Changelog

Version 2.9.09, released at January 16, 2012

New Features

Property Workers
Now it’s possible to require players to hire workers in order to activate properties. It’s possible to hire workers either by inviting friends or by paying VIP money. Also, it’s possible to customize worker position names (‘Worker’ is by default, but it can be any text of your choice)
Bucket-based Opponent Selection
In previous version the fighting page was one of the slowest pages because of the opponent list that was generated with a very slow and complex SQL query. We reworked this algorithm to avoid complex SQL queries and use Redis storage instead. All opponents are now split into buckets and stored separately according to their level group. Level groups are pre-defined in the script and can be customized. As the result, opponent selection speed was increased by 2000%!
Inline Refill
Health/energy/stamina now can be refilled without leaving the current game page. The message about insufficient hp/ep/sp now displays items that restore the corresponding attribute. Players can use these items directly from this message.
Clans
The new version of the engine gives players an ability to build their own team of players. Clan creators can invite friends to their clan, moderate player requests to join clan, change clan image, aclan image and info. We decided not to add anything else to clans (like clan fights, clan shop, etc.) because clan mechanics is very specific for each game.
Pictures
Previously it was possible to add only one image to each object (item, mission, etc.) and this image was used across the whole game – shop, icons, stream images, everywhere. It wasn’t possible to set a specific image for item to be displayed in shop and another one to be displayed at the equipment page. Starting from this version it’s possible to upload different images for each separate use case. If you only have one image for all cases – simply upload it and the engine will generate all missing images according to pre-defined sizes.
Extended Item Tooltips
We merged default item tooltips and item purchase dialogs into a single widget – an extended tooltip. Now, when you click some item image in the game (at the profile page, in fight result, in requirement list) you can see an extended tooltip which displays additional information about the item and allows you to purchase it if it’s available for purchase.
Boost Featuring
Starting from now all boost selectors will include all boosts that the player already have and all boosts that the can purchase. Boosts available for purchase are displayed as semi-transparent and can be purchased from extended tooltip displayed on click. Purchased boost will be automatically activated right after the purchase.
Google Analytics Everywhere
The new version of the engine is much closely integrated with Google Analytics to provide a rich statistics for all game activities. Now all game requests (both basic and AJAX) are tracked using GA, as well as special game events like purchasing items, completing missions, etc.
Multi-Item Collections
Starting from now it’s possible to require more than one of each item to make a collection. Previously it was possible to use only one of each item to create a collection.
Request Tracking
The new version allows you to check application usage by each user. Now the engine stores a number of requests made by each user during the day. This tool can be used to track active players and players who use special software to do automated requests.
Monster Fight Preview
In the old versions users were automatically joined the fight when accepting monster fight requests from their friends. Starting from now monster invite will redirect user to monster fight page without adding them to the fighter list. It’s up to player to decide whether joing the fight or not.

Fixes

It wasn’t possible to add one player to the hit list more than one time
Opponent loading was broken in IE7
Price check was broken for personal disconts which lead to impossibility to purchase an item even if user had enough VIP money to do the purchase
Facebook data wasn’t loaded properly in some cases which lead to empty user names and friend lists.
Story images in admin are now displayed only if they’re uploaded
Fixed an error that prevented VIP money from being correctly given on level up
Max VIP price of items now only updates if it wasn’t previously set.
Several layout fixes in IE7

Performance Improvements

Scheduler
The new version of the engine includes completely refactored mechanism of running scheduled tasks like sending notifications, updating ragings, and so on. Previously the system used CRON to schedule tasks. That lead to a serious overhead to load the whole Rails environment to do fairly simple checks and tasks. We wrote a separate daemon to run such tasks, this daemon loads Rails environment once and works for a long time saving CPU resources and memory.
Redis-based Rating
Ratings in previous version of the engine were built from hot player data fetched directly from MySQL. It was simplest possible solution, but it was extremely slow for fairly large user base. We rewrote ratings to store them in Redis. All rating-related tasks are much faster now.
Rendering Performance Boost
Page rendering is just much faster now. We did a lot of optimizations across the whole application to improve rendering performance and reduced page rendering by 20% in average.
Monster Performance Boost
Monster fighting mechanism was reworked to improve performance of the most popular actions. Monster attacks are up to 100% faster now and monster lists are up to 50% faster.
Now all achievement values are properly cached to improve achievement check performance
Recently accepted gift checks are significantly improved now to increase performance and reduce app request page load time
We fixed a serious flaw that lead to continuous rendering of inventory page on every item use (drinking potions, opening chests, using healing packs). Now item use should be much faster.

