you planning on releasing the beta onto genesis?
Genesis restart will be on the new code, so not until the new code is ready.  I’m not going to give you a date, but Alpha testing is going well.

Dolgil: question for the Two Amigos developing this thing, are you going to take more of a hand in age restart when putting on the new code?
Si Señor!  Once we’re on the new code, Sean and I will be in charge of age restart and we intend to make it a smooth and predictable process.  We’ll also be in charge of age changes, for which we’ll seek community input and come up with ideas of our own.

Dolgil: You have stated that you have found some weird things in the formulas and that things seem to have gone askew over time. As those things are more about game play than bugs, could you describe those things without giving away the formulas involved. There may be obscure reason for such things. An open discussion would help to ferret out if any such reasons do in fact exist.
It looks like you’ve been reading back over old blog posts :-)  Yes, we came across a few weird formulae during the re-write.  We’ve marked these in the code and will come back to them after this release.  Then, we may ask for input on regarding particular formulae in order to figure out of they’re sensible.  If we unintentionally change something important, we’ll fix it once it’s pointed out.

Ezzerland: Would you consider using a monotype script (font) to make the depth of ascii themes more feasible for the general entertainment of kingdoms utopia wide?
You mean you want to be able to have your kingdom name render in a monotype font so you can do some nice ascii art with it?  If so it sounds like a plausible suggestion that we could consider in the context of customising the kingdom page with banners, crests and alliance affiliations.

Hurlin: Questions re Origins of Undead, future use of Undead personality, and on bringing back Faeries and Avians.
Believe me, I’m really looking forward to thinking about bringing in new races and reviving old ones.  The main reason for rewriting the game was so that we would be able to make these kinds of changes.  The rewrite has to be done first, then we can enjoy the fruits of our labour by introducing fun changes age after age.

Thanks for reading,
Brian