Website Updates Infomation
Hello Players!
We just moved our blog to a new server, and we need about 40 or 50 players to help test the Login mechanism.
It’s simple to help!
That’s it!
If it works, great! Thanks for helping!
If for some reason you can not login, or you can not post a comment, then please report any problems HERE, IN THE FORUM.
Thank you!
We here at Major Command, (The best online Risk game website ever!) we were very excited and surprised when a long time player, Lulzim, contacted us with an idea for a new map. Actually, it was more than just an idea, he had practically finished it! – And within the course of a few weeks, we had the map uploaded, and ready to test with our Play Testers! If all goes well, we will have this map available to all our players within a couple weeks.
Meanwhile, please read more and welcome the newest addition to our map family – Barbarossa!
This map is beautifully designed and has a style reminiscent of the classic Risk board game map. Barbarossa utilizes all the fun features that make online Risk a fun game to play.
Barbarossa features several small quick Commands that will keep the game fast and tight. It will be a challenge for even the most experienced players for a long time to come!
Some features include:
And what is even more exciting, are these amazing new medals Lulzim designed for this great Risk game map!
Soon you will be able to take the challenge to be the first player to capture these great medals and be victorious in Operation Barbarossa!
Don’t forget to give a big shout out to a Lulzim for all his hard work in creating this newest online Risk game map!
Have fun everyone!
Sheriff.
We have just updated our RISK Gaming Blog from an old-school fixed and rigid website format, to a new mobile responsive and tablet friendly gaming blog!
With the help of jdinbc over at Great Bear Web Designs, all our blog pages, RISK board game reviews, and player’s stories, can now be easily viewed on a phone or tablet. The game blog still has some styling issue to iron out, namely the player’s info on the dogtag, but we are working to fix all lingering issues. 🙂
In the future, we are also planning to migrate our RISK Game Forum and our WIKI pages to a mobile friendly and responsive design too. Which will be great to view on all widescreen computer monitors of course, but more importantly, it will be great to view on all smartphones and tables. Now you can catch up on all the important Major Command Game stuff when you’re on the go! 🙂
So the big question is…
Well the short answer is… “kinda”. Playing RISK on a mobile phone is still a bit of a challenge. The RISK maps are quite large and viewing all the territories on a small screen is somewhat of a challenge. Playing RISK for now will remain best on a desktop or laptop, but we are making forward steps so that the gaming experience will be better when you are away from your home computer, and you quickly want to check on your games using a phone or tablet. Currently, the biggest improvement is our ongoing conversion from FLASH to HTML5. Those who have participated in our BETA game testing may have noticed the the new RISK game engine loads quickly and without issue on all mobile phones and devices. And the maps all pop up in a breeze!
The Major Command Android App designed by 5battalions is almost ready for launch. We’ll post more about this is a seperate blog, but I’ll give you a quick rundown now. So for now, when using the Android App, a player will be able to receive turn notifications, new private messages notifications, and access the Blog, Forum, and their player’s profile page directly from the app.
Currently the app is mainly a handy tool to receive notifications on your phone and to have quick access to the website. It does not make the game any more playable on a phone then it already is. Though more features may be added in the future, if 5battalions is up for the task! 😉
The app will be available in the Google Play Store shortly.
As for the new game engine, we only has one more rule to implement. After that, all the maps should be playable. The challenge now is to integrate the new engine with the current website. Namely in terms of integrating player’s scores, the scoreboard, the tournament section, the game results page, and all those things we take for granted at the moment. We also still need to clean up the UI a bit and implement Diplomacy as a feature.
There is a lot that will be unrolled in the coming months, so stay tuned!
Thanks for playing and have fun!
It’s been a while since we posted an update on the state of the website development, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t happening! So read on to find out what we’re up to…
There are two things we are working on:
1) The new game engine
2) An Android app
We’re making an Android App! But before you get too excited, please realize that the Major Command Risk Game is not a game you can play with ease on a mobile device. The user experience with the maps just won’t translate well on a small screen. It will most likely always remain a desktop, or tablet game…
So having said that, the Android app will be a companion to the desktop game. It will basically be a turn notification companion tool as well as a link and eventually some other useful stuff. Currently you will be able to receive turn notifications, new messages notifications, and have links directly to the blog and forum from your phone or tablet. This should make checking up on turns a slightly easier process. And if things go well, we may even add a few more functions.
