Swirve Blog

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

Hi all,

There weren’t too many questions since last week, so this isn’t going to be a very long post. We’ll answer them below, but first of all want to give a general update on progress.

We’ve spent the last week purely on site styling and on deployment onto real servers.

Styling wise, it currently looks very much like the current game, with the same rough layout and same colors. When you see it we think you’ll probably be underwhelmed by the changes. Our plan is to go into alpha with this theme, and look at improving it as we go. We were initially tempted to try to create a look-and-feel that doesn’t look like something from the nineties, but decided that it would cause an unnecessary delay. So we hope that when you see it, you’ll forgive us for not making it as shiny as it deserves to be. As well as improving the design incrementally as we go, we hope to introduce a feature later on in the year that will allow you to choose your preferred theme for the site, which can be either an official or community-made theme.

In terms of deployment for alpha, we’re pretty much ready to go.

The alpha version will be complete, apart from unfixed bugs and the purchasing of credits for premium features (will be disabled). On Monday we plan to start with a very small test group - tools developers, staff and some mods mainly. At that point, these people can get a bit of a preview of the site (and pass on their impressions and screenshots to everyone else, if they like). The server will be up and down for most of the week as we deploy fixes. If things go well, we’ll invite in more testers as the days go by.

Alpha testers will be notified by email about when then can visit the site and sign in. To get in, they’ll need to validate their email address, which is how we’re going to manage the size of the testing group - i.e., whitelisting people’s email addresses as we go.

So, initially, we’ll invite in a small number of people for a kind of sneak look, and expand the group over time as quickly as we can manage. During testing we expect we’ll be working fast to keep up with the bugs that are reported, although we’ll hopefully nail most of the big ones early on before most people ever see them.

On to questions:

Luth: [regarding start of alpha testing] Is this on gen, or some sort of private testing grounds?

The alpha we’re talking about above is going to be a private testing ground, into which we’ll invite people from those that have applied via email. When we think the code is ready for wider consumption, we’ll arrange to move it onto genesis. What this will really entail is decommissioning the old genesis server, and pointing the genesis link on swirve.com to the new server with the new code.

Domain name questions/suggestions

We hear what you guys are saying about the domain name being potentially blocked from some locations by fun-hating firewalls. Our solution to this is that we’ll create another domain that the site can be accessed from, probably something like utopia.joltonline.com, but still keep utopia-game.com as our main domain. This should help people access the site from where they need to. Thanks for all the suggestions for other names, which we saw in the forums. However, we intend to stick with utopia-game.com, because (a) it properly reflects the fact that we’re talking about the original version of the game, not a spin-off, and (b) we want to move on from endless hours of domain hunting. If it’s any consolation, we had considered many of the same names as you guys suggested.

Hurlin: If the monarch had the ability at the end of the inactive period when the account was going to be auto deleted to be given the option to “tick a box” and retain that province and invite a new player to occupy it; that would greatly improve Kingdoms and create a much more solid environment.

Thanks for the feedback. This makes sense, and is more consistent with the existing workflow, so we’ve put it on our todo list. Hopefully sometime during testing we’ll get a chance to drop it in.

Thanks everyone for your continued patience.

Sean & Brian

Time for this week’s instalment from Brian and Sean - please comment here as usual:

Hey All,

Thanks for the enthusiastic and boisterous response last week. :-) We’ll update you on some news and then we’ll deal with the questions from last week.

We have decided that the domain name for Utopia will be utopia-game.com. This means Utopia will still be called “Utopia” - no “Classic” to be seen. There’s nothing of interest at utopia-game.com as of yet, but everything new will run there - from the closed alpha onwards.

Last week, there was a pretty big furore over our comments on two topics.
1) Changes to the forum regarding suggestions.
2) Whether we’ll be able to discern good ideas from bad ideas.

Regarding the changes to the forum. We misinterpreted the question. It was our fault, we didn’t read the question correctly. Let’s try again:

Is it acceptable that the community and the community support team work together to revamp the forums for a more productive outcome, possibly benefiting your development processes and the environment of which we currently live?

Yes. It’s acceptable to work with the community support team to come up with ideas for revamping the forums.

If the above answer is yes, and the community has your permission to help in a recreation of the forums, can you in any way aid us in actually accomplishing something, or having someone see that it is promptly addressed and action is taken?