Minor Modifications

The application don’t ask for Facebook permissions to access signup page. Users can see a singup page without any limitations.
We updated Facebook credit processing to make it compatible with recently announced API change by Facebook
Item effect storage format was refactored to allow to easily add new effects from the code. Now it’s not necessary to create new table fields to add new effects, you should just add an effect class to the code.
Achievements are now displayed in more convenient order – recently completed achievements are displayed first to simplify reward collection.
Promo block displayed at home page now contains arrow to switch between pages.
Settings are now cached for up to 60 seconds. If you do setting modification – you should either wait for 60 seconds or restart your application.
Added a Privacy Policy link to the game footer
The new engine uses Rails 2.3.14

Version 2.9.00

New Features

Contests
The new version allows you to run a contest for your players and give rewards to winners. Contests can be based on number of opponents killed by players in a definite time frame, or amount of damage dealt to monsters. In addition, you can split players to different groups basing on their level and give them different rewards. Each contestant group has its own leader board.
Boosts for fights and monsters
Now it’s possible to create special items that will be used in player-vs-player fights and monster fights to temporary boost player atttributes (for pvp) or deal additional damage (for monsters).
Drag & Drop for character equipment
We significantly refactored equipment page to let people equip items by dragging them to available slot. We also significantly improved overall look & feel of the equipment page to make it more suitable for RPG games.
Chat
We added the chat module to the game to give players a possibility to talk to each other in real time. Chat is turned on by default on monster fighting pages (a separate chat room for each monster) and a special page for global chat. It is possible to integrate chat to any page with few lines of code.
Personalized discounts
This new feature makes it possible to give personalized discounts to players automatically. Each player will get a special offer once per day on their first visit. The offer will remain valid during 1 hour from its creation. Discount value is configurable with Settings.
Achievements
Now you can define a set of achievements that user can reach by playing the game. Achievements are based on character stats, for now the following stats are supported: level, fights won, total money, killed monsters, total damage to monsters. You can also define a custom reward for each achievement. The engine automatically publishes player achievements to Facebook using the new achievement publishing API.
Total Score
This new score board uses values from other boards and calculates a total score basing on the customizable formula. Players can publish their total score to Facebook using the new score API.
Item Swap
You can give players a possibility to trade their items to other items from their friends. Players can post their exchange offers and friends can respond. This feature is somewhat similar to market, but it only allows players to trade items to other items, not money.
Requirements for mission levels
Now you can define custom requirements for each mission mastery level. For example, you can require additional items or higher level on each mastery level of a mission.
Custom invite & gifting dialog
We replaced default invitation dialog with a custom one. The new dialog allows players to send invites to their friends without selecting friends manually from the list. All friend players are included to the recipient list by default and player only need to confirm invite delivery. Invites are sent in batches. Now it’s much easier for players to send gifts to all their in-game friends and it only takes a minute to send more than 1000 requests.
Requirements for estates
Now you can define custom requirements for each property type. Requirements are applied on propery build.
New payout triggers for estates – build and upgrade. Now you can give or take items on all property operations, not just income collection.
Health, Energy, and Stamina restore effects for items. Now you can create items that improve attribute restore rate by reducing restore time. Restore rate is defined in percents.
Discounts in VIP money purchase form. Now the engine automatically calculates discount value for each package at the VIP money purchase page basing on the price of the cheapest available package.
Integrated Applifier toolbar support. You only need to enter your Applifier application ID in Settings and the engine will automatically add your applifier toolbar to all pages.
Implemented Amazon S3 integration. The new version of the engine makes it possible to store all game images (items, properties, etc) on Amazon S3 servers to reduce bandwidth costs and speed up page load time.
Improved Upgrade Dialog. In the new dialog player can choose where to spend attribute points using sliders and save updated values with one click. No need to do 100 clicks to spend 100 attribute points anymore.

