Major Command Game Upgrade

Game Upgrade: Risk game database code improvement, more medals release, new Singles Medals, new Rank Medals, and another important upgrade to the game. This will be an exciting month when it comes to improvements. Besides all the usual maintenance and fixes we constantly do, We have two new and one exciting updates worth mentioning.

1. Code Improvement

Marcos has discovered some code that has been unnecessarily using vast amounts of resources. He has proposed a 4 step solution to cleaning up the code and reducing server load. The First stage, and probably the most important, will be dealt with during this upgrade! Yay! 🙂 Further stages to make the code even more efficient will be implemented in future upgrades. Needless to say, I am excited that this resource hog was found and is being fixed!

2. More Medals Release

MORE MEDALS! As always, we are adding some more fun stuff. This time, it will be Medals for SINGLES and higher RANK Medals! Remember to check the Wiki for qualification and to see what you might be missing.

3. New Singles Medals

We have 2563 new Singles medals ready to hand out. Will you be one of the lucky skilled players to get one? Check your RECON TAB after the update!

4. New Rank Medals

We also have new Rank Medals to complete the higher end ranks!

Note to all troopers (players): The Ranks Medals will only be retroactively awarded for the Highest Score you achieved since October 17, 2014, we did not keep track of High Scores prior to that date. However, we think we found a way to determine your highest score prior to October 2014, but that algorithm won’t be in place until the next update, at which time we plan on awarding these medals again for players that missed out this time.

If you did not receive a new Medal during this update because your highest score was achieved before October last year, then just hold on for another month. If you did not receive a new Rank Medal because your score was never high enough, then go back and fight harder! Check out all war medals available at Major Command Risk game: Wiki list of rank medals and achievements.

Important Upgrade To The Game

There is one more thing to add. Because there will be some major code restructuring this time, there is a HIGHER THAN NORMAL chance that something will BREAK when we go back online, or shortly thereafter. But Marcos will be watching carefully and will repair problems as they occur. So just be aware of this when you wake up and something doesn’t work, we’re on it. Fingers crossed everything will go smoothly, but it’s impossible to tell!

Wish up luck!

Sheriff.

Risk Game Database Upgrade

We are planning another very important Risk game database upgrade. To avoid the risk of gameplay breakdowns this time, all the fixes will be happening behind the scenes and will not be noticed by players, except in the address bar after the game database upgrade.

Most improvements will revolve around redistributing the daily tasks so that the server processes don’t all work at the same time. The rest of the update involves the URL structure of the website. There should not be any noticeable difference in gameplay, but it does clean up the code considerably and allows us to integrate better in the future.

One significant difference you may notice is a change in our URL structure after the game database upgrade.

Previously the Games and Tournaments URLs looked like this:

www.majorcommand.com/Games/Game.php?gameid=1234
www.majorcommand.com/Tournaments/Tournament.php?tournamentid=1234

This will now be cleaned up to look like:

https://www.majorcommand.com/games/
https://www.majorcommand.com/tournaments/

We have also removed our subdomains, in exchange for a more canonical URLs.

www.blog.majorcommand.com,

it will now be looking like this:

https://blog.majorcommand.com/

This may cause some dead links in our forum and elsewhere in the site, but we will spend the next little while cleaning it all up.

Adding New Medals To Risk Game

As always, we are adding some more fun stuff. This time, it will be Medal for Fivers and Sixers. And they WILL be awarded retroactively!

Thank you!

Sheriff.

Getting Medals Back

Marcos, the programmer who does the coding to our Risk games has identified the reason why Medals have not been awarded to winners. A major fix will be implemented during our next update! The best part of this news is that the medals will be awarded retroactively! So no need to go back and replay all those Duck and Cover games. Remember that, Risk players get more medals for a win. The medals can be won by playing the classic Risk games against a single or multiplayer computer opponents. The upcoming update will resolve the long issue of the medals not being attributed to all Risk players.

There are currently 3166 medals ready to be awarded to players, and that number should grow by the time we implement the fix.

2999 of those are Map Explorer Medals
and the remaining 167 are 50 Consecutive Turns Taken Medals

We will also be adding Medals for the new Forgotten Kingdom map. So start playing and get ready to check your Profile page for the new medals!

Remember, though, this fix will take place during our next update. So as usual, there will be a warning posted, as well as a countdown clock, followed by the site going off-line, a lot of complaints about missed turns, and some words of encouragement. Then when we’re back up, we will have Medals! (fingers crossed)

As an added bonus, I asked if we could have the specific name of the Achievement Medal mentioned in the RECON tab when a medal gets awarded. It has always bothered me that a generic message “You have been awarded the  achievement medal” shows up, but you do not know which medal it was. Well, Marcos discovered that this was not the original intention either. That double space before the word “achievement” was meant to be filled by a medal name. Again, for some reason, this was not working. It turns out the table describing the medal and it’s name was blank. So we are filling in the missing fields with the correct information and soon the RECON tab will tell you exactly which medal was just awarded to you.

And for those who are technically minded, the reason for the Medals not working was because -> “The cron job is crashing while trying to allocate more than 256MB of RAM, which is set as the limit on the server.”

For those who aren’t technically minded -> “It was broken, now it’s fixed” 🙂

Sheriff.