Hi all! We’re still hard at work on this, but the current focus of development effort involves a bunch of server-side reliability and data consistency work which isn’t particularly shiny or fun to write about!  (Some user-facing stuff does make progress–aside from characters needing to be unstuck less, there are small bits of progress like the Greedy Street Spirit quest now working properly.)

The Eleven Giants forums are a much better place to stay a bit more up-to-date with what’s going on, or at least admire some screenshots. (Thank you, Eris Lord Freedom!)

Other eventual work involves recreating the locations (190 or so) that weren’t in the Tiny Speck asset release (oh, Gwendolyn!) and figuring out the future of the client, but until we can keep the game going for the current community of alpha testers (thank you for your patience!) without an extraordinary support load, reliability is where it’s at–this is super-frustrating for all involved since the basic mechanics of the game are all there, but a more open test right now would not be supportable.

On that note–if you are or someone you know is interested in wading through server-side javascript and figuring out data consistency problems with an eye towards performance and scalability, drop by the forums, it’d be great to hear from you!

Back in February Sirentist explained the tagging process being undertaken by the QA team and asked you all for help locating snaps containing quoins. Sirentist asked for Glitchen to root through their folders of snaps from the game, tissues at hand, and to upload anything that would be useful to our Peons forum. Now we want to explain how we used that information and why we are asking you again to search through your snaps and videos for us.

We had many incredibly useful snaps as a result of this initial request and we have incorporated this information into the streets we have been tagging. Thank you to all those who contributed to this initial request for snaps, and especially to the wonderfully productive Zoi and MissCoco who appear to have been documenting Ur in the middle of the night given some of their quoin-complete street snaps! Their photography skills augment the street snap archives we have been using provided by Cleops, Ecats and the Glitch Tribute Blog.

Over the last few months Sumi and I have been revisiting all the streets in order to fill in a giant spreadsheet which formally documents the snaps that contain the quoin images for a particular street. (Yes, I know we should have done this on the first pass through tagging, but excitement at saying ‘Tag, you’re it!’ got the better of us and we neglected to keep our documentation up to date). You can see the details of the task by looking at the page for Aranna, which shows that for Khubbani Siggara, the snap documenting 9 of the 10 quoins can be found in Cleops’ dropbox:

(Maybe you can see why we overlooked this administrative task in the initial excitement of recreating the streets ready to be walked through again!)

We have dedicated ourselves to filling in this spreadsheet for the whole of Ur for several reasons. Firstly the next stage of the QA process involves us going through each street in turn, fine tuning the position and parameters of each item on the street. This will mean that rocks will no longer float a few inches above the ground, sloths will hang from trees in a manner consistent with the laws of physics (and biology). We will also need to set the type of each quoin – energy, mood, currants, iMG, time, favour – along with how quickly it regenerates and the payout provided. The information on the quoin type can only come accurately from snaps – otherwise it will have to be guessed (maybe we could flip a quoin for it).

Secondly it became clear that as people responded to this initial request for snaps, that we needed to be much clearer about what we still needed for each street. For example it emerged that people found it useful to know how many quoins are predicted for a street as well as how many are missing; this allows you to grin like the Rube has just offered to trade a tomato for a Grand Ol’ Grinder, when you find a snap with all the quoins on it.

We have just finished this giant task of documentation and the Peons forum is now complete for all regions of Ur. This hall of shame contains entries for all streets which contain more quoins than those identified by the snaps we have currently in our grubby little mitts. Here is the page for Aranna and the third entry is that for Khubbani Siggara previously mentioned.

As you can see we’re still missing a lot of quoins, particularly the location of those pesky Qurazy Quoins (or QQs). We are also very interested in snaps which include the high value quoins at that moment when they popped and revealed the treasure therein.

