NEStalgia is currently climbing Reddit

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ID:109951
 
Feb 23 2011, 7:47 am
I started sending out emails to gaming sites and blogs this morning. We've had a great response so far. Right now a lot of our traffic is coming from Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/fr3nx/ nestalgia_free_to_play_nesstyle_morpg_just/

I've begun hosting a second server that may or may not be temporary, depending upon how many of the new people stick around:

byond://98.225.39.120:1633

Whatever happens, I'll be happy to transfer savefiles between servers later on. Our only hiccup so far is one that we expected: the use of BYOND icon functions makes the server chug when there are lots of people creating new characters. Nothing we can't solve by hosting a few more servers in the short term.
Feb 23 2011, 8:05 am
The only downside is that people are all ready complaining that it's made with BYOND and "clunky". I'm not sure what they are going on about, possibly the lag from the new characters?
Feb 23 2011, 8:07 am
Sinfall wrote:
The only downside is that people are all ready complaining that it's made with BYOND and "clunky".

Yeah the server is just experiencing lag spikes due to character creation right now. I think that is what some players are complaining about.

Once we don't have a crap load of people logging in and creating characters all at the same time there shouldn't be an issue.
Feb 23 2011, 8:16 am
Some guys in Reddit called BYOND a "jumpy, laggy scripting language" and I almost punched my monitor. Almost.
Feb 23 2011, 8:40 am
I created /r/NEStalgia. I know you just posted about people not doing this, but considering the top comment on the post you linked to was asking for it, I figured it was only a matter of time until someone else grabbed it and then you'd be out.

If you send me a PM on Reddit I will add you as a moderator and de-mod myself.

Feb 23 2011, 8:41 am
Duelmaster409 wrote:
Some guys in Reddit called BYOND a "jumpy, laggy scripting language" and I almost punched my monitor. Almost.

Most BYOND games are jumpy and laggy due to a combination of poor coding and bad hosts. It's a shame BYOND has such a bad name.
Feb 23 2011, 8:46 am
C_Dawg_S wrote:
Duelmaster409 wrote:
Some guys in Reddit called BYOND a "jumpy, laggy scripting language" and I almost punched my monitor. Almost.

Most BYOND games are jumpy and laggy due to a combination of poor coding and bad hosts. It's a shame BYOND has such a bad name.

"BYOND, so easy anybody can jump right in"

But only a few do it well. ;)
Feb 23 2011, 8:47 am
C_Dawg_S wrote:
Duelmaster409 wrote:
Some guys in Reddit called BYOND a "jumpy, laggy scripting language" and I almost punched my monitor. Almost.

Most BYOND games are jumpy and laggy due to a combination of poor coding and bad hosts. It's a shame BYOND has such a bad name.

Most games that represent BYOND fall into the category of rips and fangames. Of course, those kind of games are usually horrendously programmed and give BYOND the reputation it has now.
Feb 23 2011, 9:02 am
C_Dawg_S wrote:
Duelmaster409 wrote:
Some guys in Reddit called BYOND a "jumpy, laggy scripting language" and I almost punched my monitor. Almost.

Most BYOND games are jumpy and laggy due to a combination of poor coding and bad hosts. It's a shame BYOND has such a bad name.

I don't think that's the issue. BYOND's default framerate is 10 frames per second, which often isn't enough to create the illusion of smooth animation. It doesn't matter how the game is coded, movement will look slow and jerky.

On the bright side people were excited about the concept of the game. If you can get people who initially have a negative opinion of BYOND to try the game you're doing something right!
Feb 23 2011, 9:34 am
As awesome as this is I don't see why you're game would lag on character creation. To me it seems like your game creates a ridiculous number of objects and images. Maybe you should try to save some of that :S.
Feb 23 2011, 9:39 am
ExPixel wrote:
As awesome as this is I don't see why you're game would lag on character creation. To me it seems like your game creates a ridiculous number of objects and images.

BYOND icon procs are the bottleneck - we're not creating images or objects. Pre-caching all the possible permutations of heads/bodies/colors isn't feasible.

We're working on offloading character creation to a separate server to keep the game lag free, but we haven't quite refined and tested it yet. I didn't expect the game to get such a huge influx of players right away.
Feb 23 2011, 9:55 am
Feb 23 2011, 10:17 am
Very encouraging! The response is actually a lot more positive than I expected given that tough crowd.

I think offloading startup generation foo to another server is logical, and in theory it should be seamless for the end-user if link() works as we want.

Runtime icon generation is one of the few things that got slower with 4.0, because the move to a non-paletted system makes the color swapping routines an order of magnitude slower. It doesn't really factor in unless it's used a lot (I only noticed it in Incursion tests). I made one attempt to optimize this by using a palette when applicable, but the code was pretty hairy. If it's something that is really an issue we could give it another shot.
Feb 23 2011, 10:45 am
Tom wrote:
I think offloading startup generation foo to another server is logical, and in theory it should be seamless for the end-user if link() works as we want.

It does work well from the off-line tests and the limited online tests we did. I did run into an issue where link() was taking a long time to transfer users based on where they were on a specific map. NEStalgia's title screens and custom character screens are on the same z-level, and users are basically moved via locate() to various places. Through that process link() would complete the transfer in varying times (negligible vs. 6 seconds). Sounds weird and I'm trying to put together a demo, but in the end I came upon a solution involving client.screen and less use of locate() to provide the desired behavior.

Runtime icon generation is one of the few things that got slower with 4.0, because the move to a non-paletted system makes the color swapping routines an order of magnitude slower. It doesn't really factor in unless it's used a lot (I only noticed it in Incursion tests). I made one attempt to optimize this by using a palette when applicable, but the code was pretty hairy. If it's something that is really an issue we could give it another shot.

This is certainly something that should be looked at as it should be easier to create cool effects at runtime(rather than pregenerating and caching lots of stuff) without worrying about the impact on a server.
Feb 23 2011, 10:46 am
I got a laugh at the "El juego Nestalgia".

The game is not only popular, it is international.
Feb 23 2011, 10:50 am
bravo silk.
Feb 23 2011, 10:57 am
Feb 23 2011, 10:57 am (Edited on Feb 23 2011, 11:15 am)
Well done! May be in need of a third server if this continues. =P

Exciting.
Feb 23 2011, 11:03 am
134 players online and still growing o.0 You need to invest some money to have like 10 servers or new people won't be able to play.

PS:
"Twitter is over capacity.
Please wait a moment and try again. For more information, check out Twitter Status"

Look what you did :P
Feb 23 2011, 11:10 am
KhaosParadox wrote:
Well done! May be in need of a third server if this continues. =P

Working on a third and a fourth at the moment. Might need more, we've got a lot of people who are waiting to join when there is less lag from all the login spam.
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