10 February 2008

No title

Since my last blog entry, the following things happened:
1. We bought IPB Gallery, an IPB forum add-on that allows people to post images. So now our players with a forum account won't have to host their screenshots on 3rd party sites. While there are free image galleries out there, IPB Gallery is integrated with the forum, so the players won't have to create multiple accounts, and the existing moderators can moderate the pictures as well.

2. We added an unregistered caregory in our forums so that guests can post stuff too, mainly for asking troubleshooting questions, or to confirm their validation (we have lots of spam bots that try to register our forums daily, so an admin validation is required for all the new users).

3. Just an hour ago my host installed FreeBSD 6.3 on the server (we were using 6.1 I think), and the server has multiple CPU support. While the server is not threaded, multiple CPU support helps by running the 3 servers we have on different CPUs (if needed), and also for the system and interupt code (which is mostly network related). Later on, I will start adding some threading on the server, to make it even faster.

4. We didn't have as many users as we expected from the c't magazine. Before it was published, I thought they will give us a bigger review, but it turned out our little game was one of many other games in that magazine, and we just got a few paragraphs. That's not bad, we are not ready for a lot of new users at once anyway,

5. NASA wants to develop a MMO, and they are asking for the public to come up with some ideas. I submited a document with my ideas, and I'll see if they are interested (the deadline is February 15). While I don't have much hope they will select my design (who knows how many people and companies submited theirs), it would be cool if they at least pick some of my ideas.

6. Xerafax is working at a better mouse seletion algorithm (the part where you get the object or player under the mouse). This should increase the frame rate by up to 100% in some situations (but mostly 20%+), and also increase the sensitivity and accuracy, especially for small monsters. We discussed some ideas today, and we'll see what happens.

7. I added a new item in the game, called "invasionmeter". With a few invasions every week, that new item is quite useful. What it does is show you how many invaded creatures are in the game at one moment, and how strong they are. This item has a 10% chance to break on each use, so it will be good for the economy too.

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