The Life of a Game

[Meikura001]

I was logging in one day through R2's forum display page, and I saw this one message out of curiosity, so I thought I would have a "look-see". It was a "shutdown" message of a mobile game that probably wasn't running for more than a year. While I don't do the "mobile" thing, I often wonder what would be the reason(s) why it would warrant its shutdown. The end part is that R2 will gladly compensate 50% of the total monies spent on that game alone (to be used towards another mobile game) and that all information like character data, inventory, progress, achievements, etc. will be reset. So basically, they are running away with half of your money, and giving you half into getting "ahead" into another game.

Sounds enticing, but here is my question: "why would anyone go into another R2 game if all we ever get is treated badly by them or very bad gaming experiences?" In my case, I am sitting right in the middle of the fence between fully quitting/never looking back AND to keep on playing until it shuts down for good. A lot of good players either have quit fully or have not been active as they would have; hell, most cashers gave up spending in the wake of R2's shenanigans. You, as a developer, might think you're smart, but the players are smarter. While I don't advocate any form of cheating on this game, I really don't blame those who do so since R2's allowing it to keep going, and in the process, hurting the legitimate player base.

My game play (active, not afk) time is limited to 10 minutes total in a day. Some events I participate in because I have the items and I can make due, and some I just skipped because it's just pointless. And please don't get me started on the rewards (like the clothing stuff) where you have to literally buy if you want to get the title for the full set; and even if at that, the clothes just looked terrible. Can I really ask, whose idea was it to make clothing glitter? I wouldn't mind the "ninja" wear in this time frame's events, but the glitter just killed it for me. Many of us who play Wartune want to dress to kill (or to be a badass), not be fairies (no offense to those who are into that sort of thing).

Everything aside, this game is going to head towards that sandbox we all kept hearing about. Soon we will get that sad note when we log into forums. I know games don't last too long, but if everyone had liked it to the point they will keep on spending to keep it alive, it should be reason enough to give it the attention it needs.

That's my "dos centavos".

[rescueyou]

This game is rotting but not dying..its like online zombie with poked eyes, brains and other vital organs but still crawling. Problem here is in game staff and management they lack just too much capability and wits to progress. Now they bet all on the new patch and stuff in it to lure players back instead of fixing current and past issues with events and all other game mechanisms. Well this new patch needs to be rly great for that to work... Anyway i wont start playing again even if they add baby Jeasus and mother Marry to aid my poor hero...just dont care of new stuff anymore but this is me and my opinion, meanwhile others are still filling up r2 pockets and fuel further their schemes.

[R262181389]

I will never play another r2 game again no matter how much they give back and I am sure many other think the same thing.

I was thinking about quitting at one point but decided I will play until the game shuts down. Want to see what happens with this game, maybe this game will turn around one of these days and actually start listening to players. This game could be so much more enjoyable, especially if they just fixed the lag. Now I don't know to much about this area but more than one person has said you can switch from flash to html5 without having to start all over. I have no idea on that, way over my head.

[rescueyou]

I will never play another r2 game again no matter how much they give back and I am sure many other think the same thing.

This game could be so much more enjoyable, especially if they just fixed the lag.

This lag problem is lost cause since long time..its just flash player programing that is too much thing to handle for you know who. And besides now there are even more things to be added that will torment the game engine. Dont know who tell you bout this html thing but it wont happen. But lag isnt the main reason this game lost its glamor.

[Alsatia01]

This game could be so much more enjoyable, especially if they just fixed the lag. Now I don't know to much about this area but more than one person has said you can switch from flash to html5 without having to start all over.

This is true, you don't need to start all over in order to switch to html5. However there are some things that may need to be changed; it's not quite as easy as just flipping a switch. Still a good idea though.

[MrFancyPants]

This is true, you don't need to start all over in order to switch to html5. However there are some things that may need to be changed; it's not quite as easy as just flipping a switch. Still a good idea though.

Definitely disagree there, asking their devs to port the whole game over to a new engine, new language, new set of tools, etc. would be a recipe for disaster. They haven't proven a great deal of competence with the established code they have, so asking them to perform a major refit like that would definitely make things worse, at least in the short term. It would be like converting the whole game to a beta version for months on end, and that's after they finished the port. There may be some pretty good automated conversion programs out there, but there's no way this game doesn't require a lot of manual adjustment to get everything to work again.