However, although snaps continue to be indispensable for quoin placement, they rarely tell us much about the value of the pictured quoins or their spawn frequencies. Another tool that has proven helpful to the QA process are a number of video clips uploaded to the net by former Glitchen. Looking through these videos has helped us re-learn how certain quests or the odd basement street used to work. We are also using these videos to provide an indication of how we should consider configuring quoin spawn rates and values during the next phase of QA.

So we are now asking you to take part in one final push to help produce an ultimate repository of snaps and videos which mean we can repopulate the streets with quoins that are as near to the Uriginal (sorry couldn’t resist that one!) as possible. Please can you dig a little deeper into your memories and archives to see if you can find any more snaps or videos which can help us in our quest to recreate the streets of Ur as accurately as possible.

Please bear in mind the following points as you excitedly search for the lost quoins of Ur that are listed on the Peons forum:

• We would welcome any quoin-containing videos that are not part of the video archives we have already identified. So if you spent some of your time in the game filming your travels around Ur, we would greatly appreciate it if you could link to your video or archive in the video section of Peons along with a brief description. Just use the ‘PostReply’ button at the bottom of the  Peons page to do this.
• Using the power of Google™ we have already searched all the published snaps which were taken before Glitch closed down – the snaps that appear when someone clicks the “All Snaps by (Username)” link. Whilst this has been very hard work, it has been heart-warming for us to come across so many familiar faces and be reminded of the many creative events that took place before the end of the world. So you don’t need to upload any of these snaps for us.
• Now, we are requesting any snaps that you didn’t publish, as well as screenshots taken using a method other than the in-game snapshot feature. For example you might have taken street snaps of your favourite locations and then saved them on your hard-drive. If this snap contains quoins which might be relevant for our search, then please let us have them by posting on the Peons forum.
• We are particularly keen to receive full street snaps as these make placing the quoins accurately much easier because they are free from parallax effects. However partial snaps are still useful, especially if they contain the elusive QQs.
• If you have snaps that document any of the high value quoins then please upload those for us to use – otherwise they risk being lost for ever!
• You would also make a QA peon very happy if you could check that the snap you plan to upload doesn’t duplicate a snap that someone else has already posted for that street.
• The title of the post for each street indicates the number of missing quoins and/or QQ. So for example ‘missing 1 quoin (of 4)’ means that we are searching for a standard quoin, whereas ‘missing QQ’ means we are searching for the Qurazy Quoin. Obviously ‘missing QQ + 1 quoin (of 4)’ means we are searching for the QQ and a standard quoin.
• The entries for each region will be listed with the most recently changed post at the top. This is not ideal but is what you get when using a forum which costs no currants to run. However you can re-order the posts in the familiar alphabetical order by using the drop-box menus (sort by ‘Subject’ ‘Ascending’) underneath the list of streets.
• Finally, please, please upload images to the Peons forum by following the instructions outlined by Sirentist. So avoid using the tempting “Img” tab on the reply window or the “Add image to post” as these use a 3rd-party to store the image … and sometime soon thereafter the link becomes dead. Instead please use the less obvious “Upload attachment” tab underneath the reply window because this provides a permanent link to the image. Go read Sirentist’s post as it is way funnier than this bullet point.
• Note that there is a 5MB limit on the size of images that can be uploaded to Peons. If your street snap is bigger than this – and this might be true for areas such as Jal – then the file can be converted to a smaller size by following these instructions.

Rest assured, all posts will be looked at and responded to by the QA team as we use them to restore the streets to that glorious era before the end of the world took place (excluding the forehorsemen of course). The title of each post will reflect the number of quoins still being searched for – once we’ve found everything we are looking for, the post will be changed to say ‘|done|’ and donations made to the QA person’s favourite giant as thanks for the snaps and videos which made this possible.

Soon Ur will be back in all its former glory thanks to the efforts of people like you!

P.S. You might be wondering why there are so many bad puns throughout this blog. Whilst it might be a reflection of the kind of person who becomes obsessive about quoin location on a remote street in the Ancestral Lands, it is also a homage to the wonderful rhymes you’ll find on a few of the early posts on the Peons forum (see Toma Traverse for instance). Unfortunately it soon became clear that the completion of Peons would be severely delayed if we maintained the rhyming couplets and so that practice was soon abandoned.