No. We also want to improve the suggestions process, but we’ll take time to consider it. We’ll try using it in its current guise and see where it falls down for us, then we’ll establish how it should change to facilitate our needs. We’ll also want to consider how you guys want it to change and we’ll do our best to choose the solution that’s most beneficial for the game. This job will take time and dedication from us. With the current release we can’t afford to do that job justice at the moment.

If that above answer is no, then do you already have something in mind to address this issue, and when can we expect to see some results?

We will turn our eyes to it after the release when we’ll plan what comes next. In the meantime, we’ll have a sticky added to the suggestions forum, where discussions on how to improve the suggestions forum can go. Anyone, community, mods and support team will be free to contribute there.

The other contentious issue was that we boldly claimed that we could tell a good idea from a bad one. Some people asked:

Why do you expect us to take this at face value?

Is it true that you eat babies?

Fair questions indeed. We’re learning about the game. We know a lot about the inner workings, but we don’t know everything about the game. We’re going to make decisions about the game and sometimes, hopefully rarely, we’ll make the wrong decisions. Even when we’re sure we’re right, sometimes it’ll turn out that we’re wrong. We’ll ask for advice and we’ll listen to that advice, but we may not always follow it. In the end it is important that we are capable of making sensible strategic decisions for the long term future of the game.

OK, on to the other questions:

Fate 1316: Could you please elaborate more on the invite system? How exactly would that work?

A monarch can invite people (other province leaders or email addresses) into his/her kingdom. These invitees can either be invited into a space in the kingdom or an abandoned province. A province can become abandoned in a number of ways:

1) A province leader decides to leave the game - they can optionally choose to abandon their province, leaving resources intact.

2) A province leader decides to accept an invitation into another province. They can optionally choose to abandon their province, leaving resources intact.
The province will grow/decay while nobody has access to it. It can also be attacked.

Palem: How will you define an ‘abandoned prov’? Simply Inactive or will the owner have to like ’sign off’ his prov to the kd or something like that?

See above.

Palem: If an abandoned prov is just an inactive one, will the 10 day inactive rule still be in effect?

See above.

Palem: Aside from that it’s nice to see things are almost done. When can we expect the new Gen age with the new code?

We expect to start the closed alpha next week, we’ll know better then.

Sweetiepie: What exactly do these comments imply?

“Eventually need to revisit the broader topic of kingdom formation, getting into a good kingdom, balancing kingdom skill levels out, creating a nurturing environment for newbies, and keeping it all fun”

This is future-talk. In the future, we’ll look at lots of things in the future to maintain a healthy, competitive environment for everyone.

Spoiled Techie: You said you will keep Utopia up and running until it stops making money… Have you done any estimates of how many users it will fall when it stops making money?

No. That’s actually not what was said. We said:

Fundamentally, so long as the game can be run without losing money, no one will want to shut it down.

We’re not thinking about minimum number of users to survive. We’re thinking about growing growing growing. We wouldn’t choose to work on a dead-end project. Put all ideas of a user-countdown to self-destruction out of your head. This game is here to stay.

DHaran: Some blogs ago you talked about new ideas on preventing cheating. Will these new systems be in place for the new age of WoL? And how exactly are they an improvement from the old cheating detections. Specifically, xlogging since xlogging is lame and xloggers should all burn. And multis too, they suck.

We said that we will progress cheat detection slowly to avoid false-positives. The main difference will be in using a heuristical approach in addition to the current methods. The heuristical approach will take time to tailor. Don’t expect any big changes immediately.

MorbidAngel: Are there any plans regarding advertising utopia after code is done?

Yes. It’s worth saying again. We plan to advertise the game once everything running smoothly and looks well. That won’t be day-1 on WoL. Timing is crucial. We will be advertising as soon as we believe the game is ready for it.

Brian & Sean

Time for another blog entry from Brian and Sean - please comment Here as usual:

We’re tight on time this week, so let’s get straight to Q&As.

Ezzerland: So you’d only consider mergers of kingdoms that are without enough provinces to handle the merger? In the hypothetical situation that this is true, would it be against the rules to kill people off in your kingdom until you are small enough to merge with the kingdom you want to, with the players you want to? … Is there any possible consideration on how the game should be fit to expand?