Modifications and Fixes

Allow to hide certain requirements. You can choose which requirements should be displayed and which shouldn’t be.
Banned users are now hidden from everywhere, including ratings, fighting, etc.
Player friends now see their real name in additional to in-game nickname
Now it’s possible to define how much money will be added to property income with every property upgrade. Prior to this version income per level was equal to initial property income.
We added new settings that allow to disable steam publishing and friend invites.
Timed out monsters are now automatically marked as expired using cron task
Now it’s possible to set character type by default when routing players to signup page. This can be done by adding ?default_type_id=123 attribute to game URL (123 is an ID of desired character type)
Improved account security and content access restrictions – now players cannot access content outside of their level and class, as well as sell items on market which weren’t marked as allowed for sale
Fixed issues with tooltips for items loaded with AJAX requests (equipment page, result messages, shop)
Additional reference keys passed by Facebook are correctly tracked and recorded now
Score boards are now cached to reduce rating page load time
Stream dialog views and javascript errors are now tracked with Google Analytics
Fixed Basic money and vip money requirements – now it’s possible to add them
Invitation link pages now include OpenGraph tags which makes them look better when posted to Facebook walls and newsfeed
We added a special payout trigger for monsters which makes it possible to give items to those players who invite their friends to fight with monster
Frictionless Facebook requests are enabled by default
All missions now have an image by default. It can be replaced by uploading a custom image.
Tutorial should work correctly now in all major browsers
In the new version all pending gifts are getting removed when the player receives a new gift from the same user.

Deprecations and Removed Features

We decided to remove Skins feature. Starting from this version all game styling should be done by modifying SASS templates which are more clean and flexible.
The old implementation of Bosses is deprecated now. You cannot create new bosses in the new version. We strongly recommend you to replace bosses with monsters. We plan to completely remove old Bosses in the next major version.
We remove ‘Usable’ flag for items. A possibility to use item is determined by presence of payouts for the item.
The new version of the engine doesn’t display any confirmation dialogs when sending invites and gifts

Version 2.8.11

Major Changes

The new release introduces two major changes that will be required to run a Facebook application starting from October 1, 2011:

Secure Canvas URLs with SSL (HTTPS)
User authentication with OAuth2 2.0

These two features are required for all production applications running at Facebook. If you already purchased the script and you want to continue running your application at Facebook – please contact us about the update.

New Features Since 2.7

Facebook credits & TrialPay support
App requests (gifts, invites, etc.) were significantly refactored to use new Facebook request system
Added step-by-step tutorial that helps players to discover game features
Added a styled tooltip to display item effects
Refill health, energy, and staina dialogs now appear when player doesn’t have enough energy, health, or stamina points
‘Power Attack’ button was added to Monster fights
Now you can set maximum number of players who can get the reward after killing a monster. Only players who dealt enough damage will be able to collect the reward.
A possibility to collect the reward is calculated from two options – maximum number of collectors and minimum number of damage that should be dealt to monster to get the reward
Now it’s possible to set maximum price for item when selling it on the market
Added ‘Use Again’ button to inventory use result so players can use several items of the same kind one by one
Added ‘More opponents’ link to the fighting page to allow loading more opponents to the list. The list is also getting automatically updated on level up now.
Unified all messages about unsatisfied requirements (money, health, energy, etc.)
Now users can change their notification preferences and re-enable previously disabled notifications using ‘Notification Settings’ dialog
Added charts & statistics about new users and user return rate
All game configuration is now generated at deployment to simplify multi-server deployment setup
Added GZip compression to all HTTP responses to speed up page load
Fixed a lot of bugs & glitches in IE7

How To Upgrade

In order to upgrade to this version you’ll need to:

1. Register a domain name for your game (if you don’t have it yet)
2. Purchase an SSL certificate for your domain
3. Update the code and changes settings to your Facebook application

Please read domain and SSL sections of our FAQ and contact us to get the update.

