Promisance License

[Blackhawk]

How about arguing about cheese?

Let's not go knockin cheese now...   :lol:  

[Ashyra Nightwing]

 Cheese is great. Join CAFI!!
*thinks back to the days of the cheese wars in the RPing forums*

[wolf bite]

 Oh great inventor Blackhawk,

Maybe you can give us a history class as to the creation and metamorphoses the game has gone through? How many versions are out there (that you know of)? Other interesting facts we should know?

Story time.


Wolf Bite

[Blackhawk]

Maybe you can give us a history class as to the creation and metamorphoses the game has gone through? How many versions are out there (that you know of)? Other interesting facts we should know?

I'll try to make it short, but here it is in a "Cliff Notes" version :)

It all started in 1997, when myself and two friends, after playing Earth: 2025 for some time, were sitting around playing Final Fantasy 7 (we kept trying to beat each other's snowboarding times) and got to thinking "We could do so much better", especially since, at that time, the administrators were never around and rarely, if ever, made a "public appearance" (similar to myself as of late, but this was from the beginning).

In mid-1998, I finally got around to starting to write it, which was started in Visual Basic 5. After some massive headaches trying to get it working (I had no database knowledge or file storage knowledge at all at the time), it was scrapped and I began using Perl to write it, using flat files.  During the testing period of the original Perl version, accounts kept disappearing and being wiped out, so I scratched that and started building it to use MySQL instead (which it still does to this day).

In mid-1999, I had a machine here that I hadn't used in a while, so I searched around for some inexpensive colocation rates and had found one, from a local ISP named Netwurx, but I had to take this system all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin (for some, that's a trip, for me, it's a half hour drive, so it wasn't that big) and it sat there for some time.

Between late 1999 and early 2001, it had it's ups and downs, as did my employment in that process (of which, I'm still looking now, rather sad actually) and in the first part of 2001, I brought that machine down permanently (which has since been LONG disassembled and all data has long since gone the way of the dodo).

Around that time is when I also made it open source to allow Promisance to live on vicariously, allowing everyone that had previously asked me if I'd ever release the source, to finally have access to it.

Since then, I've seen more incarnations of Promisance that I've lost count, and as long the credits are there and the stable source is available, more power to it!

[Riverpaw]

 Ya know, I just find the whole situation odd...  :rolleyes:  

[Dixie Ros?]

 I find it saddly offensive, myself, Riverpaw.

(By the way...7 days untill COPPA doesn't apply to me!! *is oddly estatic*)

[Retto]

 Thank you greatly, Blackhawk. It is definately an honor to not just get an e-mail, but posts on the boards.  :)

Very cool...my brother had an account on Earth: 2025 back when he played browser-based games, and it seemed really cool. And you certainly did do much better - Promisance is simply brilliant.

[caedo caelestis]

 Since we got off-topic anyways....

I was curious why you had sided with using an os function to perform the turn processing as opposed to a purely php solution?

[Burninate]

 By the way, I'm pretty sure IBF runs without cronjobs. That is if nobody visits a forum, then email notifications won't be sent. But I'm not 100% sure of that. Well, I'm sure it doesn't use crons...

[Blackhawk]

 

I was curious why you had sided with using an os function to perform the turn processing as opposed to a purely php solution?

The reason I used cron, as opposed to just writing it in...

The original version didn't have much of a player base, but I wanted the turns to trigger off no matter whether anyone was on or not, not to mention, I wanted to eliminate any possible overhead I could. Also, during the later part of when I ran Promisance solely, there were 2 physical machines running it. One did all the web work, the other did the database only, at that time, using cron instead of writing it into Promisance directly, was just a better idea since I could divide it up better.

The original 2 servers were only Athlon K6-2 450s with a whopping 256mb of ram in both, on IDE drives, so trying to squeak out any performance I could out of my own programming, was a must. At the time, I relied more on the system clocks (which synced themselves daily) than hoping someone was hitting the web site at the "fire off time".

Granted, with the speed of computers now, that's nowhere NEAR an issue, but at the time, with the hardware I was using for the servers, it was a big issue. (As it was, it took anywhere from 3-5 minutes to complete the daily "cron run" with about 1000 accounts). In comparison, I have 2 machines right here in front of me now... one is an Athlon 1ghz with 512mb of RAM running Windows 2000 Pro. The other (the one I'm typing this from) is a P3 733 with 256mb of RAM, running Gentoo Linux.

So, that's why I used the OS function, of cron in this case, instead of processing it via a PHP solution. It was a PHP "solution", it just fired off via cron.

Forum software (like Invision) aren't "time sensitive", like Promisance is. If a forum e-mail isn't sent right away, or in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc, it's not going to globally "break everything", where with Promisance, if it misses one turn run, everybody gets affected by it. Not to mention, most forum software fires off an e-mail as soon as a post is replied to :)

[Burninate]

 When I was first introduced to Promisance, the friend who wanted me to help him run it was using  a free server with no crons. For the most part (before I stopped working on it) I was able to get most of the stuff working without crons. Turns were awarded on log-in, though if you wanted you could put it on every page. If the turns were awarded every 10 minutes, and it had been 10.5 minutes, it recorded the time - 30 seconds so that users would not lose turns by quickly moving from page to page. For the most part I think the system was effective, I'm pretty sure it does slow down page returns for the ordering of scores (though I like it better when it's in real time). Even the "user online" thing is easily done without crons, like on Invision. Really, you can get around without crons, but you have to re-do a bit of promisance.

[Blood Wake]

 i think it is agreat honor that you posted in our forums, did you test out the game? do you like what retto has done to it? do you still have the code for like on of the first versions that never really worked? you should put it up and let people see how far preomisance has come since then. and can you put a link to RWL on your links page. that would be really cool

[calria]

 *snorts*
Look at all of us... falling all over ourselves worshipping the amazing Promisance guy.

Still... were it not for Promisance, my entire life the past two years would've been dramatically altered. I might've actually had to get off the idiot computer occasionally. *gasps in horror at the thought*

*worships the Promisance dude*

[Ashyra Nightwing]

 Wow.. If you hadn't created Promisance, I might have a life..

:D  :D  :D  

[caedo caelestis]

 Thank you, Blackhawk, that pretty much answers my question in any and every way possible. :D

Burninate did you ever attempt to use task scheduler or AT (on a WinNT server) to try to execute the PHP turn generation file?

Using task scheduler to execute the php executable in the php/sapi directory.

Example: "php.exe C:\%Webserver\public\promisance\turns.php"

Experimented with it a bit, not sure if it worked, cause I was running into other problems to begin with.