Oh, and there are now 5k unique visitors a month to the “old” JGF. I don’t know how many are visiting jgf.org, because I haven’t run the log analyzer on it yet, although I suspect something like 500 a month, going by the size of the logfiles.
…which also means that ge.com is now at about 95% of it’s bandwidth limit, and I urgently need to get v3 finished and put redirector’s on every page on the old site! 
Are you really sure that all this crazy tech is worth it? I mean, the number of games that it’s worth actually playing can be counted on your fingers, and it strikes me that it’s not really a huge deal for you to have just taken care of editing & posting yourself…
Cas 
[quote]Are you really sure that all this crazy tech is worth it? I mean, the number of games that it’s worth actually playing can be counted on your fingers, and it strikes me that it’s not really a huge deal for you to have just taken care of editing & posting yourself…
[/quote]
LOL (both for “number of games” and “is it worth it?”)
re: number of games
I firmly believe that the number of decent games is on the verge of shooting upwards. For one small sign for instance we’ve just seen more than 40 entrants to a J4k comp…a massive increase on all previous years put together.
re: is it worth it?
I know this may sound hard to believe, but just maintaining the site for the 40 games it already had was 3+ hours per week for me, assuming I did as little as I could get away with. Realistically, to do it properly (removing games that broke, making sure games worked when updated, etc etc) was approx 15 hours a week - way too much, and even with only a relatively small number!
So…one of the main aims for JGFv3 has been to automate as much as possible. For instance, games can now be uploaded by anyone, with the descriptions, the graphics, the screenshots, without any intervention from me. Um, OK so I haven’t linked in the HTML form where the author can change the screenshots etc (yet), but … it will also mean I’m not needed each time they want to make a change, put up a better screenshot, etc (happens often :().
and to top it off…
There’s lot’s of new features to make people happy which weren’t possible without at least some “crazy tech”, although there are easier ways much of it could have been done (but not all; and they would have made other bits harder).
For instance, here already or coming soon:
[] automatic JNLP’s!
[] automatic jardiff (come on…how many of you have set up jardiff ever? )
[] hits-tracking for which games are most popular
[] games listed in order of popularity (and any other order I write some SQL for)
[] email-notification on events of your choice: new games, new releases, general news, etc (particularly useful for editors: get email when something happens which needs your personal attention!)
[] fix all the problems with broken links in articles
[] authors can edit and append to their articles (especially dev diaries) themselves
[] anyone can put news on the front page (moderated)
[] anyone can comment on each game, article, etc and put in their own requests and suggestions
[] dynamic FAQ’s where anyone can ask a question, and it appears on the site as soon as it’s answered
Pretty unexciting for 99% of the people reading this, but …
automatically creates newsitems each time a new game is created (+ emails all news editors telling them one of them has to check and approve the news)
automatically emails all game-editors each time a game is created
automatically emails all article-editors each time a new article is proposed
…which should speed up the admin activities a fair bit, and make it less hassle. But also means people will start getting annoyed if you spam the system with lots of copies of the same game (so please don’t; I’m hoping not to have to impose per-author limits on number of games at once 
).
I like the new logo colours btw (I’d change the purple though maybe, it kind of clashes with the red).
If you like my work, I could also create other GUI elements. For example, I really, really don’t like that gradient silver oval thing that the links are in… If you want, I could design something nicer?
Also, we need the text Java Games Factory anti aliased or something, it looks dreadful.
Let me know.
[quote]I like the new logo colours btw (I’d change the purple though maybe, it kind of clashes with the red).
[/quote]
Yeah, need to find a better set of colours.
Anything you think you can do better, have a go, send it to me, and if I agree it’ll go up.
Or…post it in a thread, get some comments from other people, and if most like it, it’ll probably go up.
Sorry, still using LCD’s; never notice how bad it looks (keep forgetting to deal with it…)
Site went down again this morning…why?
Looks like in ran out of memory
Kev
I wonder what it’s doing with direct buffers?
Cas
Reminds me of this thread: http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=jogl;action=display;num=1109628293
the “why?” was rhetorical :).
[quote]I wonder what it’s doing with direct buffers?
[/quote]
Indirect BB’s == crash JVM because of Sun memory leak. At least in the version of java running on that machine (might be worth trying java 5 and seeing if it’s any better?)