Version 2.5.10

New Features

Market: now users can sell their items to each other on Market. You can define which items will be available for sale, how long they’ll be listed and what fee will your game charge for every sale.
Improved Titles: now you can assign titles as any other payout, not just on mission completion. For example, you can give a title with a promotional link, while fighting with boss, or after using an item.
Internal Game Alerts: now all in-game alerts are stored in the database and can be displayed when user get back to the game. In previous versions, if users received level up while resisting attacks they don’t get any notification. Now, if users receive level up by passive action they get a notification when they get back to the game.
Item balancing page: for quick overview of your item list by level and availability

Fixes

Fight opponent selection refactored. Now the system chooses opponents with closer levels.
Profile pages are now secured from ID examination. This won’t allow users to find weaker opponents by examining IDs of other players.
Improved Facebook request parsing performance with Nokogiri
Fixed data corruption issues when operating with equipment
Fixed energy restoration on level up when fulfilling missions
Fixed various redirect errors that caused infinite redirect in Safari & Opera
Fixed Alliance connection issue when accepting invitations
Used Items previously displayed all item groups (including hidden and deleted). Now it is fixed.
Timers now display days, not just hours: 10 days, 1:00:00 instead of 241:00:00
Improved admin interface usability and styling
Minor code tweaks and performance improvements

Version 2.5.1

Significant performance improvement for fighting page – now it’s 10x times faster
Performace improvement for equipment page and all pages that displayed best defence/best offence items
Added reference tracking to all vip money operations made from payouts (missions, opening items, properties, etc)
Fixed a bug that caused server crash when applying item payouts to characters from admin
Fixed a bug that prevented assignment updates from publishing to game dashboard
Slightly improved admin interface

Version 2.5.0

User Interface

New Features

Hospital – now players can heal their character every now and then. Delay between healings is customizable as well as healing price.
Automatic equipment – users won’t need to equip their character if this feature is turned on. The system will choose the best weapon/armor combination and equip character automatically.
‘Auto-equip’ and ‘Unequip all’ – these new buttons at the Equipment page allow users to easily manage their equipment.
Help Pages – now you can create pages with static content and display this content within the game. Read more »
New premium service – now users can pay some small fee to change their name within the game.
Promote mercenaries – now non-player alliance members can now be promoted to alliance positions as well as friends. Each new mercenary will have the same attributes as the user have when they hire a mercenary.
Ask for email permissions – you can enable this feature to collect user emails for future use.
Inline Shop – now users can purchase required items without leaving the Missions page

Improvements

Hitlist now uses AJAX request instead of page reloads
Added a possiblity to post hitlist messages to Feed (for both new hitlist offer and completed offer)
Signup form: don’t display character type selector if there is only one character type
Mission completion message is displayed in a dialog now
Display item effects in the appearing tooltip
Display character name at the profile page
Display item price and effects only if they’re available; display FREE if there is no price
Added ‘Buy’ button to a message about unsatisfied item requirement

Fixes

Added a workaround for the iframe cookie bug that caused infinite redirect in Safari and Opera (latest versions)
‘Wealthiest’ rating is now based on total money, not just bank
Hide boss fight block when there is no visible boss fights
Removed invitation by feed post because this feature is against of TOS

Admin Interface

New Features

Tracking all VIP money operations – both deposits and withdrawals. Each operation has its own reference to the item or service purchased by the user.
VIP money usage statistics – now you can review what items and services earn you more money
Manage characters – now you can edit character names or apply payouts to certain characters (or a group of characters). Character payouts use the same mechanism as mission payouts or item usage payouts.
Global tasks – now you can restart your application (to apply code changes) or delete all user data (for testing purposes, if your game is not released yet

Improvements

Reverted visibility settings for items, missions, etc. Now you can choose which character types will see an item instead of choosing which types won’t see it.
Now you can reorder payouts and requirements
Deleting item group now causes deletion of all its items
Deleting mission group now causes deletion of all its missions and bosses
Now you can disable hitlist using the hit_list_enabled flag at the Settings page
Allowed empty values for translations
Improved admin interface styles
‘Save & Continue Editing’ button to ease content management

Fixes

Now the system preserves payout order when saving them
Fixed energy and stamina requirements

Platform & Deployment

Updated to Ruby on Rails 2.3.8. Used ruby gems are updated as well.
Added multi-stagng support to capistrano deployment recipe. Now you can easily setup both staging and production environments for youor application.
Deployment script now updates stylesheets and settings before pushing the new version to users, not after
Fallback to local jQuery file if Google Libraries API server is not available for some reason