Swirve Blog

And here we go with this week’s blog from Brian and Sean!

Comments in the thread please

Hi All,

We hope you enjoyed the interview with Alliance Rankings last week. They sure had a lot of questions about leprechauns.

It’s been a week of intense bug fixing here, and we’ve made a lot of progress. As is normal for these things, we had lots of bugs to start with, and could resolve most of them easily enough. As you fix more and more of them, what you get left with are the harder ones, which take more time. Last week we have over 150 bugs files from the alpha test in our system… now we have just less than 30, but they are slightly tougher than average to solve.

Our hope is to get that bug count down into the single digits by the end of this week, and then invite in a lot more people from the pool of about 200 who registered their interest with us by email. That larger group is going to turn up many more bugs that a smaller group can’t, especially with respect to wars. Once we get the bug count down to single digits again while all 200 testers are playing, we’ll want to start to push it even harder, and will open it up for general access.

You can still take part in the Alpha testing by sending a mail to utopiadev@utopia-game.com with ALPHA in the subject line.

That’s all the news we have this week, so on to your questions.

Questions:

Scontan: Once the code is up and running smooth, what roles, if any will you, Sean n Brian, if any have in Omac/Utopia?

We’ll continue to work on future features of Utopia. We’ll also be responsible for changes between ages on the new code.

Scontan: Will there be changes for the restart? what might they be?

Fate1316: What will the changes be, if any for the next age?

Roisin will be providing changes to the restart of WoL. These changes will announced on the forum.

Luth: And I still don’t see any schedule for ending Gen? can we get an idea there as well?

Stella: When will gen start over? are there no plans at all, or is gen waiting on the new code?

The short answer is that Genesis will end when we’re ready to move the new code into public beta. The Alpha testers have been making great strides finding bugs, and in the last ten days or so we’ve fixed the vast majority of them. We’ll be increasing the number of Alpha testers until we’ve used them all and the game is stable. We predict that this will take 2 - 2.5 weeks. Genesis will then be restarted on the new code and will be open to all.

Katt: am I wrong about the loss of delete posts?

You’re right about that Katt. We lost the ability to delete individual posts in a thread. This wasn’t intentional, just a feature that accidentally got lost along the way. We’ll add it our to-do list.

Ezzerland: Do you feel your changes to the in-game forums are beneficial to those whom use them? Your “don’t like it, don’t use it” attitude will not exactly be beneficial to anyone in utopia, period. It’s also significantly different from your answer in the interview regarding player suggestions. Don’t you think?

Fundamentally the in-game forum has not changed very much. We’ve added new features - text formatting and a monarch censor button. The text formatting at least should be beneficial to users. We’ve accidentally dropped the post deletion feature, but we intend to add it back. Our attitude since the AR interview hasn’t changed at all. We’re happy to listen to suggestions and take advice on board. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll agree with that advice or indeed heed it. In this case the censor button is an additional feature - not something to be getting overly worked up about.

Ezzerland: Would it not be more professional to say something like “We are working on the new code and will repeat WoL on the current code until after the beta has been completed on genesis. At that time we will move the server onto the new code, when it is ready to harbor the entire community.”

uhgmebashu: [had similar suggestion]

It certainly is easier not to be wrong if you say nothing at all. Hoewever, we’ve tried to keep the community as informed as possible and to be honest we doubt many people would have been happy about being kept in the dark about progress with the new code while there were few (if any) bugs being fixed in the old code.

raiman: There was talk of inactives being tradeable, is that happening anytime soon?

That’s not planned for the first release of the new code.

It’s weekly blog time from Sean and Brian!

Comments here please as normal

Hey All,

Two main pieces of info for you this week.
1) We’ve done an interview with our kind friends at Alliance Rankings.
2) The results from last week’s poll are in.

The Alliance Rankings interview can be found here: http://alliancerankings.com/article.php?t=4296

Now onto the poll results…
Last week we asked you to vote on whether you’d prefer to restart the age:
1) At the start of August, on the current code
2) At the end of August, on the new code

The results are in and it was very close.  There were 7951 votes at the time of writing and the results were split almost evenly at 3996 - 3955 in favour of restarting at the start of August on the current code.  The extra time will only help the game when we release the new code, so we’re going to go with the majority.  Here is the schedule:

Monday August 3rd @ Midnight: Current WoL age ends.
Tuesday August 4th (Middle of day): Freeze time for new age begins.
This age will last for approx 6 weeks.  End of age is targeted between Monday September 14th and Friday 18th September.
Age ending messages will start appearing tomorrow in WoL.

Questions:

Luth: KD Page - why are the provs right justified???? this not only looks messy but makes it more difficult to easily scan the list to find what you want. also will make it incredibly difficult for themed kd
There are a few UI oddities that need we need to sort out, but functionality will come first.

Luth: Throne page - i see the monarch’s message is there, but i don’t see the time ticker… please put it back!
That’s a logged bug, and will be addressed.

