JGF v3 - status

General Discussions
#41

[quote]So, BBB, whats going on? Are we about to see the release of the new version?
[/quote]
Still need $200, although…I have a tentative promise from someone for that much money. Waiting to see if it happens or not.

Also…the new site design is coming along nicely, getting lots of useful feedback from friends and whoever I can show it to offline.

Some problems with the way data is handled in the CMS which involve writing 100 lines of new code for every new database table, which is a PITA, and I’d love to find a way to circumvent :(, but otherwise that’s all working fine.

Security system not quite working yet (considering doing external auth via LDAP just to save hassle).

Ah…and there was something else, but I can’t remember what.

People have stopped submitting them recently, most of the testers have disappeared, and I’m not actively seeking games out now until v3 goes up, because of the time involved.

No help needed now until we get the server setup, and I upload the alpha, and start assigning accounts, roles, etc.

…unless there are any system architects around here with in-depth experience of CMS design, who could help sort out some esoteric complex problems with part of the system design.

No progress on that at all. Although there are 3 people who were volunteering to author these API’s, all my spare time is going into the new site, and we’ll have to wait and see whether they are still available once thats up.

:). 3 in-progress, and a couple more promised - but all need chasing up and again this is on hold until the new site is up. Partly because a lot of the organization of this stuff can be more easily done via the site.

LOL. Howabout: when we release v2 of survivor?

I would prefer nothing at the moment - I am at the limit of the workload I can handle, and it’s all bottlenecked on me right now.

Once the new site goes live, there will be a lot more that people can do, but not yet.

Oh, and we’re scraping the b/w limit on grexengine.com again, so please hold off on promoting the site for now :-/

#42

Well I just tossed a few more quid your way. (I think I do it just to say quid) :wink:

And keep us updated. I can probably scrounge up a few more pence or bob as the goal gets in sight.

#43

Thanks. Although there’s still only enough to pay for 2 months hosting after setup fees.

We might be about to run out of time to get that deal - it’s no longer visible from the main site (bookmarks still work, but they might not accept the order) and the new version is 25% more expensive.

Just as I predicted…

#44

Hi

We at Agency9, really like the idea behind the JGF initiative and would of course like to do our share to support it.

We could donate a whole server with a static IP in our server park, running your OS of choice (Linux or BSD I guess :slight_smile: ). That way you can maintain and run javagamesfactory.

The physical place of the server would be in our server park, actually next to the one running agency9.se and megacorpsonline.com

Bandwidth limit is 30Mbit/s, which should be satisfactory. No traffic limits.

Let us know if this sounds interesting.

/Khashayar Farmanbar
CEO Agency9

#45

[quote]Hi
We could donate a whole server with a static IP in our server park
CEO Agency9
[/quote]
Thanks to Agency9, we’re going to go ahead and try this. It might not work out, but we’ll start with getting the JGF v3 alpha up there and see how things go from there. It looks like they can handle the b/w OK, which was the major concern.

#46

It sounds very interesting. I’m glad they’re going to give it a try.

#47

A little bit of excitement to liven up your day…

http://213.88.244.247:8080/views/players

(JGF v3 alpha)

…well, OK, not really, but if you’ve got a REALLY dull job it might excite you :P.

NB: this is NOT ready yet. It’s just that I’ve installed what I needed on the server A9 donated and unpacked a “default” self-installing CMS + JGF package.

For those interested, this means I just java -jar’d the pre-baked package and it auto-installs and auto-detects whatever it can. The default package I made for JGF just includes some basic images and pages.

This server could go up and down arbitrarily whilst I populate it with the other modules etc. At the moment, you can technically create new user accounts, login, submit games and news etc (if you can guess the URL’s) - but I suggest you don’t bother ; I may well reset the DB (multiple times) over the coming days and wipe anything you do.

Again, FYI, this is because of the self-installing stuff. If I add a column to a DB table it’s easiest for me to:


uninstall module-xxx

and then


java -jar jgf-cms.jar

…which will auto install module-xxx and thus auto-create all the tables in the new format, instead of me having to faff around going into the admin system and initiating a data-preserving upgrade from one version of a module to the next.

Oh, and it could change port arbitrarily (it needs to move to port 80 sooner or later).

#48

Things are stable now. The server should be up almost all of the time (bar a few minutes every few days when I’m doing stuff where I want it offline whilst I tinker).

Feel free to create an account (there’s no checking done, takes a few seconds only).

I suggest you enter a valid email address - when I add the email-checker for new accounts, I’ll mark all exsiting accounts “unverified” and the only way you’ll be able to verify and re-gain access to the account is if you had a valid email address on it in the first place.

I’ll put up some goodies (something to see/do) as soon as I can. Perhaps at the weekend. So far I’ve been concentrating on getting some admin tools up and running (and checking that the security is working to lock non-admins out!) and checking and fixing debug stuff (if you find a bug in the java code you should get an HTML page full of stack trace info and instructions on what to do with it; there were a couple of places that were sidestepping that error-handler which I had to find and fix).

PS there is an aggressive firewall on the box, so if you have any ongoing troubles connecting, or particular pages/images don’t display, please let me know - I might have been TOO aggressive!