Direct BB’s == used for sending + receiving socket traffic. The GE recycles them automatically (I think) so running out is not something I’ve ever seen before. The buffer size for at least some of the services is pretty high on JGF at the moment (off the top of my head some are defaulted to 50kb…which would mean 1280 simultaneous live connections could run out of memory), but I don’t think there’s been that much traffic :(.
To blahblahblah :
I’ve just noticed this morning you have changed JNLP extension of web start games (Mac / Safari friendly) , well… at list on the anacondanet game . Is it operational for all games ? Have i simply missed the announcement ? (it’s a good day for mac players
Lilian
[quote]To blahblahblah :
I’ve just noticed this morning you have changed JNLP extension of web start games (Mac / Safari friendly) , well… at list on the anacondanet game . Is it operational for all games ? Have i simply missed the announcement ? (it’s a good day for mac players
[/quote]
I think I said something about it at the time, but yes - I did make that change for all games. I may have kept quiet because I wasn’t 100% sure i’d changed it in all the relevant places, but it seems to be working fine so far (then again, I haven’t had time to check on a Mac since doing the patches ).
I think I also made it so that the old url (no .jnlp) works. If so, this will cause everyone to be “upgraded” to the new URL next time they play. But I’d appreciate if someone could confirm (I guess you’ll either have one copy of the game in your cache, or two, if jws thinks they’re different URL’s).
In 2.5 days all I’ve managed to do is upgrade all the core + modules to the latest grexengine versions, implement my own buffer manager, and install a few extra grexengine plugins.
One of those plugins is an IP blocker, which lets me easily run dangerous services (like a login shell that can remote control the server) without worrying too much about security.
Another is an improved grexengine-shell which I’m going to use to remotely control my buffer manager and see if I can narrow down / fix the out-of-memory errors over the coming days.
Now … finally, I’m onto dealing with the other bugs mentioned above.
I’ve uploaded everything I’ve been working on, and restarted the server.
Most of the changes are on the backend - although some are front-end, hope that all MSIE users appreciate the workarounds for MSIE bugs ;D - which means there could be several things broken.
I’ve spent about 12 hours testing on my local LAN, and have just spent another half hour testing on the JGF live server (and fixed a couple of extra problems), but have run out of bugs. Now I need other people to go poking and see if they can find any other problems…
Authors can now:
In general, added:
My first attempt ot play a game was not successful:
An error occurred while launching/running the application.
Title: Anaconda_Net
Vendor: Author: moogie
Category: Download Error
Could not verify signing in resource: http://javagamesfactory.org/attachments/game/Anaconda_Net/alpha/11/golden_0_2_2.jar
You also need to make the site look good. A well done graphic design will make the site less easily dismissed.
[quote]My first attempt ot play a game was not successful:
[/quote]
Nothing to do with JGF AFAICS, although I understand the point you’re really making - games need to work first time.
And I’m right with you on it.
I’m still working towards implementing the two-stage release, where games can’t be downloaded until they’ve been tested, but first wanted to get as many issues with the actual upload and download of games sorted out.
Suggestions and submissions are, as always, welcome.
I’m assuming at this point that:
At the moment, it looks like the game downloads are fully working, it’s just there are some new glitches with the uploads. C.f. also the most recent game (have to use all-games to see it, right at the bottom) - it’s parsed some of the form-submission fields together into one field. I need to find out what happened there; probably a bug in parser encountering an unexepcted ASCII code or somethign.
…looking at parser-log, it’s gobbling 6 chars of the boundary into the payload of the previous field. Could be a case of me guesstimating the character size in bytes (because Sun’s API doesn’t tell you, a bug I logged a coupel of years ago), or could just be a case of a counter getting out of synch in the parser in some boundary case that just happened to occur this one time :(.
Turns out when I wrote the parser I’d missed a boundary case where the client sent data so that an HTTP 30-character boundary marker fell just a few bytes short of a ByteBuffer limit. I’d handled lots of bytes short, and dead-on, but not a few short (don’t ask; it was a really stupid mistake). My only defence is that just parsing HTTP-uploads is complex and requires a 6-state FSM :(. Not much of a defence 