360voice Dev Blog

Arcade Sale this Weekend

Gamerscoreblog.com announced a nice but short sale on a few arcade titles this weekend:

On top of that, four Xbox LIVE Arcade favorites will be available for half their regular price this weekend. Small Arms and Zuma Deluxe will be 400 points (regularly 800), and Gauntlet  and Dig Dug will be only 200 points.  Buy them beginning at 12 AM GMT on Sunday, September 2 (5 PM. PDT on Saturday, September 1) and continuing through 11: 59 p.m. GMT (4:59 p.m. PDT).  Don't miss out!

We don't normally post info like this, but half off is a pretty good deal, and since it's such a small window I didn't want any interested party to miss out.  Also posted on Major Nelson, with nice time conversion links and all the goodies.  I'll be buying a couple of those, will you?

Code Night Results

Code Night rundown! w00t!

S00per Sekret!: Trapper spent his code night working on some secret things. That's really all I can say about it, you just get to hear about stuff that I worked on.... Sorry!

Support Pages:  We have a few tools we build for ourselves to make support easier. I mainly needed to add a way to correct records if for some reason we miss a day for a gamertag.  We missed records for a few gamers, and we are still investigating why this is happening.  So we built a quick way to replace the missing info in our internal pages. We are looking into adding more redundant pulls and smarter recovery for this when we get the new hardware.

Gamerscore Distribution Charts: There are a slew of issues with these charts, mostly around arcade and retail titles with added achievements passed the previous score limits.  I made some temporary changes, but they are going to be in flux a bit this week as everything gets rewritten.  You may notice some different numbers and distributions throughout the week, as stuff gets changed on the fly.  All the charts should be getting some love in the next couple weeks as these have been neglected.  You guys just love your badges too much to concentrate on these...

Speaking of badges: no updates this week for genres.  We got lots of feedback and want to set some clear rules on what goes in and doesn't go in a badge.  Even at PAX I had people asking for different genres (PMS Kitty really wants her movie genre), so we want to get this done soon, but with travel and stuff, I just don't want to rush it and not do it right.

That's it, it doesn't look like a lot but I really needed to play catch up and do the support pages right, so we make sure data is getting in there and we aren't creating future issues.

Things running slow, 8/28/2007

Things are running a bit slow today... for some reason, our hardware is having a hard time on Monday running the badge processing and the weekly recap processing at the same time. This is a rather new development, as it has always been this way...

The result is that the blogs are just now starting to process so everything is fairly behind schedule. It will all shake out, although we might have to cut the badge processing for today if it drifts too far into the evening to give everything a chance to catch up.

Never fear though... for the last few weeks Steve and I have been working to secure funding and quotes on a complete hardware upgrade which should bring a new level of performance to the website. We are now closer than ever. If all goes well, we might be getting brand new hard-core servers and have them up and running in the first few weeks of Sept. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Welcome Halo 3

It is official... Halo 3 appeared for the first time on our site today. I am sure it will appear a few more times right? ;) Who was the lucky soul who unleashed it upon the 360voice database? Why it is Frankie... but I bet we all knew it would be him.

Look who is at Pax 2007

Fatty Chubs aka The King (or maybe the crown says Princess?) has been spotted at Pax 2007 in the Gamerscore blog photos... 

Update 9:00pm CT

Fatty Chubs has been playing a lot of interesting games... check out his blog.

Code-it Tuesday time

Man, things have been rough around here lately... we are rapidly outgrowing our hardware which is causing all kinds of joyous problems... so we are continually fighting fires these days. We plan to upgrade as soon as humanly possible. These days, it isn't an easy process because our database is so big... and besides we are looking at some pretty beefy stuff and want to get the specs right. In the meantime, here are some new features/tweaks to show that we aren't completely slacking!

