70% Faster Loading Times!

 

Map Loading Time Improvement

 
So after posting an update last week, we have even more (and better) news to update you with. As you can gather by reading the title, we have cut the loading times of Classic Massive and Europe Massive by 70%!

Previously, on a good day, Classic Massive would take 50 or 60 seconds to load if you were lucky, and sometimes not at all. Well those days are gone. We have brought that loading time down to 16 seconds. That’s a 70% improvement.

After the database and game archiving Marcos did last week, we noticed an odd anomaly. Classic Massive and Europe Massive showed no signs of improvement at all. All the other maps loaded in around 6 seconds, but those two maps still took a full minute to load. So we did some digging in to what made those two maps different from the rest. Because the issue rests with how Adobe Flash handles the data, there was no way to analyse what was happening in the Flash code in your browser, so we started looking at some external variables.

We always assumed that Classic Massive and Europe Massive were slow to load because they has the most regions and territories, but a comparison of the maps showed that 12 Domains was almost the same size and has almost the exact same number of regions. However, 12 Domains took only takes 6 seconds to load, while CM and Em took 50 seconds. Obviously there was something we were missing, something other than size and regions….

Long story short, we figured out what Adobe Flash was having problems with and we immediately worked on fixing the issue. An unfortunate result is that you will have less Troop Colors to choose from, but the good news is, those Maps now load faster then they ever did!

The other good news is, which you already know, we have moved away from Adobe Flash and our new game engine will be in HTML5. Meaning no more compatibility problems or other issue associated with Flash. 🙂

Missing Data Under Intel Tab

 
Last week, some players depending on your physical geographical location, may have experienced missing data under their Intel tab when once the map loaded. This was caused by our CDN (Content Delivery Network). We use CloudFlare which have servers located around the world to help deliver our images and data to you quicker. For some reason, which was never explained to us by CloudFlare, some of their servers, but not all of them, caused this error to happen with our game. It only affected some players but not others, which is what made it so odd to figure out. Somehow Marcos connected the issue with CloudFlare which made it easier to solve. Turns out that a setting on their control panel that we have been using for 4 years, suddenly started causing problem. Once we narrowed it down we simple turn off that setting and everything is back to normal.

Back in the 90’s someone once told me that a person can make a mistake, but it takes a computer to really f things up.

Nonetheless, Marcos is going away on a well deserved break for a week, but he is leaving us with a working and fast site. I just hope nothing unexpected happens in the next 7 days!

Have fun and Enjoy the games!

P.S. It’s also my birthday.