An HTML5 conversion would be a long-term project, and with the way things are going, the game won't be around long enough for them to even consider it. I'm not optimistic it would be around long enough to even finish the conversion.

[Meikura001]

Yeah, it will be like building blocks all over again into a new engine; then again, the time has already been squandered as we are writing and reading. I am thinking about Vega Conflict when they made their "Unity" engine and still have the old flash going about as well for those that want to play it. Took me a while to learn some of the commands in Unity as I am not that big of a fan when it comes to flash; well except for those animated shorts like "Happy Tree Friends" (yes I am a sick <expletive>) and "Joe Cartoon". Now, Youtube requires a flash plugin to play their video content (was okay when it was AVI and MPEG).

If I could make a standing list of stuff this game had problems in, I would be making pages and pages that probably will stretch for miles. To fix one or two little (of no importance) things every maintenance is a very big blow to the player base. And some <expletive> happened in times where there is no maint (that it worked the day before); it's like "what in the bloody hell are they doing over there?"

[Alsatia01]

Definitely disagree there, asking their devs to port the whole game over to a new engine, new language, new set of tools, etc. would be a recipe for disaster. They haven't proven a great deal of competence with the established code they have, so asking them to perform a major refit like that would definitely make things worse, at least in the short term. It would be like converting the whole game to a beta version for months on end, and that's after they finished the port. There may be some pretty good automated conversion programs out there, but there's no way this game doesn't require a lot of manual adjustment to get everything to work again.

An HTML5 conversion would be a long-term project, and with the way things are going, the game won't be around long enough for them to even consider it. I'm not optimistic it would be around long enough to even finish the conversion.

Html5 isn't a language, and calling it an 'engine' really wouldn't be that accurate either..... sorta. It's a set of tools designed to optimize several other web-based tools, particularly where animation is concerned; you can convert flash/as3 elements directly into html5.

Can it be done in 5 minutes, or with just a simple file switches or variable changes? No.
Is it even remotely as difficult as rewriting it in a completely new language? No.

I see where you are coming from though. If their their programmers are half as shoddy as their management, then there's probably no hope for them to figure it out.

P.S. Edit - I believe I saw someone post wartune went green-light for steam; and there's no way that's in flash. So I guess completely re-writing it wasn't off the table for R2 after all.

[MrFancyPants]

Html5 isn't a language, and calling it an 'engine' really wouldn't be that accurate either..... sorta. It's a set of tools designed to optimize several other web-based tools, particularly where animation is concerned; you can convert flash/as3 elements directly into html5.

Can it be done in 5 minutes, or with just a simple file switches or variable changes? No.
Is it even remotely as difficult as rewriting it in a completely new language? No.

I see where you are coming from though. If their their programmers are half as shoddy as their management, then there's probably no hope for them to figure it out.

P.S. Edit - I believe I saw someone post wartune went green-light for steam; and there's no way that's in flash. So I guess completely re-writing it wasn't off the table for R2 after all.

Granted I don't know a lot about HTML5 or Flash for that matter, and you're right it's not at the level of a complete re-write. They might investigate it if only to expand the game to mobile more easily, but I still think it would be a pretty ugly process to completely convert.

And about steam, see #3 under Technical Details:
https://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/FAQ.php

Seems a safe bet it will still be Flash, basically the miniclient, tweaked, maybe re-branded, etc.

[Meikura001]

Seems a safe bet it will still be Flash, basically the miniclient, tweaked, maybe re-branded, etc.

The "miniclient"/R2 client is nothing more than just a VB.NET/C##/VS program mimicking a web browser object (why you think they always say make sure the flash for Explorer is upgraded). I've made a custom program that does the same but only I had programmed the web addresses of a few servers I play on to make it easier to get on. I still have to manually login since their login system has been changed that made it impossible to automatically login on a button press (compared to the html based login they had before). I am not that well-versed to making a bot if anyone's asking and plus it's against the rules so I don't bother; I just make a program that doesn't have the cumbersome add-ons, tool bars, and other things that eat up memory resources as a web browser does, so I can login my guys when I play.

I had initially thought the "miniclient" was a program version of the game that can be downloaded, installed, and run without having to use a browser to play the game. With that being said, the cache would be always local without the popup asking if I want to store.