1. New blog processing order
   The blogs use to process in order of registration... so the oldest members got their blogs first, the newer members, later in the day. I have switched this to now factor in your community involvement. I don't want to give away the formula, cause I don't want people manipulating it... but I am confident that the most active community members will get their blogs within the first 10 minutes of daily processing. You will still have to clear your cache to see them... but you will have that option.
2. New Leaderboards: Completionist
   There are a set of five (5) new leaderboards that rank you by your completion percentage. To keep it somewhat fair, we broke them into 5 levels by the numbers of games that you play. It isn't perfect, but let us know what you think.
3. Boosted the Watch list to 20 spots
   Everyone was asking for it so we decided to do it. You now have 20 spots available for your watch list. To use the watch list you must have a forum account.
4. Genre Changes
   Fatty Chubs decided to shake it up a bit this week with some genre changes. I think this is only the second time we have removed a game from genres. Give us your feedback.
   Sports - Added Madden NFL 08
   Puzzle - Added Hexic 2
   Race - Removed Import Tuner Challenge.
5. A few new blog sayings
   Cluskevird sent in a few sayings so I worked those into the Personality Processor.

So that is really it for new features... most of our work has been in the area of data fixes... as we get bigger and bigger... even the smallest little discrepencies snow ball out of control and you all call us on it! So here are some of the things we were playing with this evening:

1. Game stat cleanup
   People had been reporting situations where their points and achievements weren't up to date. This should be pretty much cleaned up. Remember it takes a full 24 hours for any games you played to fully update across all your stats.
2. More tweaks to manual game data fixes
   If you submitted game data fixes, we were having some problems with the right info going to the right places. Let us know if you submitted game data fixes and they still aren't there, even though they are showing APPROVED in the history section. Let us know via the contact form.
3. Investigating missing records from the 16th
   The queries to try and rip through the database and find everyone just aren't performing... so if you are still missing entries around 8/16, use the contact form and let us know! We will fix it on a person by person basis it only looks like a handful of people.
4. Presence downtime
   Over the last few days presence (which we use to track demo/beta/backcompat gaming for anyone with a forum account) has not been working very well. We rebooted the server and are investigating the issues. It should be on track now (for tomorrow), but we will have to keep an eye on performance. We hope to build some automated reporting to let us know when it fails so that we can catch it sooner.

So it has been a busy and productive night... many more nights like this to follow. Steve and I are also planning a code weekend for September. He will fly to Chicago and we will code for 48 hours straight to knock out a few bigger items.

(to leave comments, click the title of this post)

Update 8/22/2007 7:12am  CT

Tiger 08 hasn't been released yet and has been removed from Sports for now. It was added, but you correctly pointed out that it hasn't been released. That slipped in on accident.

A new "my blog settings" link

A few people have been emailing in, having problems finding the "Blog settings" link that appears when you are logged into your forum account. This link will now appear in your "Links & Community" section if you are logged in, and you are viewing your own blog. The link will also be in its current location so you can find it on any page.

What is this blog settings thing? If you have a forum account, you get access to special customizations for your blog. Sign up and check it out!

A special thanks to syndelin for the idea!

New 3VCE: Fshguy

Fatty Chubs and I would like to announce that Fshguy has been awarded a 360voice Community Expert  (3VCE) badge. 3VCEs are people that have been recognized for their contributions to the community.

Fshguy has been active in the forums every since joining. He has created the ever-popular Badge calculator and has been instrumental in helping us extend our web service API.

If you are wondering what this 3VCE business is, check out the FAQ.

No Badges on 8/15

A nice big cherry on top of a rough day, I get to announce there are no badge updates today.  We had to kick the server around a bit, and get stuff going again and the badges were the first thing sacrified.

Sorry guys, hopefully all our love and care spent today with the servers, will mean a smoother day tomorrow.

Things are running slow

For some reason, things are still recovering from the problems on Monday. Everything that is running is running really slow. I think the database server just needs a nice reboot... so we will try and do that after the jobs finish today.

So if you don't see your entry yet, never fear... it is on its way... it is just shy this morning.

Update 4:45pm CT
If you haven't noticed, we have had some more issues today with stability. Technical explanation: The disk I/O on our server is the bottle neck... database reads and writes back up... the web server connections back up... things start to hang... and the site cascades into madness from which only a reboot can cure. Our current vendor does not provide RAID as an option... so we are looking at more drastic short term measures... I will keep you posted on what we decide to do.