Level 2. Log in to see images!

Nah, I actually finished it at level 8 without knowing that it was the last forum, else I would surely have grinded more at the lower level forums before entering. I used up maybe 8 XRXRs in the course of the trip and 2-3 Teardrops. Since this thread is so spoilery, maybe it’ll be a better idea to move it to the Elitist Lounge?

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eponymous_ennui Posted:

Level 2. Log in to see images!

Nah, I actually finished it at level 8 without knowing that it was the last forum, else I would surely have grinded more at the lower level forums before entering. I used up maybe 8 XRXRs in the course of the trip and 2-3 Teardrops. Since this thread is so spoilery, maybe it’ll be a better idea to move it to the Elitist Lounge?

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I beat it at level 9 stats but went up to level ten after a thread or two.

and it still cost me 10 xrxr and 6 lipsticks (+50 sexiness)

Evil Trout Posted:

Edit: Also I’ll look into the lowest level that finished Episode 1.

Hey Trout (or any other admin) can we get an answer on that ? It would make an interesting challenge for some of us.

Evil Trout Posted:

Sorry, this wasn’t trivial to query so I put it off Log in to see images!

The earliest level the game has been beaten on is Level 8, quite a few people so far managed to do it.

It might be more interesting to try and figure out the lowest amount of cred necessary to beat the game. Looking at that, funnily enough:

woeisme      27643
Allen        27906
Daisy Danger 29059

It might be fun to see a leaderboard of this! I could see myself adding it after the upcoming re-balancing.

Thanks Evil Trout. A leaderboard for this would be very good. This leads me to think that a “reset character” option would be useful (setting your character back to the starting point).

Evil Trout Posted:

Maybe I could introduce it in a limited fashion?

I have no idea what you mean by that, but sure.

This makes me fairly curious as to how you’re storing your data, cause even with your upgrades, it doesn’t seem as though a reset would have to reset -that- many things.

Maybe I just don’t know enough (never got into PHP/SQL/whatever other database **** might be used as much as I’d like)

Evil Trout Posted:

Forumwarz is a pretty complicated application as far as web apps go.

There are about 125 tables in the database. Now not all of them are used for storing character data, but there are at least 20-30 that do. Every time a character is reset we have to begin a transaction, lock those 25 tables and delete most of the rows, then update data to their initial levels.

In the meantime, those 20-30 tables are being hit by people playing the game, wanting to insert their gained cred or whatever, which causes the deadlocks. If we weren’t serving up multiple requests every second it might not be such an issue (in fact on the development server it’s never a problem), but it’s not a simple operation Log in to see images!

Again, I’m not totally sure, but wouldn’t the easier thing to do be have each character saved as its own table, which is then part of a bigger table?

I mean, like I said, I’m unfamiliar with web based stuff for the most part, but if I were designing something like this in java, I’d have an object representing a character, with all the needed info, then a object that stores all of the characters. As I understand it that would allow for each character to reset its values individually without interfering with the others.

Tables for databases might not work the same way, but I wouldn’t think that the storage would be that much different that it would cause problems. Though it might be a less efficient use of space, which could be your bigger priority until you get better servers.

Seerow Posted:

Evil Trout Posted:

Forumwarz is a pretty complicated application as far as web apps go.

There are about 125 tables in the database. Now not all of them are used for storing character data, but there are at least 20-30 that do. Every time a character is reset we have to begin a transaction, lock those 25 tables and delete most of the rows, then update data to their initial levels.

In the meantime, those 20-30 tables are being hit by people playing the game, wanting to insert their gained cred or whatever, which causes the deadlocks. If we weren’t serving up multiple requests every second it might not be such an issue (in fact on the development server it’s never a problem), but it’s not a simple operation Log in to see images!

Again, I’m not totally sure, but wouldn’t the easier thing to do be have each character saved as its own table, which is then part of a bigger table?

I mean, like I said, I’m unfamiliar with web based stuff for the most part, but if I were designing something like this in java, I’d have an object representing a character, with all the needed info, then a object that stores all of the characters. As I understand it that would allow for each character to reset its values individually without interfering with the others.

Tables for databases might not work the same way, but I wouldn’t think that the storage would be that much different that it would cause problems. Though it might be a less efficient use of space, which could be your bigger priority until you get better servers.

Well it’s hard to explain if you haven’t dealt with web / db programming. But basically I have an object that represents a character. But that object needs to be persisted somewhere, so I put it as a row in a table.

But each object actually references many other objects, for example the character object has an inventory of item objects. Each one of those is persisted as a row in a table.

Then when you factor in concurrency, you get many people looking for different pieces of data at once. In order not to lose your data integrity you have to lock rows for transactions, otherwise someone might get stale data or data that’s out of order.

Evil Trout Posted:

Forumwarz is a pretty complicated application as far as web apps go.

There are about 125 tables in the database. Now not all of them are used for storing character data, but there are at least 20-30 that do. Every time a character is reset we have to begin a transaction, lock those 25 tables and delete most of the rows, then update data to their initial levels.

In the meantime, those 20-30 tables are being hit by people playing the game, wanting to insert their gained cred or whatever, which causes the deadlocks. If we weren’t serving up multiple requests every second it might not be such an issue (in fact on the development server it’s never a problem), but it’s not a simple operation Log in to see images!

Ok, if people can send in updates for their ‘cred or whatever’ then can’t the players have a reset bumon that they can press to update everything in their character?

TORNBUG Posted:

Seerow Posted:

Tables for databases might not work the same way, but I wouldn’t think that the storage would be that much different that it would cause problems. Though it might be a less efficient use of space, which could be your bigger priority until you get better servers.

Databases don’t work that way. You can’t have tables with subtables. The only data format that really supports that sort of thing is XML, which is really bad in just about every other way.

20-30 tables for character data does seem a bit ridiculous though.

Sometimes simple-seeming things are more complicated underneath.

I just counted and there are up to 22 tables carrying data for any particular user. Two of them are purely statistical, basically acting as logs so they needn’t be counted.

The rest are all necessary, and I couldn’t imagine de-normalizing them without losing some major functionality.

Remember a character belongs to many things: missions, bookmarks, friends, tubmails, inventory items, upgrades, abilities, deliveries, contacts, hints, cinematics, toolbar customization, etc. Those are the most obvious ones that come to mind from the front end, but I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine how a role playing game such as this can rely on a lot of relational data Log in to see images!