Hi,
I am Eike Decker, also as known as Zet. I am working at InnoGames as a developer since January and I have been assigned to The West at the end of february. The first project that I’ve been working on for The West was the tutorial mode for the game which was introduced in 1.19. Since then I’ve been working on the fort battles non-stop. I wrote the flash client as well as the HTML frontend for the battles and also the parts on the game server that are related to the game play. If something doesn’t work as expect in these departments I am probably the person to blame. For anything else I am less likely to know what’s going on – I have only a limited overview on other features than the fortbattles. Simply because I have not done much else apart from that.
But as far as I can tell, the fort battles are a big deal different from any other part of The West. The most significant difference is probably the quite intensive interaction between a lot of players during the battles which normally last between 5 and 10 minutes. We’ve had battles with up to 50 players running and so far I am quite content with the results.
Attackers are swarming the defenders on the beta server
Since the introduction of the fort battles on the public beta server I became more curious about user opinions (especially on the fort battles) and started reading a few threads about the beta and the fortbattles during the breaks on the public forums. Because I have never played The West before starting working on the forts, I have a lot of things to learn about the game and the players. While reading about opinions about the public beta I realized how much the new features are awaited but also that quite a few are upset because of the delay and the limited amount of players on the public beta.
I can understand the disappointment among the players about the delay and other problems. And although I am not to blame for all of them I want to express that I appologize for this and that I want to explain this or that with this first blog entry.
The development of the fort battles
As mentioned above, the fort battles are a complete new feature that was developed practically from scratch While it was fairly simple to develop a prototype server and client, it turned out more to be a problem to integrate the game tightly into the game itself which was quite surprising for me. It was extremely difficult to estimate the development time of that feature beacuse of this.
The development can be roughly divided into four components which partially reflects the gameplay:
- The HTML frontend that is used for joining the fort battles
- The Flash frontend that is used while the battle is running
- A Java server that communicates with the Flash frontend
- and a PHP backend that integrates the fort battles into The West.
The HTML frontend
The HTML frontend should allow players to set their starting position and targets that are used during the fort battles. It does not use Flash since we wanted to allow players to take part in the fort battles even if they can not use flash. The frontend should provide all important information about the battlefield and the positions. Characters that are not controlled by connected players will move to their chosen destiny on their own. They are – no question – much less flexible as the characters that are actively played, however they can still provide the tip on the scales that changes the battle outcome.
The Flash frontend
We decided that flash should be used for the battle itself. It should establish a connection with the server and gather / receive information on demand. This was the key reason why we chose flash next to the additional graphic effects that Flash provides. We accepted the fact that a minority of players are going to be unable to play the game that way (for example if they don’t have Flash or if they are behind a firewall that they cannot influence) in favor of these technical advantages. We will try to bypass these problems in the future and I have already ideas how to work that out. But for the moment, the connection itself seems to be stable enough for the release.
The Java server
For a couple of reasons we decided to develop a Java server which would be used only for the fort battles and nothing else. The reason for this was that Java is more efficient than PHP and that a crash of the Fortbattle server should not influence the game itself. The server simulates the game and communicates with the flash clients. Because it is less of a problem to manage different threads in Java and also having more control on the memory, it also doesn’t cost too much performance. We have no facts so far, but we expect that this solution will work much better while using less resources than using PHP.
In theory, if the Java server would crash, the battle would restart at round 1. Of course this would also upset the players that are involved, but that seemed to be the most acceptable consequence compared with other outcomes of other technologies. We hope that this won’t happen and we also planned to restore partial gameplays once the basic features are working.
The PHP backend
Most of the database related processing is done in the PHP backend. It informs the Java server about new battles and once a battle is finished, a PHP process receives all results and takes all kind of actions on players and forts.
Features vs. Time, Time vs. Bugs
There are tons of features that did not get into the fort battles. There are plenty of ideas that we have for future releases and we tried during the design of the system to provide enough room to make these changes when we have the time to do them. We are only working right now on features that are eminent for the gameplay or that are mostly done. Right now we are denting out bugs that we oversaw so far.
At this point I also want to thank all beta testers who help us to find bugs and testing the game. Some hints had been really a great help to prevent that the release would fail. Of course there are no guarantees for the planned release, but I feel much more confident because of our beta testers.
