Swirve Blog

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

Wednesday rolls around so quickly, latest from Brian and Sean below. Comments as usual on the forums :)

Hi everyone,

This will be a short post, since there weren’t many actual questions asked since last week (though there sure was a lot of excitement). So, I’m going to provide an update on progress, try to clear up the censorgate scandal, and then answer the one direct question I could find.

Over the last week we’ve managed to get the bug count on the alpha down nearly to 0, and if all goes well we should have an update to the alpha server deployed this evening, and invites sent out to a 50 - 100 of the registered testers. There are 220 people registered for testing right now, and we hope to have them all invited onto the server within the next week.

There was some confusion as well about our roles versus Roisin’s. Let me confirm again that Brian and I are working on the new code, and that Roisin is still responsible for running the old code. She will remain in charge of that until the old code has completely replaced the new code (when we start a new WoL age on the new code).

Regarding the censor button scandal, hopefully I can clear it all up here. The idea of the censor button was originally borrowed from a different piece of forum software, which supported censoring instead of deleting. The rationale seemed sound - it limits the power of the moderator, making it impossible to delete posts without a trace (the worst form of censorship). Instead, it called a spade a spade (i.e., called deleting “censoring”), and made it clear to users when it was going on. We copied the feature without too much deliberation, on the basis that the community might like it because they are anti-censorship. Wow, were we wrong. Well, now we have removed it from the game on the basis that there was no point having both a censor button and a delete button. The censor button has been replaced with a delete button. When something is deleted it is gone for good, and the post is removed entirely from the thread.

In other forum-related news, threads are now sortable by subject, last post time, reply count and post count (default is by last post time). We also hope to have a feature to edit or delete one’s own posts available shortly as well. Combined with rich text formatting, these are significant feature improvements over the current forum, and we hope that people will enjoy them.

So, leaving censorship behind us hopefully, I found just one direct question in the thread (that was actually directed at us):

Ezzerland: Can you guarantee us that this age will last the exact allotted time you have give us and that if it cannot you will be prepared (or Roisin will) to end the age on time and restart another?
No, we’re not willing to give you that guarantee. We can guarantee you that we are being entirely open and honest with the community, and we can guarantee that we believe that this age will end on time and that we believe the new code will be ready. But if one of us is hit by lightening and the other by a bus, then there might be a problem. If only one of us was to get killed in a freak accident, then the other might have to make a choice about whether to delay the next age by a week, or restart and delay new code by months. That would be a tough decision, but hopefully we won’t have to make it.
Bottom line is that the new code should be ready with time to spare.

–Sean

[Brian: Looks like we have individual personalities now.  If I get struck by lightning I want the code to be cremated with me.]