Almost there

Hi all!

I said in the last update that this one would contain the date of the next round of testing, and I was half right! But first, where are we up to?

What have you been doing recently?

Most of our time, until last weekend, was spent finishing and perfecting the design implementation, and I'm happy to say this is now complete for the initial version. There are some things that will probably be missing from the first release (that I'll get to shortly) but everything we're planning to put in is designed and styled.

This week we've been playing the fun game of Front-End meets Back-End, which is going largely to plan. We hope to have this finished by Wednesday (23rd) of this week. After that comes some internal testing to make sure we haven't missed anything, and then we head towards the initial, limited-time release.

We've also been given the use of some virtual machines for hosting the site and game servers. The machines themselves are pretty awesome and should allow us to host a whole load of game servers for you guys to use.

Running some benchmark tests on the application server VM. I think it'll be okay.

What's the limited-time release?

We've tested the site ourselves. We've tested with a handful of friends. We've tested the multi-user aspect of things as much as we can, considering there's only a few of us! We've even abused Chrome's profiles to get as many instances of the site running as we can at one time, to see what the performance is with many clients connected. But this is obviously different from the real-world, many tens / hundreds of concurrent users.

Jayserp's PC got sad at running more than 80 individual instances of Chrome

As such, we will (at a date yet to be determined, but likely within 2-3 weeks) be opening up TF2Center for a roughly-one-day open beta test. That is, the site will be available for everyone to use, but just for a limited time. At the end of the day, the beta will be closed and we will go off and fix any bugs that came up, check out our logs and make sure we're happy with how everything was running from our end. The final open release date will depend on results from this open beta, and we'll be inviting as many people as possible to give us their thoughts and feedback.

We stress that during this open beta, things may go wrong and the fixes may (in the worst case) require the server to be restarted or the beta to be closed early. We don't expect this to happen but the open beta comes with the disclaimer that things may break, and we ask for your patience if these situations arise.

We'll keep you posted with updates as we get them. Any questions or comments, as usual let us know here, via Steam or email info@tf2center.com.

Foxy

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

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.

Beta outcomes

So there may have been some confusion over the beta - the beta test held yesterday was a "closed" beta - we invited a handful of people to come try out the site and try and break it. It wasn't available to everyone, we'd mentioned this in previous posts but not in the one announcing the beta date, so sorry for any confusion caused! The beta itself was successful in a way. People broke things we thought would break, and they broke things that we didn't think would break. The good news is that most of the underlying functionality exists and worked - we created and launched a match with people there. There are issues we've spotted and issues that were reported, and we'd like to publicly thank the people that gave up some of their time to help us test - its pretty invaluable for us. We're unfortunately no closer to knowing a launch date - some of the things we need to work on are performance-related, and some are functional-related. One or two need some time spent on them before we're happy, and there's a lot of small fixes that we need to do to. We'll keep you posted here with updates as we get them!

Site Preview

Hey all! Ahead of the beta test on Sunday, we've got a cool video preview of TF2Center.com made by Cyan, to demonstrate some of the features that will be coming soon with the site launch.




Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

Beta

Just a quick one since it's been too long! Progress continues, and we'll be having a beta test of the site this Sunday. All being well, we'll need some time after that to fix bugs that come up and apply the polish, but we'll keep you posted!

Designs - now with added colour!

So far, we've shown wireframe designs for some of the pages. But that's not all we have, and it's time to put some colour and styling onto those designs! As previously stated, these are the hard work of Mother Tereza, our resident UI designer, so send the kudos towards them if you like them!

There's not a huge amount to say about these at the moment, so I'll largely let the pictures speak for themselves!

Figure 1 - the main lobby page

Figure 2 - lobby page, Highlander

Figure 3 - 6v6 lobby slots 

One thing to point out on figure 3 above, is the slot limitations. We've discussed and investigated this, and almost every 6v6 lobby uses the standard team setup of 2 scouts, 2 soldiers (roamer and pocket), medic, and demo. As such, we've made the page clearer by removing the additional slots.

Figure 4 - Lobby Launched

The server details panel on here contains information for both the game server and the mumble server. While you'll be automatically connected to the game server on launch, the option to join mumble is a manual step (since there may be a legitimate reason you don't want to use it). However, if you do (and we're hoping you do!) then launching mumble and connecting is just a single click away.

Figure 5 - Create Lobby modal

We hope you like then plans! The biggest delay at the moment for getting the site completed is making all of these awesome designs a reality. We're getting there though!