Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Deployment, designing the main window, and more bunches of fixes.



Pato has been working really hard into making sense from the main page of the server.
His work is truly amazing and detailed, cleaning up after the funcitonal-yet-visually brain-damaging things i did on the server.

In spirit of making a release soon and with great quality, we have put on hold many great features that are already implemented but need designing, improving adn thinking, and we will gradually add them as things look sturdy and the users are ready to lose brain-mass from the awesomeness explosion it will cause. Examples of that are in the final chat lines of the attached pictures :).


I could finish deployment in an hour or so, but some assumptions i had went wrong. When we tried the server last sunday, the 2 users took a looong while to log in to the server. Since development servers run in our own computers,it always runs super fast, and i attributed their slowness to my bandwith.

But after deployment...oh boy its slow. We hadnt put a single sec of work into minifying javascript, compressing images and stylesheets, ordering things to get a better experience, etc.So when a user logs in, its downloads the pictures and stuff and it takes a while. It works like a charm afterwards of course, but loading is dissapointing.
And that working on that is what im actually doing. As expected and feared, more and more things pile up, so its very unlikely we release the Alpha this friday ,and we will do so next week.
Speed, however, has improved greatly in the last 50 minutes :). I have reduced download requirements by over 80%, and still working on that. And after putting cache, after the first download the site will go super fast.

Stay tuned, we are soon to release :).

The Alpha release will come with several disclaimers, and with instructions on how Founders (that now rise up to over 100, counting people that havent asked for their nicknames on the board of fame yet) can log in to the server.

5 comments:

  1. I wouldn't mind long waiting times. It is not supposed to work perfectly in alpha ;)

    Even for hardened trolls beta should be early enough to roam message boards and flame programmers for the poor work they've allegedly done ;)

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  2. Speed's definitely important, looking really good though, can't wait to trying out the server!

    Think I might have been founder #100 :-) wasn't sure what to do for the board of the fame ...

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  3. Speed improvements have changeda lot, but its still not perfect. However it now has bearable waiting loading times. Cache is giving me some headache which once well implemented will make the site experience fly.

    The Alpha server is up& operational :) . I just played a game with myself, its working without errors or problems. Yes. I rule.

    Today with pato we are pushing the work to the limit to try to make it to tomorrow. Have to finish the main window that needs some polishing.

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  4. There's still way too much unused screen real estate. You've gotta make it so it's possible to (nearly) full screen the board like you can on KGS.

    Why do web designers love narrow columns so much?!

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  5. Technically you cannot do full-screen board on any server yet. We will when we do the board in canvas, which will allow resizing. Right now we have to use a fix-sized board, which means we have to pick a resolution and make sure it looks good there. Higher resolutions will look at it smaller.

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