The mergers idea isn’t decided on or finalized, so everything regarding them is, for the moment, hypothetical. We imagine that if we implemented them, it would be to help out very small kingdoms. On that basis, only two kingdoms that can fit together into one kingdom could merge. It sounds like you want to instead do something about the problem of in-actives. That’s a different problem, and not one that we’re talking about solving with mergers.

DHaran: Sean and Brian, can you comment on this? What are the chances Jolt takes UC away from you and closes up shop like NS? The player base is already dying, what realistic time frame are they giving you to rebuild the community?

So far as we’re concerned, there is zero chance of this happening for as long as we’re here. And there’s no time limit set for rebuilding the community. Fundamentally, so long as the game can be run without losing money, no one will want to shut it down.

Luth: and i’m a bit disappointed that this much time has elapsed and we still have no definitive (or even possible) dates. Are we looking at 2 weeks? another month? another 6 months?

Ezzerland: In terms of coding the game itself, dismissing plausible bugs or other errors that may set you back, on a percentage scale, how much of the games recode would you say you have complete? 75%? What area’s are left to cover?
Ezzerland: If the game is intended to head on genesis for testing first, with the new code, how long do you believe the testing will last? May this delay the WoL age further?

We’ll take these three questions together. In terms of code completion, we are about 98% done. Left on the board are:

* Changing/resetting account password
* Defecting
* Site styling/layout/graphic design
* Production server setup and deployment

We’re hoping to start inviting alpha testers in next week. We’ll then be busy with fixing bugs and optimizing site performance for a while. It’s hard to say how long that will take until we see how the first week or two of testing goes. We’re keen to get the game onto WoL as soon as possible, but at the same time (as we said before), don’t want to comprise on quality. You should assume that the current WoL age is going to continue for at least another month, while we get all this testing done.

Ezzerland: Is it acceptable that the community and the community support team work together to revamp the forums for a more productive outcome, possibly benefiting your development processes and the environment of which we currently live?

We’re afraid we don’t know what you’re referring to here. Is this in relation to a particular suggestion already made? In any case, the forums in Lydias’ jurisdiction, so if you want to change something about them, you should probably direct your question her way.

Ezzerland: Will the games current functionality change in any way? Are you intending to keep the game on track with its original core purposes?

As we’ve said before, none of the game play is changing at all, at least not yet. Some functionality will hopefully be improved, with a better sign up and log in process, cleaner navigation, no frames or MIDI music, and an improved version of trading/moving based on invites instead of copy-and-paste codes.

Instead of move codes, a monarch can send invites out for empty slots in a kingdom. Instead of trading, a monarch can send out invites to take over abandoned provinces in the kingdom. Both of these have the same limits in place as moving and trading, for the moment at least. We know that moving/trading is perhaps one of the most contentious issues in the game. This new implementation is at least more streamlined and easier to use. We’ll know we’ll eventually need to revisit the broader topic of kingdom formation, getting into a good kingdom, balancing kingdom skill levels out, creating a nurturing environment for newbies, and keeping it all fun. For the moment, the invite system works nicer than passing codes around while basically achieving the same thing, and will be a good basis for future improvements. Soon enough you’ll get a chance to try it out and give us feedback.

Ezzerland: Do you believe you know enough about the game or the history of the game to discern what is a good implementation and what is not?

Toadi: Do you think you master the game well enough to analyze these suggestions and determine whether or not it is something that would be good for the game or not?

We’ll take these two together again. Apparently there’s a real crisis of faith in our abilities! It’s a broad question, and its impossible for us to say that in all circumstances we have an immediate intuition on what the right direction is regarding an issue of game design. However, in most cases its pretty obvious. We’ve been steeped in things utopian for 5 months now, including having completely analysed every line of its source code, and have a very strong understanding of it. But don’t worry, if we don’t have a confident opinion regarding a particular suggestion, we have no problem looking for other opinions. And before you worry about the quality of the opinions we might receive, accept our assurances that we can also tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly in that department too :-)

And here is this week’s Blog! Comments as usual please:

Good Morning Utopia!

Thanks for all the feedback since last week. Regarding the wiki idea, it sounds like there’s broad consensus, with the caveat that there should be a basic guide or lite version that isn’t as scary as the full thing. More broadly, we agree that any tooltips we put in shouldn’t advise specific strategies but should instead help new players with decision making. We also liked the idea of quests that Mourheim pointed out are used to good effect in UK, and will keep those in mind too.

