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Minor Update 15 October 2005
2005-10-21 : Minor update
Popular Player
The more clicks a player`s vassal link receives the more popular he/she is. Every day we will give 120,000 planets out to the top 3 most popular players.
Temples
You can now upgrade your temple size by 100 meters instead 1 meter at a time. The cost is slightly more though but worth the time spent on it.
Vassal
Vassal that now wish to declare freedom from their master will need to pay honors that is 50x their Pr instead of 20x their lord`s Pr. This is made in such a way that if players is desperately need to free themselves can plunder their planets and declare freedom, as some of the lord may have millions of planets and can be impossible to declare freedom from.
2005-10-19 : Minor update
1.00-4.00 am server speed increased (Effects all games)
The server performs a daily statistics calculation at around 1.00 am to 4.00 am. The stats contains very important information that will help us judge the happiness level of players, mainly calculated from players playing pattern, number of logins, number of signups, length of time spent online, and so on.
We have moved this process to off peak hours at 1.00 to 4.00 pm instead, and also split up the processes to even more different parts to further reduce any lag produced from this scheduled task.
Do note that most pages in the game loads takes about 0.10 to 0.20 seconds to load (on average). So many players might not even notice a small lag when the scheduled task is running, because even a 10% lag = additional 0.01 or 0.02 seconds (not very notice-able). This update is to cooinside with the up coming DM to ensure the game loads as fast as possible so everyone can be sure of having fun in the DM.
2005-10-15 : Minor update
PR Cap increased to 10 billion (Effects UC)
Problem with large number issue has been resolved, so we are opening up the PR cap to 10 bil instead of the current 2 bil and monitoring the situation for errors/problems. It seems there is a bug in Coldfusion running on Microsoft. Now putting data as say 3 bil into the system works fine, but calculating 3 bil with x (times) or / (divide) plus using ODBC translates the thing to a weird number as such: 2.06420010818E+014. It seems after ODBC received a couple of such `weird numbers` ODBC (Microsoft) corrupts the memory allocation for the game forcing the game to refresh, resulting in the game refresh once every 15-45 minutes. Those who isnt a techie, 2 billion = 4 byte, and our system is running on 8 byte in theory capable of running over 15 trillion not 2 billion. This problem seems to have been fixed on the latest version but not the version we are currently using, we are using the server platform from the windows 98 era, so there is zero support on this as very few people are using this.
Minor design problem in ranking page fixed (Effects UC)
Federation logo does not have the tiny border in the ranking page. This design problem has been fixed.
7.30-7.40 pm server lag solved (Effects all games)
The server normally suffers lag around 7.30 pm to 7.40 pm, this is because there is a scheduled process during that time, mainly to get rid of old inactive accounts and other junk from the server. In order to fix this lag problem, we have split up this scheduled task to multiple sections and all of this will run from 3.00 pm to 6.00 pm. When this scheduled task was setup sometime ago the database was a mere 1 GB in size which has sinced grown to over 10 GB hence the lag.
2005-10-04
Reporting
Each day we run a reporting system scheduled to run at around 1.00 AM to 2.00 AM , this report is used for us to calculate and estimate player happiness levels, acceptance and others mainly used to judge how well a feature or update which has been done recently is accepted by the general public. Ex: happiness level drops if update isnt doing well, and so on. This report is very important as it also shows which area that needs us to spend more time in. Anyhow due to the large size of the database (currently exceeding 10 gigabytes, the server lags when the report is being generated, sometimes causing the server to refresh 2-3 times during this period of 1.00 AM to 2.00 AM (this effects all games & all game servers).
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We have found a solution by splittimg up the processing from 1.00 to 2.00 to 1.00 to 3.00, so it processes longer but causes much less lag to the game servers.
We are still working on improving the efficiency for other scheduled task as well. Other scheduled task currently occurs at 3.00 pm and 7.00 pm to 8.00 pm, and we hope to use the same implementation method in hopes that this will further reduce lag and thus server refreshes as much as possible.
Sending Tribute
We received many comments from players to increase the amount of tribute you can send per transport and to reduce the transports itself. So players can send 1 bigger transport rather than sending like 10 smaller ones. This has been done, the transport size has been increased by 300% however the number of transport has been reduced accordingly. I shall personally monitor the tribute situation to see if we need to increase or decrease the transport size accordingly.
I would like to personally thank the suggestions and comments made by several players on this part. If you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to highlight it to us in the forum, or you can PM it to any guide/admins.
Minor Speed Increase
I have updated the file system of the game, this should increase the page loading speed by about 10-20%. I believe this by itself should help with reducing the number of refreshes as well. This only effects the UC game (for now).
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