PPS there’s a port remap in effect now, so plain old: http://213.88.244.247/views/players works fine

PPPS: that’s a static IP, so don’t worry it won’t change. It’ll be some time before I update the DNS records (i.e. make javagamesfactory.org point to this server) simply because there’s a lot of preparatory work to do (there are lots of links to javagamesfactory.org/* on the net that would break)

#49

The only bad thing I noticed up to now it that the “Java Games Factory” logo is very slow to load the first time (and I have broadband). Nothing really bad though. :stuck_out_tongue:

#50

re: slow-loading logo…

It will be slow because there’s no file caching at the moment, hence if the server goes to sleep (no clients for a few hours) there could be a pause as it triggers a fetch direct from disk.

Also, there appears to be some kind of bug with the streaming of plain static files. Every 4th or 5th page-load in mozilla when done over local LAN “loses” the first 1 or 2 images and the first style sheet.

This probably means there’s a race condition in the file-streaming and the server is dropping the leading bytes. This is a serious problem for once the server starts streaming large files, so we’ll need to fix it :(. Then again, this might only appear over the LAN…

If you can reliably get problems with images not loading, please let me know!

#51

I’ve just done a major update of the alpha/test site. Not much more to see (yet), it’s mostly behind the scenes stuff (admin etc).

There’s now a working news module - PLEASE if you have any news you think would be good on the front page, login and “submit” your news for review; you’ll be helping test the system :). It won’t appear immediately (it automatically goes to all the “news-editors” for review first) but if it’s not entirely frivolous I’ll probably OK it.

And there’s a tutorials module (although I haven’t transferred any tutorials over yet).

http://213.88.244.247/views/players

PS: I haven’t personally looked at it in MSIE since the last round of font-size etc fixes (they were looking vastly different in different browsers) so I’ll check that as soon as I can - just trying to get the CSS to display nearly the same on all browsers at the moment.

#52

Site is almost up to full “basic functionality” now, which means it’s pretty close to being launchable (still not got the games added yet!). I’ve added a comments/suggestions module so that you can make public comments on any page - e.g. point out bugs, add new ideas, etc. This is NOT the planned mini-forums for each game - maybe it will be replaced by that when the mini-forums are ready.

All the suggestions are gathered in a central index, like in a bug-tracking system, which most of the editors can browse to see what people are saying (without having to go to each and every page).

I’ve also started testing with Google Ads. I suspect they’ll kick the site off for having too little traffic, but until then it’s useful as a test.

Now that the JGFv3 news seems to be working fine, I’ll post all updates directly there, rather than in this thread, unless there’s something truly major.

#53

When do you plan to switch to javagamesfactory.org?

#54

[quote]When do you plan to switch to javagamesfactory.org?
[/quote]
Two possibilities:

A - parallel route, end of this month

I copy the entire old site to the new server, and run BOTH sites at once off the same server. All the URLS are distinct and don’t clash, so this is possible. There will probably be some tweaking needed - for instance fixing stylesheets which probably have the same names - which could take a couple of days.

The front page (javagamesfactory.com/) will be changed into a page which presents both sites and asks the user to choose one or the other. This will ONLY happen to javagamesfactory.com, because of some weirdness about how the domains were registered (don’t ask :().

B - compelte transfer from one site to the other, probably mid-December

In this one, we get ALL the content up and running OK in the new site and server (which is currently the “alpha/preview”).

As soon as that’s transferred, we switch off the old server, transfer the domain name over, and WHAM! people surfing the web see a completely new site.

…

Option B is considerably less hassle for me. If some people volunteer to help get content transferred and tested then we could probably get it ready much sooner. The critical path is to get the articles and games pages implemented and tested - both are partialyy implemented and tested at the moment. Once I’ve completed those, then anyone can start transferring games and articles across.

#55

I would give help to test the games or do other things but I still have a dial-up internet connection at home. BUT I plan to switch the high speed in the following weeks. Yeah!

#56

How convenient :slight_smile: You can do a spotlight on the launch of Super Elvis too now, which is complete.

Cas :slight_smile:

#57

Referer URL:/controllers/create-suggestion

Throwable:java.lang.ClassCastException
Line Source File
92 In InsufficientAuthorizationException.java
76 …called from HttpPostControllerService.java
236 …called from bAsynchronousService.java
330 …called from bModule.java
534 …called from Thread.java

#58

Would be nice if password fields didn’t echo characters :slight_smile:

#59

[quote]Referer URL:/controllers/create-suggestion
[/quote]
thanks. Whilst I’m glad I put all the error logging in place early, that particular method call is doing a lazy calculation, hence the short stacktrace - and no indication of which class actually caused the error by putting unexpected data into the constructor of the InsufficientAuthorizationException via a Collection, and without generics it’s not easy/fast for me to argument-check every instantiation :(.

So, um, what page were you on when you created this suggestion?

EDIT: should be fixed now - but let me know if not

#60

[quote]Would be nice if password fields didn’t echo characters :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Hmm, yes, this is becoming a rather popular suggestion. Doesn’t bother me personally, but I’ll change it in the next update - should be just one line of code.

EDIT: done