[R238423534]

there aren't many successful examples of porting one complex system to another runtime environment without breaking it or rewriting/tweaking some critical points,
let alone wartune won't receive much budgeting or priority from its owner company.
if dev wouldn't even fix a trivial typo like Dark Dragon Lair versus Taranton's Lair, it's overly optimistic to expect them to port its client to a more robust framework.
just enjoy the remaining days it has.

[R229619798]

there aren't many successful examples of porting one complex system to another runtime environment without breaking it or rewriting/tweaking some critical points,
let alone wartune won't receive much budgeting or priority from its owner company.
if dev wouldn't even fix a trivial typo like Dark Dragon Lair versus Taranton's Lair, it's overly optimistic to expect them to port its client to a more robust framework.
just enjoy the remaining days it has.

what do u mean by enjoy the remaining days it has ?

[Alsatia01]

The "miniclient"/R2 client is nothing more than just a VB.NET/C##/VS program mimicking a web browser object (why you think they always say make sure the flash for Explorer is upgraded). I've made a custom program that does the same but only I had programmed the web addresses of a few servers I play on to make it easier to get on. I still have to manually login since their login system has been changed that made it impossible to automatically login on a button press (compared to the html based login they had before). I am not that well-versed to making a bot if anyone's asking and plus it's against the rules so I don't bother; I just make a program that doesn't have the cumbersome add-ons, tool bars, and other things that eat up memory resources as a web browser does, so I can login my guys when I play.

I had initially thought the "miniclient" was a program version of the game that can be downloaded, installed, and run without having to use a browser to play the game. With that being said, the cache would be always local without the popup asking if I want to store.

How did you setup a manual login? And how did you setup managing the authentication token? I wrote a mini-client for ArmorGames a little while back in java(mostly for giggles, java isn't exactly known for its performance) and those were the biggest hiccups I was having.

[Meikura001]

Since we know that explorer/edge items are all windows with the same info, no matter how many windows are opened, this is what I had my program to do when it starts up:

• Upon startup, it goes to wartune.r2games.com/user/logout to automatically log out and clear any account that is logged in so it won't have a conflict when multiple windows are opened.
• Then, under a hot key (since I do not know about timing between tasks) I press, it goes into a web address that is programmed. As it loads into the server, and if not logged in, the login box will pop up, prompting you to login.

Unfortunately, when they switched over to the Java based login scheme, I had to go in this way since I know nothing of Java and I had tried looking for info on how to make it work. The old login (html based) was great since I just can pull up the variables (view source) and it can do it in one fell swoop through a routine. However, this one only produces errors so I just stripped it away and went with just logging in manually for each one, which I tend to nearly use the same character structure since each login saves the last one's info.

Too bad VS could not allow me to incorporate Chrome since it's the only browser that you can create multiple profiles and can play independently on each one (refreshing, for an example) without it conflicting with one another. On my "refreshes", I have to take all the windows down and then reboot them. Or if I am doing one, then only that window gets exited and rebooted.

[Alsatia01]

Since we know that explorer/edge items are all windows with the same info, no matter how many windows are opened, this is what I had my program to do when it starts up:

• Upon startup, it goes to wartune.r2games.com/user/logout to automatically log out and clear any account that is logged in so it won't have a conflict when multiple windows are opened.
• Then, under a hot key (since I do not know about timing between tasks) I press, it goes into a web address that is programmed. As it loads into the server, and if not logged in, the login box will pop up, prompting you to login.

Unfortunately, when they switched over to the Java based login scheme, I had to go in this way since I know nothing of Java and I had tried looking for info on how to make it work. The old login (html based) was great since I just can pull up the variables (view source) and it can do it in one fell swoop through a routine. However, this one only produces errors so I just stripped it away and went with just logging in manually for each one, which I tend to nearly use the same character structure since each login saves the last one's info.

Too bad VS could not allow me to incorporate Chrome since it's the only browser that you can create multiple profiles and can play independently on each one (refreshing, for an example) without it conflicting with one another. On my "refreshes", I have to take all the windows down and then reboot them. Or if I am doing one, then only that window gets exited and rebooted.

Sounds a bit convoluted. You could incorporate the login information using javascript, directly into the page elements - shame it's not your forte.

On your refreshes, you really have to close all the way down? Surely a page reload wouldn't invalidate the authentication token, unless you go 12+ hours a session.

I'm not particularly familiar with chrome (from a software perspective), but I believe it has part of it's api open-sourced - you might be able to use their own profile system without recreating it yourself.

Thank you by the way, I may give the mini-client another look, if only for giggles.