Friday 27 September 2013

Opportunities

It's come to our attention that TF2Lobby has been down for a while. While this would be a great opportunity to launch TF2Center, I'm afraid we're not quite there yet!

But don't fret, we're still working hard at this and hope to have something to show you guys soon. There's nothing more concrete at the moment to pass on - we're finishing the design implementation and making performance improvements, which is hard to demonstrate - but rest assured that we haven't forgotten about you (and we hope you haven't forgotten about us!)

The next update I write will (hopefully) have a date for the next round of testing. That's probably a few weeks away at this point, but watch this space!

Foxy

Tuesday 10 September 2013

Progress update

Hi all! It's progress update time (wooooooo)!

So wee've been stomping bugs left, right and center after the beta test, and while we still have a bit of a way to go, we've got the biggest ones out of the way. For those at the beta or anyone that's heard about it, this will make sense. For others, its just words on a page but hey, who doesn't love words?!

  • Added chat throttling
    • One thing we noticed was over-enthusiastic users could impact performance by sending walls of text over and over. We've added some throttling to stop the overly keen users from sending too much at a time (either accidentally or maliciously)
  • Added a ban system
  • Added IP location lookups when creating a server, to auto-select the region when creating lobbies and make it even easier to create lobbies
  • Added integration with the UGC API. For now this gives us ability to discover if a player has a UGC profile, and link to it if so
  • Increased performance by serving static content in a more cache-friendly way
In addition to these, we've added 2 new members to the team. We have Jayserp from the UK to help out with the server side of things and keep an eye on performance and infrastructure, and we have tstm from down under in Australia to help out with the design implementation. They've already been dipping their feet into the project, and you'll hopefully be able to see some of the cool stuff they're doing soon.