Developers blog

First of all the sad story - 3 weeks ago my laptops motherboard or video card died, so I’ve got even less time to work at this project, until I get my laptop back. That sucks, but I’m working as much as possible, doing at least small tasks in my free time.
Enough about me. Want to hear about the game?
Well, lets start from the basic security we have added - at one time you can access account only from one browser.
That means - you can not open Firefox while playing with Opera (or any other) and login. The same is if you are logged in at home and someone tries to access your account from the other computer - you wont be online at the same time.
How is this done? Well, we log out the one that was logged in earlier and leave the new one so you will notice if someone hacks your password and no noobs will be cheating using two browsers or two computers.
Moreover, we are rewriting some major parts of the code - making them more standalone and easier to fix.
As well, Skyruler modified our dictionary that translates all the game interface, because it was causing us lots of problems with performance. However, this is not the last modification. There are still a lot of things to be tuned. We want the game to be as stable and fast as possible, so you can enjoy it.
As well, I’m making news module for it, so when we start the game, the blog will be for the development news and game news will be posted in the game itself.
Oh, and we are making plans on how to implement ToDo/Support module instead of the old one to make it more efficient.
Thats about it for now
Bye

I’d like to inform you, that we have published Mad For Speed game rules, so you can start reading them.
But we have a more important question:
Would you like to be part of the game?
What we want to ask is: would you like us to make polls on certain parts of the game?
Are you ready to be active, when posting your opinion?
Just post below and let us know. Then we will see, maybe we will start making polls about tuning parts, cars or even more serious parts of the game

Hey there.
One evening i was thinking about website defaces and how to make a protection against them, as after deface the game would be unreachable until me or Skyruler come online, so what would happen if we were on vacation at that moment?
After few hours of thinking I’ve developed a protection system in my mind and the started coding it.
Almost all my thoughts came true, but still it’s not fully finished.
If someone finds a bug in the game system and uses it for a deface - he would succeed, but the game would repair itself after an hour. This solution does not suit me, however, I don’t want to slow down the game with this addon, so can’t execute it every time a visitor comes.
I’ll making a search of an optimal solution.
Well, but on the other hand, we feel much more safe, as we know that the game will try to repair the damage and it would be down for no longer then an hour now.
Going back to forum development, maby after that I’ll find the way to make this a more stable and smart system, to provide us with as much security as it is possible (non of the applications are 100% secure, our aim is 99% if possible)

Since one of our visitors asked us about the progress, I’ll give you some of the most fresh info available.
So what are we working on? Stability! Well Skyruler is. I’m developing our forum (screenshots available at the end of the post).
Let’s make things clear.
Skyruler is working at our core of the game - making modules work. Why modules? Well, thats pretty easy to answer:
You see, if some part of the game hangs - we can turn it off until we fix it. How about that?
For example, we can turn off forum if it makes our server slow (because of some bug or hakers exploiting some vurnelability), or let’s say, some angry player starts flooding in PM’s (private messages) from a lot of different accounts, so we turn PM’s of until we block all of his accounts, so you get as less harm as possible.
Yes, we know that you want to try this game, but thats our politics - stability, security and usability. We don’t want to have tons of post about game being slow, or accounts get hacked, or alot of players cheat. We would like to see fair, competative gameplay.
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Well, I have some good and some bad news.
The good one: The Beta will be Open, not closed. So that means - we will not put any limit, to how many will be able to sign-up for the game
The bad one: Due to this, we will have to postpone the release for about a month, because we want to add more cars, more parts. Skyruler will be alone on this, because I’m gonna write a forum (board) engine for the game, so you are able to talk to each other, post your thoughts and ideas.
We just want to provide you with a more stable, interesting game.

P.S. registration will be open very soon

Yes, Mad For Speed racing game is on the road to beta testing. No matter the fact, that me and drawgas are working all day long in a real job, we still find time at night or during the short brakes at job.
Well, I just want to inform you about major changes in Mad For Speed game.
First of all, drawgas has almost finished the new “Todo” system, so he will probably continue with the part shop, or the tuning itself.
Moreover, both of us have some serious work to do with the game engine again, because we already got our Database layer done and at last we agreed to get all templates to Smarty system.
drawgas was talking about Smarty a long time ago, but none of us had ever touched this templating engine, however, now both of us work with Smarty at our jobs.
Why Smarty and not our templating engine? Because our engine does not have cycles, if - else checks, but the bigest broblem with our template engine is, that it does not support caching.
Thats the most recent news we can tell you, Keep an eye on this blog and some time soon you’ll possibly hear a longer story about the preparation for the upcoming beta release

Skyruler told me, that he wants to extend TODO system and add some features, but then I took a look at the code, that was written about 1 year (or even more) ago and told him, that we should do the system from the scratch in a more OOP based way, with alot of optimizations and modifications to all the structure, so that the system would be alot easier to extend.
As well, some modifications will affect the way progress bar in the main page is generated, so it will show more precise representation of the work we have done…
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As you remember, some time ago there was a separate RSS feed for Mad For Speed news, as well as new looked a bit different. However, we started this developer blog, so I decided that there is no use to have separate news, so i asked Skyruler, what does he thing about my idea to integrate this WordPress powered blog in place of our old news and he agreed. So what you see in the main page are the same posts, that you can find in the Developers blog. Moreover, now we wont need to check for your comments in two different places, now all comments will be here - in this blog.

Furthermore, i’m porting part of AutoMeta plugin to our game in some way, so we could access it’s generated meta tags for articles we write. Oh, almost forgot to mention, Skyruler added for me possability to add page titles, so now every part of the main page has it’s own title tag, in the feature they will also have different meta tags and descriptions.

To the addition to this, I have added hreflang=” option to the links that link languages of the game, as well as modified <html> tag, so now it reflects what language is selected (now it looks like <html lang=’en’>)

Thats about it for today. Now I need to go and make page links for the news in the games main page. See you next time