Just look at it as one last day of normality before the awesomeness starts :D
In a couple of weeks time we'll all be sat here glued to the game, unwashed, with filthy real life houses, and thinking "Remember the good old days where the site would close once in a while and reality had a chance to kick in?"
Damn I was really hoping to have something to distract Me from the soon to be released Battlefield 3 beta, Oh well guess I'll have to start tearing My hair out from impatience
I was hoping that this was a mean joke. Oh well. Thank you Tiny Speck for the heads up and the amazing free game you have invited us to play while you work. Tomorrow afternoon is gonna be Glitchy.
And thank you to That Kid Tyler for putting this where I could see it!
Here's what happened: We've been working on a big, complicated, low-level change to the way data is sent to the game client in order to render the locations in the world. This is something that will need thorough testing and we need to wrap it up before opening for this so-close-to-the-end test.
Despite a number of people working all weekend (and a few of them getting my awful cold!), we didn't have it all wrapped up this morning. And it looked like we wouldn't by the afternoon either. And since it was a nasty, potentially messy change, we didn't want to rush it and risk screwing things up. So: tomorrow instead!
(For the curious, the change is switching the client to be able to render locations from multiple "location swfs" at the same time. A location swf is a pack of assets (like trees, flowers, bits of ground, platforms, background mountains, etc.) which we use to render locations in the game. Till now, the client could only load from one location swf at a time, which meant that all the necessary assets had to be one swf, which made them very large and monolithic. Now we'll be able to break those into much smaller groupings which means data can load on demand, rather than requiring it all to load all up-front. And, when we make changes and additions, less data will need to be re-loaded by players who had already cached the relevant location swfs.)
Stoot - tomorrow instead is okay! We love how hard you guys work to give us something fun. Especially when the work has to do with optimization and (potentially) faster gameplay!
thx stoot for some words on the causes. makes it more easy to accept and feels good to hear a real word from staff.
And best wishes for recovery to you all !!!
Ouch! That totally doesn't work for me. You'll just have to open it today.
How about this. You bring it up, I do whatever is necessary to get my house, and then you can take it down and fix your load-y thinggy and I can go back to work too. Deal? Cool. Call me.
I just want to say "thank you" for keeping us in the loop. Of course, I was looking forward to the game starting up today but I'm okay with waiting as long as we aren't kept in the dark. Too many other online games are completely inconsiderate with their players and this is a breath of fresh air.
@Stoot- Thank you for the hard work you are all doing. You oughtta stop passing that cold around though. Can't wait for tomorrow!
@Princess Pinky- Happy early birthday!
@Gertie Mack @Princess Pinky happy early birthday you two. What a great present you will get tomorrow.
@shexycorin :D
@Staff thank you, somehow you knew I couldn't watch the beloved Sabres/hated Canes tilt tonight and be here as well. You took the appropriate action. Thank you.
That sounds like a very good reason for the delay and I am happy to wait on it. We are all pretty busy in various Forums so this gives us something else to discuss while we wait. As for me personally, I blame the Pickle.
Get well soon Stoot and everyone with the cold! Good luck with the rendering changes, sounds like a good thing to do. Personally, I beg you to ignore Laurali and open the game earlier tomorrow so we in the UK can get some play in tomorrow evening ;)
Stoot,
Feel better (also to any devs who have gotten a cold) and thanks for the update. Completely above and beyond to give so much detail to us, but I know I appreciate it. I'm still in awe of a community where there is so much back and forth. I can't imagine being kept in the loop when I think about other games / software developers.
I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to win the game.
I echo the thanks for letting us know. I can tell you really wanted it to be up today but appreciate your need to get everything working first. I would rather test something you think is ready for prime-time than something with significant known defects.
Although when I am playing I may lose track of being a beta tester, I need to bear in mind that the reason I signed up was to help TS get this game ready to go live. Any fun I have is actually part of the testing (i.e., it's a defect if the game isn't fun). So, take as long as you need to get it right. I will be ready to test when you open the game.
Glad to see you all are working around some of the flash issues!
Aside from faster rendering for clients between map transitions and better bandwidth usage due to read-ahead caching, does this mean client-side rendering of location swf's will handle cache more efficiently as well (i.e. reduce plugin-container overhead for expiring content and reduced pre-load requirements)?
Also, hope you feel better... West Coast colds are a pain to get rid of... I blame it on the morning fog.