The Mail Problems

Well, it seems registrations has been working after all. The ISP may have shut down the account, but somehow the relay works. So I'll leave it for now. I guess I won't be able to read mail sent to the mail address, but it seems to work sending out info and that's what it's for...

Always...

As always there is a problem when I leave home for a trip. This time my ISP shut down the mail account sending all creep mails. Reason, someone has hijacked it for sending spam. This means no one can register for now since I have an email confirmation on the registration. I talked to the support on the phone when I was on the airport, but it was a stupid drone who didn't know anything. When I'm back on Friday I will try to fix this.

Time for another pint. Over and out.

Vacation

Summer vacation is finally here. 4 weeks. If you want www.worldofcreeps.com to develop - wish for rain and cold weather in Sweden :)

First off is a trip to Scotland 20-24 Aug. A good test to see if all my architectural changes has made the world more stable. But if the world decides to take a rest, hold on until Friday, then it will be restarted.

New Creeps Bug

Apparently I missed one (or more) things when I introduced the new stuff yesterday. The activation of new creeps bugged out. I corrected that now, but that's probably the reason no new creeps have been born the last 24 hours.

Another small change that was made yesterday was that I now hide the "creeps in sight" on the creep info page. The list of creeps in sight is revealed with a mouse click now. On some creeps, in some parts of the world, the list was very very long and made it hard to see the history/action list beneath.

Change Alignment Scroll

Ok, the item development is now one step further in beta.

All gods have been given a change alignment scroll, that can be used three times.

If you didn't get one, just tell the almighty god.

Same goes for any bugs that may be caught when you try this out.

The scroll inverts the alignment of the creep you use it on. It can only be used on your own creeps. To use it, click "Use Item On Creep" from the creep info page.

Stamina & Alignment

The latest creep stats that were introduced is stamina and alignment.

Neither of these play a role in the world yet.

At first stamina will be a parameter in the outcome of creep fights. Stamina will be possible to train and upgrade, just like strength and agility (and secret creep skills) today.

Alignment will also play a part in fights. Later on it will be used for creep professions as well.

Recent Changes Behind The Scenes

Some major structural changes has been made recently. The two most important were moving most of the log, and the opinions, into memory. Previously the log (all creep actions) and the creep opinions were fetched from the MySQL database. However, both these tables were becoming extremely large, and they were crashing more and more often (MyISAM). When I finally moved them to memory instead, the performance boost was fantastic. No more table crashes since this change. And the speed was improved many many times. Opinions and log state are now saved in .dat files instead, making world startup times very fast as well. Overall these changes has made the world much more stable.

The last change with opinions was a limitation. Opinions are growing at a very high rate when all creeps eventually will have opinions about all creeps (and gods). The limit now is that a creep's memory is not infinite. They will be able to remember a limited number of creeps - and when that memory is "full" they will forget the one they met the longest time ago. As for gods, there is no number limit, but a time limit. For now they forget gods after 6 months. Every touch will restart the 6 months period though.

Technical

Ok, a little something for the more advanced readers.

The world is set up on a windows machine (but I plan to move it to Linux).
The important information is stored in a MySQL database.
The world itself, is an application developed in Java.
Currently the world clock ticks every 5:th second.
The web interface is built in jsp / java and runs on Tomcat.
To get fresh information from the world, the interface connects through a socket and fetches real time data.
Both the world app and the web app (interface) uses the same jar file.
In order to present object (creeps, gods, regions, items..) information I have written my own serialization protocol and methods, to avoid overhead.
Dynamic images are constructed from svg originals. I have developed a new lightweight svg library in java to be able to accomplish this.

Items

The big thing I'm working on right now is ... items.

Gods, Creeps, Regions... will have inventories. It's already up for beta with four creeps. The items in these cases doesn't do anything, they are just decorations.

Check out Gideon Jökul's star.

Items will be able to be wearable and equippable (for creeps). Eventually there will be a lot of different kind of items. However, the first item I will introduce will be a scroll, for all gods, that will be able to change creep alignment. Permanently.

Forum

I have been thinking about adding a forum to the site for quite a while. However, today I stumbled upon a thread discussing www.worldofcreeps.com.

http://www.virtualpetlist.com/forum/showthread.php?t=499

Quite nice to read about what total outsiders think about the world. They seem to think like me. It's a nice world, but the design needs a boost. So... who will help me? :)

What's This?

This is a blog about what happens in the World of Creeps (www.worldofcreeps.com). New features, work in progress, thoughts...

I know I have been very bad in updating the site with news, so I will try to use this tool instead to write about updates and what I'm working on.