Luth: Enchantment Spells - why on earth do you need to break them down into 3 different categories???
Breaking the spells up was intended to make the spell behaviours clearer to new users.  The UI ends up more cluttered though so we’ll review this and perhaps change it.

Luth: Forums - CENSOR BUTTON??? are you kidding me? after all the arguments in the forums about censorship you’d actually put a Censor button in the game???
Don’t like it?  Don’t use it.  Don’t like your monarch using it?  Vote for someone else. When something is censored, it shows up as such, so you know when you have Big Brother as your monarch.

Luth: Forums - will deletions of threads/posts still be checkboxed so we don’t have to delete one at a time?
You now click on the delete button to delete a thread. If people end up with too many threads to delete this way, we can look at it again.

elow: You sure the time frame you present is realistic?
With the poll results and age restart decision we hope your fears are alleviated.

elow: Are you not grown ups enough to just say it as it is? The age was supposed to last one month. Period! It wasn’t supposed to be normal lenght, so why present it as if it was? It’s really annoying when you present stuff like that.
In last week’s blog we also said:
“We are mindful that the current WoL age was supposed to be a short age”
We acknowledge that we made another estimation error, and were not hiding it.

dodge83: just one question are u sure the server will be able to handle the mass registering and login of users in the same hour you launch the public beta?
Part of the scaling up from Alpha to Beta and then into the release is about slowly increasing the load on the server and seeing how everything reacts.  In the last week we’ve dedicated a lot of time to increasing the speed of the code and it’s natural that we will want to make it run faster and lighter the more users we have.  We’re planning for a load spike when the beta goes public and we’re looking forward to handling it.

Lead Pipe: Will a new guide be published? Is the wiki supposed to take its place? The wiki is not very newbie friendly.
We’ve always maintained that the guide wouldn’t be rewritten for the start of the new code.  The wiki has the potential to replace the guide, but that decision hasn’t been made.  We’ll see how the wiki progresses as it is written and edited by the community.  If it’s not going to meet the needs of new players we’ll provide something else.

camel: do you think its professional to set a time period for an age and miss it by 3 times of that amount? and regarding the consequent misjudging of any date you set in the past, do you think anyone will ever take any date you will set in the future seriously?
Yes, we’ve missed the dates that we predicted and we’re not happy about it.  We have been quite open about our progress however, which leaves everyone free to decide for themselves whether or not they have faith in what we say.

It’s weekly blog time from Sean and Brian!

Comments here please as normal

First up, let’s give you an update on progress. The initial test group has been doing a spectacular job of finding and filing bugs from the Alpha game. We’ve been dividing our time between fixing these bugs and speeding up the performance of server in anticipation of inviting in the rest of the registered alpha testers. The performance work is nearly done, so we’ll both be focusing exclusively on bug fixing from here on in. There’s currently about 20 testers in the alpha split between two kingdoms. Our next milestones are:

1. Invite in all remaining alpha testers (about 180 players).

2. Go to Beta, which will basically mean replacing Genesis with the new code, and making it available for anyone to sign in.

3. Make the code active for WoL.

We want to move as quickly as possible, but can only move onto the next milestone once we have the bugs from the previous stage under control. We are aiming to invite in the remaining alpha testers next week, and estimate it that it will be the start of August before we can make the new code publicly available on Genesis. It will take us a week or two of hard work to fix the bugs that will be submitted at that point. This leaves us with awkward timing regarding the current WoL age - it is likely to be late August before the new code is sufficiently bug-free to represent an improvement on the current code. This leaves us with two options regarding the current WoL age:

* extend it to the end of August, and then replace it with new code.

* end at the start of August, and start a new short age on current code. The age after this short age would be on the new code.

We are mindful that the current WoL age was supposed to be a short age, so we are reluctant to just extend it without consultation. So, we’ve created a poll to gauge people’s opinions. This is available by following the link below, and will also be available from a link on the throne page at some point this evening.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dElRekRFcWE4TmRqUEh4X0xhOUc0RHc6MA..

Please take a moment to visit the link and let us know your preference.

In other news, we would like to announce the community wiki for the game, at http://wiki.utopia-game.com. As of writing this, it is password protected, but that restriction will be removed either today or tomorrow. It is far from complete, but is a great starting point. What the wiki needs now is some dedicated players to give it care and attention, to expand it and drive it forward in terms of content and accessibility to new players. We would like to ask anyone who’s interested in becoming an editor to get in touch with us. Just email us at utopiadev@utopia-game.com, and put WIKI in the subject line.

Questions:

Fate1316: Would it be possible to create a list of bugs that have been fixed and which ones you are working on?

Using the current bug tracking system this isn’t very easy, and for the moment we want to focus exclusively on fixing the bugs. There’s a lot of bug turnover right now, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense short term. Longer term, we hope to get around to exposing a limited view of approved bugs/feature requests that are in triage system.

Stella: By the look of the screenshots posted last week, it seems like you’re still using frames. Is that something temporary or will it actually be changed?