I know one of the big things everyone is thinking about when it comes to our little project has to be, “When can I play!?!” I honestly can’t blame anyone. I mean, our friends over at Children of Ur have a playable demo up, so why can’t we? Well, there are a bunch of good reasons, which I’ll gladly go over, and let you know what we have left that needs to happen before we can allow any level of public consumption of the game.

1) Logo

As you may already know, one of the restrictions Tiny Speck placed on the use of their code is that nobody could use the names “Tiny Speck” or “Glitch.” While “Tiny Speck” isn’t as big of an issue, “Glitch” has its logo front and center while loading up the game.

This means we need to come up with our own logo and substitute it in. We’re lucky enough to have some creative people in our midst who are currently working on this. CoreParadox came up with a great mock-up and he’s working with DanteAmaya to refine it into something that we’ll be able to replace the Glitch logo with. Once we have something a bit more finalized, you can be sure to see it here first.

2) Authentication

We currently don’t use logins to specify users on our test systems. Instead, we’re taking a somewhat hacky approach, which, for the security of our test systems, I’ll avoid describing in more detail than to just say it’s hacky. A side effect from this approach is that anyone would be easily able to access anyone else’s character. I know I personally would hate to think of someone else messing around with my character while I’m away.

The biggest issue we have to consider while researching the possible approaches to authentication, though, is that we need a single login to work for every part of the website: the forums and activity feed, the vanity and wardrobe, the game and the auctions, and more. The good news is we’re wrapping up this research and are close to a decision. Stay tuned for more details.

3) Avatar Creation

Some of the items that weren’t included with the code Tiny Speck released to the public are the Vanity and Wardrobe. While we could (and still might) move forward utilizing a default avatar or even allowing users to pull their characters as they appeared at the end of Glitch, one of the big draws of the game is the ability to customize your experience, from your avatar to the way you play the game to the way you build your /home.

What we do have, though, are all of the assets that are used to build the avatar; we’re just missing the code to put it all together. Once we’re further on in the process of rebuilding this, we’ll post here with some details.

4) User Number Limitation (Temporary Architectural Design Restraints)

While we’re in the early stages of development, any demo we put out will likely be somewhat unstable and running on lower-powered servers.

What’s that you say? You’d be willing to throw some money our way to help with better servers?

Well, that’s great and all, but why don’t you hold onto your money until we have a greater need and a more stable system. While a beefier server might allow more people to be logged on at once, the risk of encountering a system-crashing bug due to the current instability would only go up as well.

How about adding more servers, you ask?

The problem here is our framework is currently only set up to run on a single server as far as normal game processing goes, and some of the high-level processes are in what we’re considering a ‘temporary’ state so we can access the game while we work out some of the details. It’s something we need to address, but it’s a little lower on the priority stack while we get some more basic game functionality working. Once we have the mechanics of the game a bit cleaner, we’ll work on how to spread the load across multiple servers. You can look forward to a blog post from our friend Aroha giving some of the more nitty-gritty technical details of our current setup soon.

So now you want to know how you’ll be able to play?

There are a few ways we could go here. We’ve come up with a couple options and may think of more before we get to this point. One option would be to have a closed alpha where we allow so many users to have access to the game over a specified period of time, say, a week, before removing their access and allowing the next set of users in. Another option would be to simply restrict how many people are in the game at a time, so you’d just have to wait in line until someone else logged out and a spot opened up.

I personally would prefer the first option (closed alpha). It would keep users from having the hassle of waiting to see if and when a spot would open up, and instead would allow unlimited access (minus server down time) over a longer period of time. It would also be a lot easier to implement.

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To summarize, we’re a long way away from having things done the right way, but we’re working hard to make sure the amazing Glitch-loving community will have something they can jump in and try out.