Hello everyone,
I'm posting this because as you've probably noticed, a week has been added to the pirates countdown timer. I feel like I owe you an explanation as to why (it's down to me, none of the other staff are responsible in any way). A lot has been happening lately. We've had some drama recently that's been upsetting of course, but that's not the reason why.
Recently, it's come to light that I won't be able to live with my mother and siblings anymore. I can't really go into the reasons why as they're too personal to talk about really, however as you can understand, this has been very upsetting. I've lived with them my whole life... and I've never known anything else. I'll be going to live with my father relatively soon, who I haven't seen in around two years (which isn't his fault).
So, I've been quite upset lately. It'll be for the best in the end (it's very cramped in this house...). But that's basically why I haven't made the deadline. My decision to delay it was a difficult one. If I rushed and rushed, I would be able to get something out in time, HOWEVER if I did this it would have so many problems. If we combine that with the high server load we're expecting on launch day in the first place, it'll be a disaster.
Let me go into more details. Basically, the pirates game is now separate to the Shockwave MyVMK client. I decided to do this for quite a few reasons, the biggest one being the fact we're moving away from shockwave in the main client soon anyway, so the idea behind this was that I could do it now and I wouldn't have to rewrite anything for the new client, which would reduce the workload on the new client dramatically and give you all a better version of pirates in the end anyway.
Originally, I started writing the pirates game as an extension of the new client. That made sense at the time, but as time went on I realised stripping the new client down wouldn't make much sense, and the code was a little messy anyway, so a few weeks ago I started writing pirates again from scratch. This time with the pirates server being a completely separate entity to the main MyVMK server. Basically I just started again because it made a lot of sense. The reason I wanted the server to be separate is because pirates could potentially give us quite a large load, so if the pirates server didn't rely on a database and only relied on a way of messaging the main gameserver, if it was needed I could move all of the pirates stuff off of the main server which would reduce lag. A simpler way of saying that is that it might have been too much for MyVMK to handle as it was, and this would let us resolve that relatively easily.
My plan all along has been to use the original pirates lobby, when you've entered the lobby show a loading screen saying "Waiting for pirates to load", and wait until it gets a positive notification from the server saying it has loaded successfully. When you enter a game in the lobby, the main VMK game would be hidden and pirates would be shown in its place, and the game would start without you having to leave. There are some issues with this way of doing it. Now, if I launched right now, we wouldn't even have that. You would create a game in some external interface, as soon as the game is created and you've joined it, that would be when the assets started loading. The upshot of that would be, if someone has a slow internet connection, you might be waiting for them to finish loading the game before you see the stage appear, and if that happens then they could timeout for loading, which would mean due to a slow internet connection you wouldn't be able to play. There would've been a few things we could do to mitigate that, but none of them seemed up to the job to me.
So, what are we going to do about all of this? Well, I will keep working on pirates, fixing all of the issues with it and making it perfect for you to play. Of course, there are some problems with how it needs to be done, but given the extra time I'll be able to minimise the impact of those (keep in mind the shockwave client is very hard for me to change, which is why everything tends to take longer when it is involved). I'll be fixing a lot of the bugs in the pirates client and server as well, and basically trying to make it perfect for when you get to play it.
To apologise, we will be releasing the bird hat you've wanted for so long right now. It's in the catalogue and it's easy to acquire. We hope this will make you feel better about the delay. I'm sorry I couldn't make it, but I really hope you'll understand. If you have anything you want to say to me about it, email me at amy0436@gmail.com - no matter what you say you will not have any repercussions in the game. I ask that if you post about the delay on somewhere like facebook, that you include the whole post. Thank you.
I'm posting this because as you've probably noticed, a week has been added to the pirates countdown timer. I feel like I owe you an explanation as to why (it's down to me, none of the other staff are responsible in any way). A lot has been happening lately. We've had some drama recently that's been upsetting of course, but that's not the reason why.
Recently, it's come to light that I won't be able to live with my mother and siblings anymore. I can't really go into the reasons why as they're too personal to talk about really, however as you can understand, this has been very upsetting. I've lived with them my whole life... and I've never known anything else. I'll be going to live with my father relatively soon, who I haven't seen in around two years (which isn't his fault).
So, I've been quite upset lately. It'll be for the best in the end (it's very cramped in this house...). But that's basically why I haven't made the deadline. My decision to delay it was a difficult one. If I rushed and rushed, I would be able to get something out in time, HOWEVER if I did this it would have so many problems. If we combine that with the high server load we're expecting on launch day in the first place, it'll be a disaster.
Let me go into more details. Basically, the pirates game is now separate to the Shockwave MyVMK client. I decided to do this for quite a few reasons, the biggest one being the fact we're moving away from shockwave in the main client soon anyway, so the idea behind this was that I could do it now and I wouldn't have to rewrite anything for the new client, which would reduce the workload on the new client dramatically and give you all a better version of pirates in the end anyway.
Originally, I started writing the pirates game as an extension of the new client. That made sense at the time, but as time went on I realised stripping the new client down wouldn't make much sense, and the code was a little messy anyway, so a few weeks ago I started writing pirates again from scratch. This time with the pirates server being a completely separate entity to the main MyVMK server. Basically I just started again because it made a lot of sense. The reason I wanted the server to be separate is because pirates could potentially give us quite a large load, so if the pirates server didn't rely on a database and only relied on a way of messaging the main gameserver, if it was needed I could move all of the pirates stuff off of the main server which would reduce lag. A simpler way of saying that is that it might have been too much for MyVMK to handle as it was, and this would let us resolve that relatively easily.
My plan all along has been to use the original pirates lobby, when you've entered the lobby show a loading screen saying "Waiting for pirates to load", and wait until it gets a positive notification from the server saying it has loaded successfully. When you enter a game in the lobby, the main VMK game would be hidden and pirates would be shown in its place, and the game would start without you having to leave. There are some issues with this way of doing it. Now, if I launched right now, we wouldn't even have that. You would create a game in some external interface, as soon as the game is created and you've joined it, that would be when the assets started loading. The upshot of that would be, if someone has a slow internet connection, you might be waiting for them to finish loading the game before you see the stage appear, and if that happens then they could timeout for loading, which would mean due to a slow internet connection you wouldn't be able to play. There would've been a few things we could do to mitigate that, but none of them seemed up to the job to me.
So, what are we going to do about all of this? Well, I will keep working on pirates, fixing all of the issues with it and making it perfect for you to play. Of course, there are some problems with how it needs to be done, but given the extra time I'll be able to minimise the impact of those (keep in mind the shockwave client is very hard for me to change, which is why everything tends to take longer when it is involved). I'll be fixing a lot of the bugs in the pirates client and server as well, and basically trying to make it perfect for when you get to play it.
To apologise, we will be releasing the bird hat you've wanted for so long right now. It's in the catalogue and it's easy to acquire. We hope this will make you feel better about the delay. I'm sorry I couldn't make it, but I really hope you'll understand. If you have anything you want to say to me about it, email me at amy0436@gmail.com - no matter what you say you will not have any repercussions in the game. I ask that if you post about the delay on somewhere like facebook, that you include the whole post. Thank you.
, I hope things with your dad work out since you haven't seen each other in a while :3 SO LONG AMY POND
-hugs- Your the best Amy always remember that <3
