Reign Of Blood News Blog

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Optimisation, Server Upgrades & More

Posted on 19-Feb-2019

Every now and then I take some time to give Reign Of Blood a spring clean and get rid of any unnecessary bloat and data that over time slows the game down. The last major cleanup was 2014, so we're overdue for another one. TOH is starting to slow as we have more players competing at the top of hour, so I've put this clean-up on a higher priority. This time though, I am doing more than a general clean up as I look to modernise the game code for 2019 and beyond.

The Reign Of Blood codebase - which I started to create back in 2006 - is now past its prime. The version of PHP has now stopped receiving security updates so it is time to make the code fully compatible with PHP 7.3 - the latest version. Doing so will automatically fix a few server glitches here and there, as the server software moves past the old versions, and incompatibilities and glitches start to happen, which I want to avoid.

Only around 10% of the code needs to be updated, but even 10% of 12+ years of work is still quite a bit of code to go through. Updating the codebase and the software will result in about double the speed increase, which is always appreciated.

At the same time, I'll also be updating the CSS and going through and streamlining the front-end code to keep things as fast as possible on both ends. I'll also be spending some time going through the database and getting rid of tables of data no longer used, removing unused variables from the player table and much more. This will free up space and increase page loads. As i'm there, I'll be updating the look of some of the older pages that have yet to be updated to the newest look, and also getting rid of old files. If there's enough good stuff in the archives I may put together a little nostalgia collage for the old timers here.

This will take some time, and will be my primary focus over the next few weeks.

I will doing the PHP updates on a separate domain (so not off the live game) and I'll be inviting people to help me by playing the game on that new domain to find bugs and incompatibilities before updating the main game's codebase. More on that later.

The Valentine's event, special, and Reigning Couples has now ended. You can read the roundup on right here if you missed it.

I'm also laying the groundwork to something quite awesome, which will be a complete overhaul of a certain place, which may make it useful again.

Enjoy,
Ash

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