It was interesting that there was generally negative feedback regarding a potential council of elders - we’ll have to think harder about that. Most posters are well established in both the game and the forum, so it’s possible that they wouldn’t benefit as much as some more junior players from this idea. In consequence, can we hear feedback on how you think the average player would be affected? For example, if we ran elections for the council of elders, we guess that most players would probably just vote according to what the most experienced of their kingdom mates say. Will this essentially lead to an elitist group of people being elected? On a separate concern, what about apathy? Would the average player feel far removed from the effects of the who gets voted in and who doesn’t? If so, what could we do about that?

Bear in mind that the probable alternative to a council of elders is that we would establish a brain trust over time, either formally or informally.

Well, enough of that. On to question time.

tloblaw: Would you be able to provide Utopia Angel, Utopia Pimp, Metatron and Pimp Agent like tools in the future?

We’ll talk more about this below in the context of SpoiledTechie’s questions.

tloblaw: Are there thoughts of allowing kingdoms to merge without using their moves/trades?

Mid-age kingdom mergers. This is an interesting idea. The short answer is no, there aren’t, but we can consider it for the future. It would be one good way to address ghettoization. It would probably take plenty of politicking for two kingdoms to come to terms on a merger, but that’s to be expected. Can people think of any ways that this could be exploited?

Prelude: would you consider actively playing in top kingdoms (different ones, so you observe different styles of play etc) if such an arrangement was possible?

Sorry for misinterpreting your question last week (oops, and also opening a can of worms regarding a council of elders). We would consider this, pending time constraints. We really are very busy with the code, and probably wouldn’t make very reliable kingdom mates at that level. Our cover in this spy mission could be easily blown by our truancy. If we were going to spy, we would probably do it even more covertly, by reading kingdom messages (as tzar suggested).

TheGnu: I would also recommend playing in an uber-ghetto to see what the new players go through.

Where else do you think we’re playing now ;-)

Clampy: How’s the idea of in-game attack calculator going? Expected to be in the new code for next age?

We’ll take this along with SpoiledTechie’s questions below.

Clampy: I was under the impression that next age with the new code wouldn’t include this ages changes, is that still the case? Any ideas on race/pers changes for next round yet? Will they be based on this age or last age?

We’re still just trying to get to a stable point for next age. What we’ve programmed so far is based on the last age, not the current one. When the next WoL age starts on this code base, we might tweak some mods, but nothing too radical to start with. We haven’t yet made any decisions about what those changes, if any, will be.

Clampy: How much time do you spend reading the Suggestions forum? Anyway we can help streamline the process or make it more effective?

We won’t lie, we (Sean & Brian) don’t spend much time on it at the moment. It’s full of good ideas, especially about changes we could make to game dynamics for future ages. However, every time we look at it we end up getting distracted by it. We would be putting the cart before the horse if we spent much time on it right now. Once we get all you guys playing on the new codebase we will turn to it and consider all ideas before we plan out new features.

Regarding streamlining the suggestion process, that’s really something that’s in our court. We hope that over the next few months we’ll be able to eliminate the current problem of good suggestions piling up unimplemented.

Clampy: There was mention before of including more war recovery mechanisms in both wol and gen, is this still happening? Any idea of what forms it will take?

As above, the new code behaves the same as last age’s. We’ll be able to look at this along with other suggestions later.

Clampy: I know the guide is being addressed in other questions, but any more detail about it? Will you be accepting more user input? I’m a monarch in a ghetto and quite familiar with the game and I have to keep telling my players to not rely on the guide, and in many cases ignore it which leaves me to write up mini-guides which is very time consuming. I know of many well versed players who would be more than happy to update the guide or a wiki etc. and are itching for the opportunity.

Hopefully a Wiki guide is the answer you’re looking for.

SpoiledTechie: Since I am the new developer of pimp, is all my time wasted?

We talked a little about the End User Tools program in the Utimes.org article a while back, in summary: it’s an open issue how far the new code will eventually go in terms of providing the features the EUT tools currently do. This is still our position.

