Developers blog

Hey there!
It’s been more then a month since we have posted news last time. Let’s fill this hole with some information.
What’s been happening around all this time?
Well, I have almost finished my work with the forum, made some changes to our meta keywords generation from news, as well as I have written the requirements for the game.
Again, we had only a bit of time to work at the game, as Skyruler has some problems in his personal life, so do I. But, hell, we have not forgotten and we still are working at it. Yes, it will be finished and released. Yes, we want it to be as interesting and fun to play as possible, that’s why it’s so long in development. We have played a lot of similar games, but they were unfinished, with lots of bugs, having nothing in them that would exclude them from the others. None of them were very realistic, or they were too hard to play. Yes, we are setting ourselves high objectives, but that’s all for you - players.
Oh, and we’d like to brag a bit. This game is still in development, but unique visits are stable and standing at about - 35 per day.
This shows, that there are some people, that are interested in this as we checked - most of the visitors are the same (about half of them comes every or every second day, all the others visit us less recently or only once). We are happy to see this and we hope to get a lot of players after we launch the beta release, because the more players we will have, the bigger competition you will have.
It’s always more fun to be in TOP100 from 1000 players, then from let’s say 300.

I think it’s about it this time

P.S. some statistic graphs from Google Analytics:

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

Yes, thats right. We would like to announce this great news!
March, 2007 we are going to open a Closed Beta testing stage of the game! Be ready.
What do we mean by “Closed Beta”?
Well, the game wont be really the one, you are goint to see in Open Beta, as we expect to modify it alot during the Closed Beta with the info we gather from it.
Why do we call it closed? Well, only 200 users will be allowed to register for it, so be so kind and don’t register if you are not sure if you are going to participate in it. We are going to open registration in a week or two, so keep watching website for more info. this stage will last for about two-three months, after it, we hope to start an open beta maby - we will see, how successful will be this stage.

What should you expect in this Beta testing?

• Drag races
• City map
• Sponsors
• 52 cars from 30 manufacturers (muscles, exotics. Expect more to be added during the beta testing)
  • Acura NSX
  • Aston Martin Vanquish
  • Ferrari 360 Modena
  • Ferrari Enzo
  • BMW 645Ci
  • Chevrolet Corvette Z06
  • Dodge Viper SRT-10
  • Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren
  • Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG
  • Panoz Esperante
  • Saleen S7
• 274 drivers to hire and train
• Lots of parts in 8 categories to tune your car to it’s limits:
  • Body (Body kits, spoilers, roof scoops, hoods, weight reduction kits and more)
  • Engine (Air filters, spark plugs, wires, camshafts, flywheels, pistons, turbos, superchargers, blowers, blow-off valves and more)
  • Transmission (Gearbox’es, clutch’es and more)
  • Suspension (Shocks, shock absorbers, coilovers, anti-sway bars, camber kits ant more)
  • Nitrous
  • Tires (tires, light alloy rims)
  • Brakes (brake discs, brake pads and more)

So start your engines.. Get ready.. Go!!!!

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…
(more…)

At last we brought these systems up again. Recoded them to meet the new core and work with it as it supposed to.
Most of the parts, of these systems, will be done in another, more optimal way, as they were made almost year ago, so there is alot space for optimization.
The good news is, that development status bar in the mane page of the game is working again. You should already notice some small changes in its possition. It will be showing our progress again.
Never knew how to understand it? Let me explain you. This bar represents, how much of the game have we done, are doing at the moment and how much is still to be done.
Every week we add or delete some jobs, edit their status, so the bar updates every time we do this, just to let you know, how the things are going.
Oh, by the way: all the main pages have their own meta keywords, meta description, page and table titles in both: English and Lithuanian languages. As well, some of the text is now marked with the header tags, so it’s a bit easier for search engine to navigate the page.

Today I ran a security check again after all the work we have done to the game core. I was very happy to see that most of the security issues were gone, but one high level threat was found!
The bug is called: “Cross Site Scripting in URI”. The problem was hidden deep in the code - one global variable was used without checking it for potential threats and wihout cleaning it.
The variable, I talk about, is $_SERVER[’PHP_SELF’]. The most simple example of using this vulnerability was this:
If you type:
http://www.madforspeed.com/index.php/>’><script><alert (”bug”)</script> ,
the main page whould open and a JavaScript alert would show a message: “bug”.
Strange that I haven’t found this bug last time I was checking the game. But it is now fixed! Few more bigger updates to the game core and I’ll do the check again.
See you then

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

What a terrible weather today.
“Maybe I’ll check the code for bugs” - i thought.
I did.. Used some software to speedup the process and what do you think? We were so stupid to leave Cookies without any checks. There were several security vulnerabilities through language, visitor and theme cookies. Most of them: remote include or XSS (cross-site scripting) and some SQL injections.
So I sit back, got myself some mineral water (yes yes, mineral, not beer :P ) and fixed all of them. Now there is a check and a clean-up. The rest of the main page looks secure enought for now. Some seriuos checks will be done after the rewrite of the code to OOP (object oriented programming) style.

Well, we do this again, for about fifth time, just to ensure that it works correct, secure and fast , also it becomes smaller and alot more easy to update and edit.

The main thing now is to convert most parts of the game from functions based code to so called OOP (Object Oriented Programming), where each part of the game is a separate object with its own functions and variables.

As well, we are re-coding the language system so it becomes more flexible and optimal. We used to kep all the translations in one file with alot of variables, while now it will be stored in MySQL database and only the ones we need will be loaded. So dont worry if you see some strange characters in page for some upcoming weeks - Work In Progress