Symfony – Might & Fealty Fans

The Upcoming 1.1 Update

“Andrew, why haven’t you added more features yet?” you might ask.

Because the next update, the 1.1 build, isn’t called 1.0.5 or 1.0.4.5 for a reason. It’s not small. In fact, it’s the largest single update to Might & Fealty since I’ve taken over coding. It might be the single largest update to Might & Fealty since its launch, save maybe the Lendan towers (but they were later removed).

Yeah, it’d be really easy to make this update just add a way to designate realm capitals. In which case it would’ve been complete like a month or two ago. But I want to add capitals as feature-complete. That means what I want to put into the game, isn’t a staged-release. I want you to see as many of the parts of this update that exist in my imagination now, as possible, as soon as any individual part of it is pushed live. The only exception to that being player complexes, which would probably push this update back a few MORE months.

Continue reading “The Upcoming 1.1 Update”

Mini-Update Released! Version 1.0.4.0 – “Welcoming Committee”

Sometimes, I’m sitting there playing the game, when I start to realize that there’s something I can fix pretty easily that if I fix it, would greatly improve some aspect of the game.

This update’s target? Player Retention. Continue reading “Mini-Update Released! Version 1.0.4.0 – “Welcoming Committee””

Our First Big Update: “To Your Positions”

So, we’re super happy to report that Might & Fealty’s first big update, which we call the “To Your Positions” update, or more boringly: 1.0.3; has gone live to the game yesterday, with only a couple hiccups so far (because no update survives first contact with the production server).

This update adds a ton of new features to the game’s existing Realm systems: Continue reading “Our First Big Update: “To Your Positions””

What’s Next?

So, the server move is done, and while we’ve yet to iron out the last few kinks, we are actively working on things. First and foremost, game breaking bugs. Secondly, bugs we can understand enough to work on. Third, new features and additions. And yes, in that order.

The biggest bugs we encountered was of course the mail issues, which I’ll not cover again. Beyond that, there was a bug we introduced to heraldry where if your character had a spouse that did NOT have a heraldry, it’d prevent you from loading the page to select any. We added a rule to only care about spouse heraldry if said spouse actually HAD heraldry, which fixed that.

There is another error that we believe was introduced by an update to the underlying framework the game runs on (our research indicates Symfony 2.7.33 itself, rather than one of it’s dependencies–for the record, the game used to run on Symfony 2.7.7). This particular error causes a bug in the character sorting functionality for each player.. You should see the fix live in game now.

Beyond that, well, is everything and anything. Continue reading “What’s Next?”

Server Move Mostly Smooth?

So, as you may know, last weekend the game moved from Tom’s server, where it had been hosted for the last few years, to our server, where it immediately got a couple dozen or so different updates applied, both fixing long broken things and adding in smaller new features.

That’s not to say that the server move was entirely smooth, though. One of our updates to the game was glitchy, an update to some of the code the game is reliant on broke a few pages, and I discovered that I, Andrew, don’t know how to setup an email server as well as I thought I did.

That said, I’d like to do a bit of a post mortem here for any future Symfony developers out there who run into the same situation I did, and if you’re curious what exactly happened, read on. Otherwise, I’ll take more about the game itself and it’s future in a later update.

Continue reading “Server Move Mostly Smooth?”

Nearly Fully Operational

So, I’ve not been keeping good on my wanting to post something here when I get something done, and I apologize for that, but progress is continuing.

The test server, which I’ll henceforth refer to as “Valengard”, is nearly fully operational. There are a handful of bugs left to squash before I let Tom know that we’re good whenever he’s good and I put in a request for a second server to host the live game on. Continue reading “Nearly Fully Operational”

One Week Later

So over this last week, we’ve been pretty busy figuring things out and fixing things and figuring out what we were missing and maybe even fixing another long-time error in M&F.

Firstly, we’ve managed to identify several places where how forms were rendered ended up resulting in extra greater than signs, ‘>’, being scattered about. I think we’re up to five now, that we’ve corrected.

Past that, thanks to some assistance from Anaris from the BattleMaster development team, hierarchy and family trees will now render on the test server. I was apparently missing an application called graphviz. Telling my server to install it solved the problem right promptly. Continue reading “One Week Later”

Valengard Day 2

Day 1 was helpful, because it highlighted a number of issues with how the code differs from the live game to the test server. Files that we expected to be the same have errors that break the game. For instance, you can’t initiate battle anymore.

Other files have changes we’re aware of, some of which we’ll roll back. One we have, was the 0-0-0 line on event logs. This was originally added to make it more obvious that other events existed outside the log. However, due to how the table sort works, it needed to have a number assigned so it’d appear in the right place in the table. It still appears at the top, which it will continue to do.

That particular change came with the table sorter being implemented on other tables. The event table in particular wasn’t a regular table beforehand. It was a definition list. Which wasn’t sortable (I tried), just filterable. Now it’s both. Might be a note for down the line that we make other tables similarly filterable.

On a different note, there has been some more discussion about how battles and equipment should work going ahead. I think we’re all on the same page about equipment changes, but how battle will work is another story altogether.

Test Server “Valengard” Operational

I realize that I am posting this on Monday morning, JST, but I actually got a test server operational for Might & Fealty a couple hours ago, so I’m pleased to report I came through on that mention of having a test server operational by the end of the weekend! 😀

If you’d like to check it out: http://valengard.lemuriacommunity.org

Even with the short amount of time it’s been live, some of you have already helped me find some errors in things, and I’ll be working out the rest of them over the coming days, with the goal of having the server move completed by the end of the month.

The Last Week’s Efforts

So, the last week or so has been spent trying to smooth out the database import process. When the current M&F database is imported to a different server’s database, the code for the website encounters an error when loading some pages. I’ve worked around this before, but I’ve never gotten a good solid fix down, probably because I’ve never properly documented what I did. I just kept trying things, and eventually it just worked.

My efforts of late have been to document what does and doesn’t work. I’ve got three different sets of instructions that do not resolve the problem. And literally in the middle of typing this, literally between this sentence and the last, I figured out how to fix the major errors I’d been having. I don’t understand why they were a thing, but they’re fixed. Not that it was really a thing that needed “fixing”, it’s more there was a step I didn’t realize I needed. Continue reading “The Last Week’s Efforts”