UF NEWS: Interview with Brian and Sean: Owners of Utopia

[Meeni]

Great interview!! Really informative and interesting. Please sticky so lots of players get a chance to read or make semi-official news

[Mad_Scottish]

That is an interesting take on things golfer, I see your point though. I dont know if it is that clear cut in terms of the paradox you have identified but it something that if sean and/or brian read they can keep in mind.

[Che Guevara]

wow, a tzar!

dark azn: there is obviously no ban on someone taking a vacation 72 hours before age end.

You're just bitter because your guys were deemed to be rule abusing, cos they weren't actually on vacation. Take your whining elsewhere.

How do you decide who is on vacation and who isn't? I mean, sometimes I like to take a break or a "vacation" from the game when I know that there is nothing left I need to accomplish that age. Just because I want to lounge around watching football instead of logging into my province for the last few days doesn't mean I'm not on "vacation".

Definition of VACATION
1
: a respite or a time of respite from something : intermission

If they aren't logging into the game, they are on vacation from the game. How do you have the authority to say one person taking a break is within the rules, and the next person taking a break is acting outside the rules? A break is a break regardless of where you spend your time. With the rise of smartphones, there should only be VERY, VERY, VERY rare instances of not being able to access the game. So the NEED for a vacation mode is gone, it's just there for people who want to take a break. Yet if they do it at the end of the age, they are abusing? Excuse me, but that is ignorant. People should be active throughout the age furthering their goals and their kingdom goals, and take their breaks at the end of the age. But apparently, that is against the rules...

[Che Guevara]

13. The tick is still a huge issue for a lot of people within the game, is there any chance this can be restored to how it previously worked?

First of all, the problems with occasional missed ticks with subsequent double ticks for some kingdoms is one that needs to be fixed, and is on the list.
The more general question of ?how ticking works? is more complicated. The way it worked on the old code didn?t work very well, and caused performance issues (such as very slow page loading) as well as data corruption that could cause all kinds of bugs. The first version of ticking in the new code was kind of similar, but because we had put so much effort into making sure that the game data was never corrupted, performance was impacted instead (resulting is even worse page loading times). The current approach of ticking everyone in a controlled manner keeps page loads as fast as possible at the cost of about 30 seconds at the start of the hour. We would like to improve this, but it would involve significant work for uncertain payoffs, and isn?t a priority. When we do get around to it, it will probably require changing how the game behaves.

For the technically minded, here?s some details. The new code implements exactly the same behavior as the old code. One of these behaviors is ticking. Ticking a province requires some up-to-date info from the kingdom (war, free land, net worth etc), so kingdoms need to be up-to-date, which in turn requires all provinces in the kingdom to be up-to-date. So, you can?t tick one province without ticking all the provinces in the kingdom. The old way of ticking was ?lazy ticking?. Whenever a province was accessed (e.g., visiting the game accesses your own province, attacking another province accesses that other province, visiting the kingdom page accesses all provinces...), all provinces in that kingdom would need to be ticked. This would happen during the server-side processing of the page request, which is why it could take so long to load a page. In the old code, what would often happen is that different players might access provinces in the same kingdom at the same time, and the server would end up trying to tick the same kingdom simultaneously for each of these page request. There were no consistency checks in place, so you could get all kinds of problems with double ticks or with data being overwritten incorrectly. In the new code, we use database transactions to ensure this kind of thing can?t happen. The problem is that multiple concurrent writers to the same database record (the provinces or the kingdom shared data) cause database transaction rollbacks, meaning the whole kingdom tick needs to be re-tried. This basically results in a low performance system, with the web-server being tied up all the time trying and re-trying to tick kingdoms, with different server threads constantly fighting over database access. The fundamental problem here is that there is shared write-heavy data in a highly concurrent system. This is a Bad Thing - something to be avoided at the design phase (a choice we didn?t have). The solution would be to remove that data - i.e., change the ticking logic so that kingdom nw, free acres, war etc. do not feed into province ticking. This would make it possible to tick provinces independently of one another, and eliminate database contention.

Funny how the game ran smoothly even with the "horrible design" that was apparently in the game back in the day. It ran smoother and with just as fast of page loads as the game today. And was less irritating. I don't know Sean and Brian, but I have to say if you are inept at programming you shouldn't run a game like Utopia, because it doesn't make sense. And when you make ignorant changes to something that already works well, and it decides to work poorly, you will get a bunch of negative comments. Sorry it hurt your feelings back in 2009 but if you put out a quality product then it would have been a lot easier on you.

[UnBan Hurlin]

Funny how people have short memorys and remember the goldern ages as being perfect but forget the.massive down times mass deletions and mass exodus of players.

Great interview maddy 8)

[Che Guevara]

Funny how people have short memorys and remember the goldern ages as being perfect but forget the.massive down times mass deletions and mass exodus of players.

Great interview maddy 8)

Funny how a Kaer dude remembers the deletions, and a Kaerless dude didn't have to worry about them (Hint: Because he wasn't cheating).

[Meeni]

Funny how a Kaer dude remembers the deletions, and a Kaerless dude didn't have to worry about them (Hint: Because he wasn't cheating).

Name 1 good kd that didn't cheat. Funny how mass deletions happened and suddenly these players were back in the kd EoA... there were always issues. These recent ones regarding Brian & Sean happen to be recent...

Not to mention mass multis and some other stuff that was always prevalent. It's part of the game and we just have to combat it as best we can but 1 answer was legalizing previously banned stuff such as trading and sitting (which caused xlogging before) which definitely helped a lot. I'd imagine they were widespread due to necessity... now that it's manageable these issues are a lot more limited.

[majordisaster]

wow! great interview. nice job maddy

[kbone]

funny thing about the glory days is they never happened...again, great interview!

[DjTeddySpin]

That was a very interesting interview! It was fun to read about the difficulties from the admin side.

Funny how the game ran smoothly even with the "horrible design" that was apparently in the game back in the day. It ran smoother and with just as fast of page loads as the game today. And was less irritating. I don't know Sean and Brian, but I have to say if you are inept at programming you shouldn't run a game like Utopia, because it doesn't make sense. And when you make ignorant changes to something that already works well, and it decides to work poorly, you will get a bunch of negative comments. Sorry it hurt your feelings back in 2009 but if you put out a quality product then it would have been a lot easier on you.

Well, as a small-time developer myself, I wouldn't change something as major as the base code just for fun. It is a lot of work and if you are any sane developer, having to work on changes SUCKS. But sometimes it come to a point where it can only be rectified by remodeling how the code works. It might be worth the trouble as it will possibly speed up, decrease bugs and help in stability of any future implementations. Just saying from my perspective, as they did not elaborate on the issue technically.

[draconis84]

very good maddy! It was really nice to see an admins POV. Thanks S&B for taking time out of your schedule and letting the utopian community know there are some updates worth while coming to us! I might even pay to use some of the premium services as a donation to uto!

[Cymindis]

it was good to hear from the dev's. interesting read please keep up the good work guys - both dev's and interveiw/news team

[UnBan Hurlin]

Funny how a Kaer dude remembers the deletions, and a Kaerless dude didn't have to worry about them (Hint: Because he wasn't cheating).

Funny how I was never deleted from my KLA kingdom ...... Or even worried about it... And the only time I cheated was in a non alliance kingdom.......


But haterz will allways be hating

[Che Guevara]

Funny how I was never deleted from my KLA kingdom ...... Or even worried about it... And the only time I cheated was in a non alliance kingdom.......


But haterz will allways be hating

Not hatin, tbh I could kaer less. Hatin would require me to give a damn.

[gergnub]

Keep on posting Che!