First off, sorry for the poor blog post yesterday. I spent Friday-Sunday solidly reading through server documentation, following tutorials, and being really frustrated with all the problems I kept facing. I was so tired when I was writing that. The past half week has been very tough, way harder than I thought it would be. Working a server is not a task someone with no experience or understanding of servers can just casually pick up and do.
I felt really bad last night. I had sent around the link to the alpha game while the server will still preparing for launch after its initial crash. The server was ready by about 00:30am local time and unfortunately it crashed again when it went up. Fixing a server can take several hours and there was no way I could stay up that long playing around with it. Had to call it a day and leave it down overnight.
This morning I found this problem causing the crash and fixed it. There have been a few minor hiccups since then but the server appears to be stable now. All its performance metrics are reading what they should and all the traffic from the alpha players hasn’t caused any issues – the server looks to be able to support a lot more players than the current number, although it is difficult to work out an exact number because the usage from players is partly stochastic in its nature, especially when working with very low player numbers. All I can say is I don’t believe we are even close to the usage capacity of the server.
Whew!
I had two big worries when I launched the server. The first being that part of me really believed that no one other than myself would be able to use the site. I was half expecting to launch it and then for everything to be broken and no one able to do anything on it. hahaha…. so did not almost happen.
The second worry was that the server would be overloaded with all the traffic. CCSO is not a ‘standard’ website – it sends a lot of data to and from the database per player. The table for games has over 100 columns alone… That’s a hell of a lot of data. You even notice the effects of it when a round ends and the page auto-refreshes and blinks a few times before displaying the final results. There is a lot of processing that goes into updating a round and yeah I probably could make it more efficient if I rewrote the entire thing, but that doesn’t actually seem to be needed at this stage. All this processing barely makes a dent in the server capacity! Phew.
Anyway, things are working and look good. I’ll leave the server running overnight here and this time I’m reasonably confident it will still be working in the morning. If the server can stay up for a full 24 hours, I will have confidence that it can stay up indefinitely. (perhaps a little naive, but I’m feeling lucky here :P).
How Hard Actually Was It?
Let’s say I almost gave up on several occasions.
And on many accounts I had to take breaks because it was just getting too hard and I could see no way of making it work.
But Here We Are
30 weeks ago I said we would have a just about working game by the end of the year. I would say we have done this, although you might be a little bit more skeptical depending on how you interpret that statement. But no matter how you view it, we are on the verge of having a fully functional game. The core functionality is there. It is just the extra parts that need adding.
But The Site is So UGLY!
I know. This is not how it is going to look in the end. As I’ve been saying all along, the important thing now is to get the game working, and then we can worry about how it looks later on. The site looks utter crap, but for my very first website I think it is pretty good. It is fairly alright, just not the most ergonomic or fancy.
I’m expecting a design overhaul to be done in time for the Beta release – something that is expected in late 2015.
How Can I Test The Game?
Feel free to make a second account. I have added a special 2 player game mode for testing. For the second account, make sure you use a different email to the first or it won’t sign you up. This email can be fake and needn’t exist at all. Don’t worry about it.
When on the game screen, the view button will appear only once the game is full. Use separate browsers for your accounts, otherwise your sessions will overwrite each other; this is not a special feature in CCSO, all websites do this. You try having two accounts open at the same time in the same browser on any other site and you will quickly see that one of them get logged out. It’s just the nature of websites.
Anyway, keep an eye out for bugs and spelling mistakes.
Also, do check the bug thread and the component status page for components that should be working in the game and dodgy buggy traps that might catch you if you’re not careful. Please report anything weird that isn’t listed.
Where From Here?
The main focus will be on making more components functional. I’ll fix some of the other bugs along the way too. Each bug is listed from a high to low priority. This doesn’t define the order I’ll do them in, but will certainly influence it.
And Finally….
I FEEL AMAZING!
No, I’m not on drugs. Probably. What I mean is as a game developer, releasing my game (even if it is an early alpha) and seeing others play it is so fulfilling. I feel like a genius after getting the server working, and now I see all my hard work has paid off. Game developers get high off people playing their games apparently.
And on that note,
Goodbye for now. I’ll see you all soon!
P.S. How did I go from knowing nothing to this in 30 weeks? o.O
P.P.S. Today has been the best day by far for views on this blog. In fact, we broke the old record by almost a factor of 4 :O And this day hasn’t even ended yet! http://i.imgur.com/UYJBsut.png
But I have improved the systems even more. This time working on how some HTML tags were slipping through the system and being interpreted.
CC Survival 
