GreenSlimeGames

Ok, I’ve just finished building the new webplayer, time for some more testing 🙂  I’ve got the new web based stats screen totally working with the new database version – and there are some major changes built into the database for future versions 😉  The new stats screen look just as ugly as the old stats screen – but that will give me something to work on later 🙂

I’ve shrunk a lot of textures from Mr Smive, but I couldn’t downsize the play-field textures without them looking majorly ugly – All of his models are using lower res textures to keep the webplayer size down ( with everything in it and looking shiny, it was weighing in at around 30 meg ).  If anyone notices anything that looks really ugly, let me know.  I could always release two webplayers, a low and high res one … just a thought 🙂

The game feels very different now with the real models in it.  I’m very happy with how things are coming along.  Still a long long road to go though 🙂

This initial release of 2.0 will probably have problems I haven’t encountered – if you find one, please feel free  to let me know, every bug sorted now is worth less stress down the line.  The balance of the game has changed greatly, esp with all the new ores and the focus crystals.  The balance will very much be addressed in future updates.  Extended server side stats should ( hopefully ) make this easier.

Players now get a profile on the website – Aside from player name, and when the accounted was created – there really arn’t any personal things on them – just a breakdown of stats.  I have got a privacy method all ready written – so if you really don’t want your stats viewable, please just let me know, and I can opt you out of displaying them.

My gf is leaving for New Zealand on Thursday to spend Christmas with her family, so expect blogging rate and actually development to pause till then, as I wanna get some quality time in with her before she leaves.  However, I will still be checking on things and keeping an eye on things – so hopefully can sort out anything before any major problems develop.  Best way to contact me will be either by email ( see about page ) or leave a comment here.

I’ll write out some patch notes tonight, just to wet appetites 🙂  Then at 2pm GMT, I will be uploading the new version of SpaceOreMiner, and changing the stats system over to the new one 🙂  Players who are already registered and have a score over 1 will automatically get a title on their profile to say that they played the first version of the game – The top three players will be getting special titles to indicate the rank they ended at.  I’m working on some in-game rewards for the top three and all version 1.0 players – but that will have to wait until after Thursday 🙂

Time to get a’mining 🙂

Well, I was playing 1.13 earlier to relax and had a quite good game ( 200k ) go vanishing on me.  So I’ve spent quite a while tracing why the data wasn’t saving.  I’ve had a few bug reports, each of which could have been explained away by strange client conditions … However, this game submission failed completely – which was useful, it meant I had a live case to look into.

Turns out the data wasn’t saving because at the time the data was being sent to my server, the database itself was actually down.  I’m using shared hosting, and therefore shared databases at the moment – but had NO idea at how strained mysql actually was.  I haven’t actually seen the database stay up for longer than an hour at the moment.  Looks like someone else using the server is hitting it hard.

Ofcourse I sent a ticket in, and they suggested ( very rapid response about 5 mins or so ) creating a new database on a new database server and copying the data across.  So I did that 🙂  Think I have lucked out and found a database with an uptime of 19 days – not really major ( for work I normally measure db uptime in months/years ) – but a vast improvement on a database which gets rebooted every hour 🙂

So hopefully the case of the lost games has been sorted – I am currently in the process of moving all the 1.13 stuff to the new database server – then tommorrow when I get some time I’ll change the script to reflect that – and that should be the end of that 🙂

Ofcourse, if after this change you have a missing game, please let me know, I think I might start running some sort of monitoring on this new database to check to see if things are up and running.

Ahhh, the dangers of shared hosting 🙂

EDIT: Update, I’ve decided to move it across right now, so if you get a dropped game after this, please let me know!