Styling is a touchy subject with a lot of people, and for many style-related decisions we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. As it turns out, what you see in those screenshots aren’t frame borders - they’re just borders added in to divide the content, and styled to give the pages a bit of a ‘classic’ look. There are no frames in the new site.

Stella: What are the thoughts from the developers about different themes for the players to choose between?

We’ve mentioned this a few times in previous posts, if you look back. We intend to add this feature down the line, as soon as we have time. This will permit people to choose the old-school look, perhaps a new-school look or a work-safe look, and eventually we might even be able to support community-submitted themes as well. It would be a nice feature, and very useful for some people. That said, it’s relatively low priority right now, so we’re unlikely to get around to it for some months yet.

Here is the latest Wednesday Blog from Sean and Brian - as usual please post comments in the forum.

Hey All,

Thanks for all the feedback last week. It was nice for us to be able to finally show you the something. We were also really encouraged that there were a lot of positive comments.

The initial alpha testers have been doing great work during the week. A few bugs have cropped up (nothing too serious) and we’re currently working on those. We’ve just started ticking the game (no longer in freeze mode), so soon a lot more features will come available. We expect a new crop of bugs to come out of this too.

This week, we’re going to be working on bug fixing and performance. The current alpha testers will soon find the most obvious bugs and at that point we’ll want to start loading more players onto the server. Again, this will raise its own challenges.

We can’t go into all the questions from last week, but here’s some general comments on the topics discussed.

The new navigation side menu: Some of the names, such as “Send Armies” and so on, are actually placeholders. We don’t expect to keep them. A lot of small things like this may change during the alpha. In other cases we have split out items into multiple links. Typically, this relates to a division of function which allows screens to be cleaned up. The grouping of menu items, particularly as you move further down the list) is also likely to change. Wizards training has been moved into the “resource growth” section along with building, military training, exploring etc… Mystics is for using you wizards, as Send Thieves is for using you thieves and Send Armies is for using your military.

3rd Party Tools: The third party tools developers are going to have some work to do. Obviously not all the screens are identical to before and even small changes can throw these tools off. For this reason we’ve made sure that the 3rd party tools developers were included in the first batch of alpha testers, thus giving them as much time as possible modify their tools.

Old bugs: Our aim has been to very-closely replicate the existing functionality of the game. In many cases this includes unwittingly replicating bugs. A few bugs may have disappeared along the way, but in general don’t expect things like Paper bugs to be fixed. In more positive news however, once this code is up and running we’ll be able to kill these bugs off without too much fuss.

Integrate IRC: Yeah we’d love to do this right now, but it’s going to have to wait. We are working like crazy to get the re-written game ready for you all. As developers one of our favourite things to do is dream about future features, but the reality is they have to wait until the current job is complete.

Brian & Sean

Now for this week’s episode of the Sean and Brian Blog - as usual comments Here please:

Hi Everyone,

We’re going to keep it quite short today, since we’re tight on time and are trying hard to get the alpha version ready for the first test group before end of business. If all goes well, by the time your reading this, the first group should be signing up and getting a first look at the new site. We’ll leave it up to them to comment on how they find it. In the meantime, here’s some screenshots of how it currently looks.

http://yfrog.com/52screenshotutopiathronepp

http://yfrog.com/45screenshotutopiagameprep

On to questions:

Scontan: [Re: IRC] Are you guys considering to help us by providing an official server, wich wont (becosue it cant) be abused by certain groups with administraton powers with the community?

We are thinking about the general issue of instant messaging for the game, and what we can do to make it better. For the future one option is to stay with IRC, in which case we would be interested in hosting an official server. However we are also thinking about promoting a move away from IRC to in-game instant messaging. This would have the advantage of understanding in-game relationships, such as what kingdom someone is in, whether you are at war, and so on.

This seems nicer to us, and is a big benefit from the point of view of new players who will typically be unfamiliar with IRC. We know however that there is more to think about than this - we’d need to look at all the different ways that people use IRC at the moment, including the use of bots, and see how this would fit in.

So, the answer is, yes, we are considering it, but no, we have not come to a decision.

Lead Pipe: So PLEASE consider making some game changes when you begin this next age, and get them figured out early so the transition runs smoother.
A lot of people have been saying this, so we’re going to listen. We don’t want to delay things any more than they already are though, so any changes we implement will not be big.

Infidel2K:   Back on the 20th of May you talked about working on the guide. Are you still looking at the idea of a wiki guide?
Yes, we’re setting up a community driven wiki.  We’ll have more details on this next week.  It may even by live and open to the public by next week.

Luth: Sean and Brian, how long are you anticipating the “alpha” phase of this to last? genesis has already gone triple time, and we’d like some kind of indication as to when we “might” expect it to end.
We’re surprised that you’d even ask!  One thing we can all agree on is that our time estimations haven’t been exactly Nostradamian.  We’ll see how it goes over the next few days with the first small group of alpha testers.  After that we’ll be in a better position to call it.

Sean & Brian