Some things, like an Angel-style battle calculator for example, would need careful thought. Usability is one thing, but it wouldn’t be any fun if the game told you exactly what you should do for maximum effectiveness. So, the answer is that we haven’t yet figured it out.

Out of consideration for people’s time and effort, our gut feeling is that down the line we’ll want to implement something with the rationale of usability. Most likely this will mean some intra-kingdom intel sharing (though its unlikely we’d include as much info as pimp), and also some level of visual feedback about the likelihood of a particular operation succeeding given known intel. But that’s all with the caveat that we really haven’t thought through it properly yet, and we don’t have anything like this on any plan yet. We expect there to always be a role for 3rd party tools.

SpoiledTechie: Basically, what are your long term goals? To create something like angel and pimp and move away from text and go graphics?

We don’t think we’ll be moving away from text at all. The game is popular on the basis of it being text-based and strategical. Additionally, this means that it’s an ideal candidate for platforms such as mobile, facebook, etc. We don’t think this will change. That said, there’s probably be some prettier themes available down the line, that may have decorative graphics.

Brian and Sean

Sean and Brian have taken the time to answer some of your additional questions this week. Please comment on the thread Here as usual:

Hi All,

There’s been a bunch of follow up questions since last week, which we’ll go through below.

Luth: “my biggest concern is that once it is put out onto genesis for testing, that you give it a long enough period of time before it’s put out onto wol.”

We hear you. There’s always a kind of pressure to move forward with things, but we have no desire to incur everyone’s wrath with an unnecessarily buggy WoL age.

Comport: “you said the same thing ["no pay-to-win nonsense"] with Utopia “Khanwars” Kingdoms… and yet the “pay-to-win nonsense” is front and center in that game.”

UK is a different game than this game and we (Brian and Sean) had no involvement in it, so we can’t comment. Regarding this game, we’re calling the shots for the foreseeable future, and we believe that premium in-game powers/abilities make a game less fun. A game that isn’t fun won’t attract the numbers of new players we’re aiming for.

3. Bishop: utopiaclassic.com [has no one noticed that it's a Jolt-owned domain?]

Yes, Jolt has bought utopiaclassic.com, mainly just to get there before any of you guys. We’re sure it didn’t cost much, and no one’s married to the name, should a better one be suggested (i.e., one that sounds good, is attainable, is clearly to do with original Utopia, and won’t be confused with sister games like UK).

4. Prelude: What are the next things on your agenda with regards to Utopia Classic? i.e. would the domain shift to utopiaclassic.com straightaway, will you be looking at fixing the guide next, developing other external programs for the iphone/facebook, or work on promoting the game?

That’s a long question. To take it piecemeal:

This is also under MUHA. Before we start spending money on promotion though, we’re going to make sure that the game is up to the standard we’d expect of a web game in 2009, so that as many curious visitors as possible convert into full-time players. There’s a lot of work between here and there.

4b. Prelude: do you intend to possibly pick up some top kingdom experience? [to help with game design changes]

If we’re hearing you right, this is another question about whether we’ll consider instituting a “Council of Elders” that could act as a kind of representative system, and who could act as an advisory panel on game design issues. This is definitely an interesting idea, but a complicated one!

We’re not opposed in principle to this, but would only set it up if we were sure that the players that make it into the council were selected fairly (e.g., by election); that there was sufficient transparency; and that the unavoidable politics and in-fighting that always happens when people are elected to things wouldn’t get in the way of us doing our jobs. What do people think?

5. Luth: … do we have an ETA yet on completion and installation onto gen?

Here we have some bad news. We had an unexpected setback last week when we had to reconsider some assumptions we had made about how WoL and Gen servers would co-exist on the new servers, how accounts are handled, archived rankings etc. (basically cross-over issues between the software architecture and how we’re going to deploy it in production).

The upshot is that we had to re-organise a bunch of code, which set us back about a week and a half. Put together with some other minor slippages and we’re about 2.5 weeks behind our last estimates, and looking at private alpha testing starting in early June, with Genesis deployment in mid-June, and WoL at the end of June at the earliest (so the current WoL age will run for another 5-6 weeks at least).

6. Ningun: Will you make use of an affiliate system? So if you get new people to start playing you get a little real money in your pocket.

We haven’t got this far in our thinking yet, but when the time comes it is quite possible that we will consider offering some kind of incentive for people to recommend the game to friends.

