Lag Solution & Blog Update

TAKE THAT LAG!

When I made Reign Of Blood back in 2006, I didn't really have much idea about a lot things. This has been amazing learning experience for me. When I started it, I decided on an hourly revive system to allow people to be able to play all day long. Of course, I wasn't thinking ahead. I was sat at my Mother's desk, on her PC, messing around and creating a game. I didn't have growth in mind at all. As Reign Of Blood gained a lot of popularity, the hourly resets started getting slower and slower as it had more people to update.

In the recent couple months, it had got pretty unbearable. I got advice, talked to a few people, did some thinking and came up with a few theories. I took the game down on evening of the 10th June, worked for about an hour on doing some structure changes, and it paid off a lot better than I expected.

When 59 past hits, you barely feel any struggle at all. I was  nervous when top of hour came for the first time after I let everybody back in, but I am so happy it worked out better than I planned. I am super excited everybody can now experience a top of hour that doesn't lag like hell.

There might be a few glitches here and there whilst it runs in the 'real world'. But I will continue to optimise as normal to keep pages as fast as possible.

Little updates

A few little updates I've also done today:

• Jailed players no longer appear on 'top vampire' leaderboards page

• Sidebar mp hover reworded

• Fixed a small equipment page alignment issue 

• Vadenhill feeds moved to half past the hour

Blog Updates

Blogs are one those features that not a lot of people use. But the people who do use it, use them a lot, and love using them. With over 45,000 total blogs posted so far, I can happily announce a good few updates for them.

• Now fully named "blog center". Still can be found from your [social panel]
• Updated and cleaned up the layout on many pages
• Extended the title and mood box, added randomised default mood
• Blog TYPE added. Choose from personal, RP, story and poems to set a category for your blog (you can go through and edit all your current blogs to update their category)
• Up to 5 blogs are now displayed on your profiles (v2 only)
• Updated directory which includes title search and category listings
• You can now select which blog posts you want displayed on your profile with the new profile blog control panel. You can add up to 5
• The profile blog section has been updated and looks much better
• You can now SUBSCRIBE to blogs and get NOTIFICATIONS when a new blog is posted by someone you are subscribed to
• You can now set blogs to 'family only' (family YOU have added)
• Fixed a few small including linking errors
• Private blogs no longer show up anywhere for anyone else

Head over to the blog center now to check it. I hope you agree its a lot more useful and use friendly now.

I hope you enjoy these updates and the improved page loads,
Ash

10th June Scheduled downtime

Scheduled downtime

I talked about a couple ideas I had on this post last week. And tonight, I am going to give it a shot.

I have a theory on how to help reduce the top of hour lag. It will require an update on the code on several pages, which means I'm going to have to close the game for a small while. My estimates are no longer than an hour.

So at 10pm tonight (game/server time) I will close the game and work my magic.

The worse case scenerio, it will be no different than it is now. Best case, a much speedier top of hour.

Ash

Downtime Tonight

As many of you probably figured out, we had some server troubles this evening. The reason why it took so long for us to get back up was as follows:

The server guys get notified as soon as the server goes down, so they always know before anyone else. They did a quick check and two of the hard-drives seemed to have failed (computers eh? can't trust 'em.) They got them physically checked and the techies confirmed this. It turns out they both failed simultaneously so the RAID couldn't even protect it from failure.

The techies then replaced the two failed hard-drives with brand spanking new ones. And the server guys re-installed the OS and loaded the latest backup onto them.

I invest heavily into this sort of protection and with the backups in the rare event things like this happen. A lot of sites/games don't. It may have taken some time, but when it involves having to physically replace drives, it can take a while. There might be up to an hour of loss (as the backups are done pretty much hourly.)

Remember to keep an eye on our Facebook Page for updates when the site is down.

I have given everybody a free VIP and VIP+ day. Also a little promo code for everyone to use to make up for the loss and mess ups it would create in regards to the dailies and the slight time jump: junedowntime

Sorry again, and thanks for your patience.
Ash

New Co-Op Quests

A lot of my time this week has been given to a secret project I'm doing with our helpers, but here are the things I have for you all this week.

Pet (Mt Tilia) Changes

Oh the pets. As much as I didn't hope it would have to come to this, a few changes have been made starting from this month.

- The leaderboards will remain, but there will be no prizes for the top wins and highest level anymore. The QP rewards have stayed exactly the same.
- Tidying up the Dead City a little, the pet leaderboard page has moved inside the top vampires page.
- No longer in beta.

New Co-Op Quests

It's been a while since I've added new co-op quests. Simply because I didn't really know what to do with them. But on the recent poll, surprisingly, a lot of people asked for more co-op quests. So here we go!

- Vampire War II
- Vampire War III
- Feeders
- Feeders II
- Money Looters
- Money Looters II


I also noticed there was no direct link to the quest news page, so I have added a link on the top of the news page.

June Competition

This month's competition is for you writers out there. The great thing about text based roleplaying games, is that gives people a place to bring alive their imagination. I'd like a small article written about how Dead City is on a daily basis in your eyes. Plasma prizes for the best entries. Click here for more info.

La-a-aaa-aaa-a-ag

I've got it. I've figured it out. I have come up with a theory to reduce the top of hour lag by a large percent. It's been something we've all put up with for a while, simply because of the large amount of updates needed every hour. I've done my best to help strip things out of resets, but the server guys & I have come up with a solution that should help speed things up some more! More on the towards the end of next week.

Enjoy the weekend, and I hope you enjoyed the Midweek Madness!
Ash