Future blogging
For the future, I am planning to blog constantly on development about The West. If this is not possible because new features are not yet to be mentioned yet, I’ll just come up with rants on technical details about what I already did at InnoGames.
Thank you for this. I’m glad this blog is up and running, and it is being added to my favourites. Good job!
Zet! Are you the same Zet from T~S, world 18?
Congrats on getting into Innogames. Nice blog, I hope to hear more.
-overcast
Hi
This information is very interesting but I don,t know how it will be working?
Could you explain it? For example How many players? When could it attack the fort??….
Thanks
Nice job. For me, always was interesting the inside part of the game – you and all your team -) Thanks -)
No, as I wrote: I have not played The West before I started working on it. Unfortunately the nickname zet is already taken in several countries by others. I registered on the German world for the forum access as devzet, but I am not playing there. Playing on the beta takes already enough time and is more important to me since I am always looking out for bugs that are important for us. And since the beta world is always “bleeding edge” (which means that it is the software version that I am working on), I can be sure that this bug is also in my locally installed version present which means that I could try to fix it or reproduce it at least. But that happens scarcely because I am mostly only working for getting the fort battles running (so I am mostly only fixing bugs that are related to the battles).
Some of your questions are going to get answered by the help manual which is being updated (I asked that yesterday). The manual is also already online on the German world 1 server so that you can read it there [1] or you could refer to the beta manual which is written in English [2]. This is currently only available in German but is already being translated. The manual should also be uptodate with the latest changes we made. As for the number of players that are to be involved in one fort battle: Technically there is currently a flexible limit that we can set in the config which is per default at 256 in total (the hard limit would be about 1000 players, but these wouldn’t fit on the map). We are going to tune this to allow setting limits for defenders and attackers. In principle, the number of players is limited by the number of locations where players can spawn, but we wouldn’t want this to happen. First, this would be a quite chaotic gameplay, second I am not sure if the server is able to handle this. Well in principle, it should be able to, but as a programmer, I am always in doubt if it really works as expected ;). We are really looking ahead (also a bit feared) for introducing the battles on the public worlds because this is going to give us some real numbers on how good the server is able to handle it. But from the experiences on the beta world, we think that the server should be able to handle it gracefully. We are just not sure how good it is going to work also for 20 to 30 times as many players. But as said, it is looking promising. I hope that the players are going to be a bit understanding if problems occur with the battles because this is a technically complete new land for us.
[1] http://www.the-west.de/help.php?article=fortbattle
[2] http://zz1w1.tw.innogames.net/help.php
Reading again Overcast’s comment: Yes in deed, I’ve been playing on W18 in T~S until I’ve been running out of time. Nice to read from you π
Nice article, nice work. Thank you for this π
I’m playing on the beta and I think the fort battles are perfect, it’s an absolutely new part of game.
Good luck in developing this super game π
Thank you so much for sharing all this info with us!
Do you know if other developers will post articles on this blog (developers who work on other areas of The West)?
Some questions about forts: can the town that owns the fort give access to the fort to other towns? Right now there are many alliances in The West (even if there is no official alliance system built into the game), so they should be able to share the fort.
Also, do you think the weaker towns will be able to stand a chance against the fully-build and fully-populated towns?
@Aurelianus: You ask some difficult questions. About articles: That mostly depends on time and topics, we’ll see what we can / will do.
For the Forts: Fort owners can invite other towns to their fort. The member towns of forts can help to develop the fort and defend it when it is attacked. Small or weaker towns are probably unable to take forts on their own. It will be up to them to find allies to support their attacks. Attacks will be expensive but not too expensive. Any semi active town should be able to attack smaller forts every few days just for the fun or for trying to get a fort under control. Personally, I like it more to attack forts for the fun and not for the prestige of owning one.
When will she enter that updating for the game in Portuguese???
I wait for answer.
Thank you.
The release is going to be done at first on world 1 in germany. Other countries are following after that. The exact date of the release is not yet sure, but it’ll be next week if there’s no epic fail until then.
well, this blog was made to clarify some doubts is not?
then tell me, what the function of the church.
I am grateful for can help ..
@pedrinho: The church’s function is a well kept secret. This is not going to be revealed on this blog.
Sorry to those who wrote comments that got not published. But I decided to close the commenting because the comments got more and more off topic.
Thanks to all who wrote – it’ll motivate me to write the next blog entry π