Thanks for reading everyone!

Sean and Brian

Brian and Sean are answering questions posed in the threads about previous blogs this week. Please use this thread to add comments:

Hi All,

OK, so the last couple of blog posts have been short on information. We want to be able to tell you about exciting developments every week, but sometimes programming isn’t as glamourous as it’s cracked up to be. Rest assured though, when we’re quiet we’re working hardest. We still blog every week though, just in case the more paranoid among you (you know who you are) fear that we’ve run off to Bermuda with your account sitting money.

We’ve answered your questions below. We may not be able to answer every question every week, but we’ll do our best.

DHaran: Will you be as terrible as Roisin with a flood of insanely ridiculous changes all in one round? Will you actually put a bit of thought into the impact of changes before throwing them in for kicks?

We intend to use Genesis as a testing ground for future changes to WoL. Changes that do not work on Genesis are unlikely to make it onto WoL. This should mean less “insanely ridiculous changes”. We’ll put lots of thought into the changes, yes.

DHaran: Will you actually acknowledge the presence of bugs when reported and let us know they are being worked on, instead of ignoring us for several days like the current system? I really don’t want to have to PM Lydias for every stupid bug.

All bug reports will be first triaged through community support. Once confirmed, each bug will be handled by us directly and we will update the submitter with the bug status.

DHaran: Will you listen to the MANY people pointing out flaws in the trading system and actually try to improve it? For example, my activation email still has the username of the previous player’s account that I traded into 2 ages ago. So using that email, nubs will try logging in with wrong info.

The whole trading system has been redesigned and is being rewritten and the above scenario is no longer possible.

DHaran: Will you make an attempt to not suck as much as the rest of OMAC at running this game? If UC is going to be your baby, then don’t be crackhead parents who try selling the baby for dope. A little nourishment and attention would be lovely.

We know what you really want is a stable, exciting and vibrant utopia managed by a team that cares. We’re doing our best to create that and deliver it to you as soon as possible. Over the last few months we’ve blogged every week, we’ve done an extensive interview with uTimes.org and we’re answering your questions right now. We can’t release the game yet, code takes time, but hopefully you see some evidence that we’re working on it and we do care.

Catwalk: Are there any long-term plans for the game?

In our first blog post we said that we want to attract new players and bring back old players. This still stands. We want to grow the player base. The question is how do we go about doing that and of course there are many answers (e.g. advertising, kill bugs, introduce new features, add graphics, remove graphics, game variations, stop cheaters, create mobile versions, create facebook version etc. etc…). In each case we’d all be better served with a game written using modern techniques which can deliver a game that looks good, remains stable and provides a solid foundation for future features. This is why the focus is on the immediate plan of rewriting the game. Details of the next set of plans will be decided upon and revealed to you all after this release.

Catwalk: When did you (Brian & Sean) get involved with this game, and are you playing it?

February 09. Yes, we both play the game.

Catwalk: Now that it is obvious that UK (Utopia Kingdoms, aka Fake Utopia) bears no resemblance to Utopia other than the name, will you reconsider changing Utopia’s name to Utopia Classic?

No final decision has been made. It’s been referred to (by us) as Utopia Classic, but when released it may have a different name. Feel free to make suggestions.

Catwalk: Will the guide be improved or left as is?

The guide will not be changed in time for the release of the rewrite. Longer term, we do intend to improve it, yes.

Catwalk: (re. NOT putting pay-to-win features into Utopia Classic) We were told something similar about Fake Utopia. It’s been a month since that interview, anything you’d care to share?

It’s going to stay the same as it is currently. We’re going to put in new premium features down the line, but there won’t be any “pay-to-win” nonsense. That was our reply in the Utimes.org interview and it remains valid today.

Catwalk: Will you be answering questions we ask here, or is the comments section just for entertainment?

We may not be able to answer every question every week, but we’ll do our best.

tzar: Have they decided who’s doing the alpha/beta testing yet?

No, we’ll announce to everyone when this has been done. Thanks to everyone who has volunteered.

There were also some general comments about our involvement with the community. We do understand the desire for us to communicate with you more, that is what this blog is all about. We hope that answering your questions today is a step in the right direction. Obviously we know IRC is popular among some of you, but we don’t feel that our time is best served split between programming, blogging and chatting on IRC. For the moment we’re providing the one place where everyone/anyone can read our posts and comment if they so wish.

