announcements

Welcome to the new section for game announcements! Featuring the following:

• Announcements now come in the form of special forum posts, allowing you to reply directly.
• An extra forum counter in the sidebar turns red when there are new unread announcements to help you to stay on top of updates.
• The headline of the latest announcement is shown on the top right of every page.
• Visible on homepage without logging in.
• I'll have much more freedom to post more detailed updates with content like tables, images, etc.

The legacy announcements from before this change are of course available too.

cool man

nice addition :)

smashing baby!

looks good :)

+1

+1

Hello Edmazur.com/bots :D

Looks good.

LEGGO.

+1

Nice touch! :)

I think they should be above donations.

+1

I think they should be above donations.

+1 this would look better

I agree with nos and made2shred. It would fit better

Is it just me or have the load times increased since this update? :[

I'm noticing that too Draoi.

I think they should be above donations.

Right now I think this would be okay because there's only one announcement and it's relatively short. The homepage is currently configured to show the last 5 announcements though, so this could eventually push the donations down really far. I still want to display those somewhat prominently, so maybe I'll rework how they appear to be a little more condensed as a compromise.

Is it just me or have the load times increased since this update? :[

While working on this update, I noticed some slowness on certain pages - the forum index and documentation page in particular are pretty bad. I also identified a slow query that was running on every page. I've already begun work on addressing all three of these issues, so I should be able to get something out very soon. Hopefully that will clear this up. This particular update also added a couple new queries that get run on every page load, so I'll take a look at those as well.

Right now I think this would be okay because there's only one announcement and it's relatively short. The homepage is currently configured to show the last 5 announcements though, so this could eventually push the donations down really far. I still want to display those somewhat prominently, so maybe I'll rework how they appear to be a little more condensed as a compromise.

I was under the assumption it was going to have a dedicated amount of space, similar tot he older style, that scrolled. If that's not the case I could see how pushing everything down could pose an issue because donations and Hall of Champions shouldn't be pushed so far down they become almost unnecessary on the page at all.

I guess rather than displaying the entire information like you have on the home page, remove the information and just leave the header. Don't remove the information on the login page, just the home page after logging in.

+100 to the new home page now. With another announcement, with some color, it looks great.

Seems to be loading pretty quickly now, even pages that weren't slow seem a bit faster now too. Documentation is still slow but that can't really be helped :P

Documentation is still slow but that can't really be helped :P

yes it can, cache it and make it update every 20 minutes or so. you lose the real time statistics, but it will decrease the load time dramatically.

I mean it can't be helped on the server side. I was only saying that though, I'm not gonna cry over a couple seconds of load time for the doc page.

you would cache it server side. But I don't think anyone minds waiting a couple of seconds for the page to be generated when its real time statistics. so I don't think this needs to be implemented yet. But as the database grows with more data the load time will increase.

Seeing that red N was a nice new, highly visible addition to the game, I look forward to seeing more. Will a red N be giving us s'more weapons and shit sometime maybe?

I have good news on the slowness/performance issues. In general, there are two main ways the game can be slow:

• Slow pages load slowly - Well duh. If a page has a slow database query or does a lot of computation on the data, it's going to take more time to serve it.
• Slow pages loading slowly slow down fast pages - This one is less obvious. There's only one web server running the game and it's not very powerful, so if it's busy doing other stuff unrelated to your page request, you could notice it too, even if what you're loading should be fast.

The speedup you guys noticed was probably from me fixing the forum index a couple days ago. The database query to fetch the last post of each section had gotten very slow, so I optimized it some more. Since the forum index is a popular page and probably gets loaded by a lot of people simultaneously after a new forum post (because of the sidebar notification), it could have been triggering both of the above scenarios.

In figuring this out, I also did a lot of other performance profiling and identified many other causes of slowness. I'll be fixing these too over the coming days and will likely have a separate announcement talking about this more when it's complete.

Although I like the new way the announcements are handled, I think they are way to much as far as information is provided on the homepage. It clutters it up excessively and pushes it to the point of "tldr" territory

You could do like runescape does.

Have like the first few sentences and a link to say "Read more". And it takes you to a page of just announcements. Like the Hall of Fame months.

If you get what I'm saying.

I suggested something like that a few post up, in this thread.....

Sorry Mr. Nos. :/

Great minds think alike?

Or lesser minds repeat what great minds say? :P

Thanks Nos.

You're quite welcome.

I gave the announcement boxes a max length/scrollbar. Most of them will be pretty short - a bit of text and perhaps an image. The length of the Q&A one is an exception, not a rule.