A big thanks should go out to 5battalions who single handedly created the entire Major Command Android app!!
We’ve been testing the new game engine for a while now, and the basic gameplay is smooth as silk! So far we have 70+ players who have invited to test the game engine, not all have joined, but the ones that have accepted the challenge have been providing excellent feedback in the forum. More players will be invited to test the new rules as we roll out the remaining game maps and features.
DONE:
So far we have deployed and tested the following maps:
And we have created and tested the following game rules:
We still need to create and deploy the following Map Rules:
And then we will deploy the following maps once their corresponding rules are implemented…
Mexican American War (One-Way Assaults)
Europe Massive (Conditional Auto-Deploy)
Rivals of Rome (Conditional Auto-Deploy)
Forgotten Kingdom (Conditional Auto-Deploy)
Conflict Africa (One-Way Assaults, Conditional Auto-Deploy)
Mars (Conditional Auto-Deploy)
Middle East (Flex Commands)
Balkan Peninsula (Flex Commands)
Australia (Flex Commands)
Far East Asia (Flex Commands)
Sea of Japan (Killer Neutrals)
Nukes (Conditional Auto-Deploy, Killer Neutrals)
1984 (One-Way Assaults, Conditional Auto-Deploy, Killer Neutrals)
12 Domains (Conditional Auto-Deploy, Killer Neutrals, Starting Positions)
Land Rush (Conditional Auto-Deploy, Killer Neutrals, Starting Positions)
And if you are wondering what the hell is “Land Rush”? Well, it’s our newest Risk game map, and it’s MASSIVE! In fact, it is soooooo big, that the current game engine can not handle it, so it will only be released once the new game engine is complete and deployed.
Here is a sneak peek at the new Risk game Map!
Remember to give a big thanks to 5battalions for his great work on the Android app, and is you are on the Donors list, stay tuned because you turn to Beta test will be coming very shortly.
Thanks!
So after posting an update last week, we have even more (and better) news to update you with. As you can gather by reading the title, we have cut the loading times of Classic Massive and Europe Massive by 70%!
Previously, on a good day, Classic Massive would take 50 or 60 seconds to load if you were lucky, and sometimes not at all. Well those days are gone. We have brought that loading time down to 16 seconds. That’s a 70% improvement.
After the database and game archiving Marcos did last week, we noticed an odd anomaly. Classic Massive and Europe Massive showed no signs of improvement at all. All the other maps loaded in around 6 seconds, but those two maps still took a full minute to load. So we did some digging in to what made those two maps different from the rest. Because the issue rests with how Adobe Flash handles the data, there was no way to analyse what was happening in the Flash code in your browser, so we started looking at some external variables.
We always assumed that Classic Massive and Europe Massive were slow to load because they has the most regions and territories, but a comparison of the maps showed that 12 Domains was almost the same size and has almost the exact same number of regions. However, 12 Domains took only takes 6 seconds to load, while CM and Em took 50 seconds. Obviously there was something we were missing, something other than size and regions….
Long story short, we figured out what Adobe Flash was having problems with and we immediately worked on fixing the issue. An unfortunate result is that you will have less Troop Colors to choose from, but the good news is, those Maps now load faster then they ever did!
The other good news is, which you already know, we have moved away from Adobe Flash and our new game engine will be in HTML5. Meaning no more compatibility problems or other issue associated with Flash. 🙂
Last week, some players depending on your physical geographical location, may have experienced missing data under their Intel tab when once the map loaded. This was caused by our CDN (Content Delivery Network). We use CloudFlare which have servers located around the world to help deliver our images and data to you quicker. For some reason, which was never explained to us by CloudFlare, some of their servers, but not all of them, caused this error to happen with our game. It only affected some players but not others, which is what made it so odd to figure out. Somehow Marcos connected the issue with CloudFlare which made it easier to solve. Turns out that a setting on their control panel that we have been using for 4 years, suddenly started causing problem. Once we narrowed it down we simple turn off that setting and everything is back to normal.
Back in the 90’s someone once told me that a person can make a mistake, but it takes a computer to really f things up.
Nonetheless, Marcos is going away on a well deserved break for a week, but he is leaving us with a working and fast site. I just hope nothing unexpected happens in the next 7 days!
Have fun and Enjoy the games!
P.S. It’s also my birthday.