Brian and Sean

Another Wednesday, another update from Brian and Sean. Please comment on this latest blog on the forums:

Hi Everyone,

Once again, we don’t have a lot to say. Nonetheless, here’s a brief update on progress.

For the last few weeks, we’ve mainly been implementing non-core game features, such as the province messaging, the kingdom and war forums, rankings, browsing kingdoms and so on. At this point, we are basically done with these. We have the following tasks left:

* End of age transition. This means the logic that runs when an age ends, and which sets up the subsequent age.

* Feedback system. This is for easy feedback from you guys on everything from bugs to regular support queries.

* Ad integration. For our monies.

* Premium account/payment and account sitting.

* Sundry account settings. Password reset, email verification, vacation mode settings.

* Site styling. This is about creating the look and feel of the site with CSS. We haven’t really done any work to speak of on this yet, so the development version is pig-flu’ ugly. For alpha/beta, we are planning on just getting the site visuals roughly up to the current level (or perhaps a little bit cleaner), nothing too fancy.

We’re testing things as we go, and are killing all the bugs we come across as we find them. When all the features above are done, we’re going to spend a while doing pure internal testing to find the obvious bugs, before going to alpha to track down the more subtle ones.

Sean & Brian

A shortish blog from Brian and Sean this week - comments here please as usual:

Hi Everyone,

Thanks everyone for your response regarding the upcoming alpha test. Anyone who hasn’t signed up can still do so by sending us a blank email at utopiadev@utopiaclassic.com with ALPHA in the subject line.

We have no news since last week. We’ve been working hard, but haven’t bumped into any unexpected new issues. Tune in again next week.

Sean & Brian

Brian and Sean bring you an extra Classic Blog. All comments Here please.

Hi All,

We’ve read your responses to our last post and see that you do not like the idea of extending the current WoL age to wait for the new code.  We’ve taken that on board and have revised our plans.

We will run one more short WoL age on the old code.  This age will start late next week and will end when the new code is ready to replace it (as you know from yesterday, that is targetted at week 1 June).  That means you can expect this new WoL age to last for about 1 month.  Roisin has kindly offered to make changes to the code to reflect the fact that the age will be shorter than usual (more details on this to follow).

So the revised plan is:
1) Current WoL age will end on Thursday 30th April at midnight.
2) New WoL age will start on Saturday 2nd May (Freeze for Sat and Sun; Protection on Mon, Tue, Wed).
3) New age ends in about 1 month.

We know this is a little different to the norm, but at least it should be fun.

Brian & Sean

Brian and Sean bring you the latest news on the development of Utopia Classic. As usual, please post your thoughts Here

Once again, not a lot of news this week, but there are a few things we’d like to mention.

First off, thanks to everyone who has emailed us since last week. However, we’d like to remind you that:
(a) The email address is temporary.
(b) We don’t have time at the moment to reply to most of you.
(c) We are unable to help with bug reports/complaints about the current WoL age.
To allay some people’s concerns, we are not replacing the forums with email. Some people need to email us about things that don’t need to be public discussions. Discussions about future features are not happening there.

An example of what it is for is: We’d appreciate it if all the third party tools developers could drop us an email at this point so that we can establish a distribution list.

Many of you will have noticed that the end of age message was displayed earlier this week. This was an accident, and the end-of-age has now been postponed, so you’re no longer seeing this message.  Both WoL and Genesis ages will be extended until the new code is ready to replace them.

So, when will it end? We’ve re-assessed our progress here, and are tracking about 2/3 weeks behind schedule, with a lot of testing still required and a handful of features left to implement. Updated roll-out time-lines are as follows:

Week 2 May: Closed alpha test of new code for one to two weeks.
Week 3/4 May: Genesis server upgraded with new code. New genesis age (public beta test of new code).
Week 1 June: Current WoL age ends. WoL server upgraded with new code. New age begins.

If you are interested in participating in the closed alpha, please send us a blank email at utopiadev@utopiaclassic.com with ALPHA in the subject line. When the time comes, we’ll pick people by lottery from those who applied.

In the meantime, thank you all for your patience. It has been an intense challenge to port all this code, and we’re very happy to be accelerating towards the finishing line.