The Soul Raver Dev Blog

As some of you might know, we've been planning on several very sweeping changes lately, and I'd like to outline all of them and how they will or will not affect any of you. Database changes: We're in the process of changing up the general style and relationalism of the db with the help of our new database administrator dev, TheFlyingSpaghettiMonster. What this means to you: The game will execute actions faster and we'll be able to do more with less code which means more productivity. The con to this is that it'll take a bit to rewrite the code to use it, but more on that later. Rollover changes: We're going to be changing rollover fundamentally so that not only do you not get kicked off chat, you won't be kicked off the game period. I'm of the opinion that it's useless breaking your session just to update some data in the db and make backups. So, we're simply going to prevent you from doing anything (you'll get a message saying rollover is in progress). So, there will be rollover 'warnings', but you will be able to stay on and chat during. Design changes: As we were already going to be rewriting the site's entire code to allow for the new database setup, we were hoping to really change up the way the game is coded to be more efficient, to be easier to code for, to make everything more or less awesome. I had been pressing to use Ruby on Rails to do this, which is an application language made for rapid application development and convenience of coding (see ForumWarz for a working example of the neatness), but as it turns out RoR is a bit picky and overall too much work to adapt to and use. So, instead, we're going to be (possibly, still waiting for coding team approval) rewriting the game code to be entirely based on one page (this excludes chat, which we will also finally finish soon >.>). Anyways, the upside of this is that all the code is contained to one page, which means system changes are easier to make, and none of the hassle needed to make new pages is needed. Adding a new function to the game will be as simple as using a tool I'm designing to add a new section to that page. It makes compression of functions, it means we can use a single style sheet that'll be easy to adjust (no more silly bugs caused by Fyr's setup >.>). But that's not all. We'll also be able to keep all our functions on one page, and we'll be able to see where we need functions the most. In addition, we're going to start implementing AJAX calls into all of the interfaces- no more page loads for every little thing, saves bandwidth and what not. This is going to make javascript being enable pretty much a necessity, but it basically already is. We may or may not code in support for JS being disabled, we'll see. But, I think the best aspect of this, is that we can refactor all of the existing code to be much better and have more features than it used to. To be honest, alot of our early code by me and Fyr is very sloppy and inefficient. It'll be nice to have a consistent code base from now on. And so, I'll end this blog. I think very soon we're going to make a new Soul Raver Show, so I'll recap some of this on there. If we can, we're going to get Sukie and FSM on, since they haven't been on a show yet >.>