Swirve Blog

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

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

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.]

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.

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

A little later than usual here is today’s blog post from Brian and Sean :) Comments here please.

Hey All,

Thanks for all the feedback last week.  There was some really constructive discussion which has got to be beneficial for all of us.

Clearly people are quite polarized on the Council of Elders idea.  Don’t fear, nothing has been decided on it yet.  We’ll review all your input on this again later before we make any decisions.

Regarding gathering suggestions in a structured format.  After this release we plan on focusing some effort on this process.  What structure that process will take is still to be decided.  There is already a suggestions forum section (rather than just a thread) by the way.

There was some discussion about a feature to share province information with the kingdom monarch.  Any feature like this would have to be optional.  At the moment a monarch can’t force their kingdom-mates to use any tools outside of Utopia.  This is handy as it’s easy to draw a line in the sand regarding monarch’s power.  To make an in-game tool optional would require a a rewrite of the Utopian constitution!  It’s not hard to do, but philosophically we’d have to be ensure it would be good for the game.

Now for your questions…

Shockwave’s Minge: Are there any plans to add formal in-game options and features for alliances?
We have talked about allowing kingdoms to “declare” their alliance.  Perhaps they could add an alliance banner in addition to the kingdom banner.  I’m sure your question relates to more substantial features though - we haven’t discussed anything further on alliance features yet.

Ezzerland: Will you consider focusing the forum in a more organized an proper manner for future suggestions? Do you have that power?
We’ll definitely consider it.  Suggestions will play a much larger role in the next round of development, so this is important to us.  Regarding power, we shouldn’t need to fight anyone for something like that, we’ll try asking nicely.

Ezzerland (re kingdom merges): What happens if two 20 or 25 prov kd’s conjoin, where do the “lost” provinces/players go?
Bearing in mind that this kingdom merging is a fictional feature… while there is an upper limit on kingdom sizes we wouldn’t allow two kingdoms to merge if combined they would exceed the max kingdom size.

redhorse: When is this age gonna end?
Nice question.  This age will end when we’re ready to put the new code on WoL.  Clearly that’s not a definitive answer, all we can say is we’ll give plenty of notice.  The new code will go onto Genesis before WoL, so until that happens you can rest assured that the age isn’t about to end.

Brian & Sean

Latest Utopia Classic news from Brian and Sean. Comments and feedback here please :)

Hi All,

We had a 4-day weekend here in Ireland for Easter so there’s not much to tell you about since last week.

We do read the comments on our blog posts so we’re aware of your feedback and suggestions.  It has been suggested that some people may prefer to send us email rather than to post in the forums so we’ve set up a temporary email address for this.  We can be emailed at:

utopiadev@utopiaclassic.com

We’ll try to read all emails sent to this address (well unless they get caught by the spam filter - so don’t bother offering Viagra).  We don’t make any promises about replying however.  If there are questions that we can respond to, we’re more likely to deal with them in the regular Wednesday blog update.

Sean & Brian

Latest Utopia Classic news from Brian and Sean. Comments and feedback here please :)

Hi,

Wednesday blog post time. We don’t have anything exciting to report at the moment. We expect to complete the core game logic today, meaning that all the original Delphi game code will now be ported and rewritten. The remaining tasks are:

• To add auxiliary site features such as the kingdom forum, rankings and so on. These features are pretty conventional, and we hope to fly though them with the help of some third party components.
• Testing, testing, testing. Although there’s a bunch of aspects to the site that are readily testable, a lot of the game code is going to be tricky to verify. The problem is that it’s hard to empirically measure the exact behavior of all the mathematical legacy code, because of the number of permutations of the many inputs into those calculations.

We’re glad so many of you enjoyed the interview last week. Obviously, we weren’t able to answer everything yet, but will do more interviews in the future. All will become clear in time.

So, sit tight - we’re still alive despite the occasional flame (thanks flame-proof pants) - and the game is on its way.

Sean and Brian

Here is the latest update from Sean & Brian who are developing Utopia Classic. Please use this thread in the forums to add your comments:

Hello again.

It’s Wednesday again, so here’s an update. We’ll try our best to post an update every Wednesday from now on. We’ve been keeping an eye on the thread since our post last week, and are going to respond to the top topics below.

First of all, something we neglected to mention last week.  Roisin will continue to look after the incumbent Delphi codebase until we finally replace it, at which point she’ll move on to other projects within Jolt.  We’d like to thank Roisin for the invaluable help she’s given us so far with the game.

Many of you asked for clarification about updates to the game logic. We are well aware that changes between ages keep things fresh and present new strategic challenges. However, our first objective is to get the new code working exactly like the old code, before going ahead and making new behavioral changes to it. Our plan is to get a version up onto Genesis that is nearly identical gameplay-wise to the current WoL age.  Once successful on Genesis we will run WoL on the new code with some minor changes such as tweaking modifier values etc. After that first age on the new code we should be in a good position to make bolder changes.

Finally, some folks were asking about the EUT program and ongoing support for Pimp.  The look and feel of the site will be changing a bit, but not so much that it should pose a problem for any of the tools. We’ll open up communication with the tool developers closer to first launch when we have more of site design locked down to give them ample opportunity to make changes where necessary.

That’s it for the moment. Thanks to everyone for their positive feedback since the last post, including all of you that we haven’t answered above. We heard you, and will respond properly to everything from forum mechanics to cell phone versions in due course.

Sean & Brian