Speed Up The Game – May Upgrade (Milestone 8)

Speed Up The Game

Speed up the game, more Assassin Medals, more Rank Medals for players who have reached Executive General or higher. From now on you would be able to play your favorite risk games at fast loading speed.
Play Risk game at higher speed

Update Summary

So anyone who was here last year is aware that this site had seen some troubled times. Most of us remember freezes, crashes, 0-troop bugs, and general unplayability. And to top it all off, we didn’t even get Medals!

Well, a lot of that is in the past now, this is not to say that things are perfect, there are still bugs, glitches, and logs, but for the most part, things are WAY better than they were and we are not constantly “rebooting the server”! – We also have medals now too! 🙂

Now the ultimate goal has always been a complete recode, but patching up the immediate problems has taken time away from reaching that goal. That is about to change. From this point forward, we will no longer focus on daily bug fixing, and we will go full speed forward with the recode. We think we have done as much as we can to make the site as “playable” as it can be under the current code structure, and now we are going to focus on making it totally awesome! No more risk of slow loading games.

The First thing

I would like to mention, is that we have hired a new coder! Georgy (a power Risk game player) will be assisting Marcos in this recode. Things should really speed up once Marcos has finished establishing a workable environment for him

Secondly

Speaking of medals, we have more Medals! We are introducing our absolutely gorgeous Assassin Medals! And yes, they will be retroactive, so if you have been slack in playing an assassin, it’s not too late to get your Assassin on!

Assassin Medals bronzeAssassin Medals silverAssassin Medals goldAssassin Medals onyx

Thirdly

Speaking of Medals. Back in March we introduced Rank Medals for players who have reached Executive General or higher. Those medals were only available to the player who reached that rank recently, however, with this current update, we should also be able to award those Medals retroactively. So if you were a Legion General 2 years ago, hold your hat, a new shiny Rank Medal should be coming your way!

Lastly

The donations drive will be ending shortly. We are close to 100 donors and expect to be there by the end of the month. If not, I will put a deadline of midnight May 31 on it regardless of the count. Which means that next month you should all be expecting extended memberships, exclusive tournament invites, and a new service award on your profile page. But that is not all you should expect, you should all expect great thanks and gratitude knowing that you have all helped fund the last 2 months of fixes and coding. That generous contribution has paved the way for us to not only have a semi-functional site but to also start a new code base and help move forward with some more awesomeness!

 

Thank you all again immensely for all your support!
You know the drill!
Wish us luck!

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Major Command Game Upgrade – April (Milestone 7)

Major Command Game Upgrade

Major Command Risk Game Upgrade

Once again, we are going for our monthly Risk game upgrade. This month will be less glamorous than previous upgrades, no new medals or bling, just hard work! Though we promise fun stuff next time! 😉

This time, we are focusing on decoupling more of our codebase and upgrading our WIKI (which you need to check out and read!).

Seriously! Check out some of our cool pages:

All the Great Medals and Achievements
Our MajCom Hall of Records
Our New Dice Odds Table
And a Sneak Peak at BeanZ’s New Map Explorer page! (work in progress)

You know the drill!

Wish up luck!
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Major Game Upgrade, More Medals – March (Milestone 6)

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!

Risk game upgrade Singles Bronze medalRisk game upgrade Singles Silver medalRisk game upgrade Singles Gold medalRisk game upgrade Singles Onyx medal

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.

Army Executive General MedalLegion General Medal ArmyArmy Grand General MedalGeneral High Comand Rank Medal

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!
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Game Database Upgrade – January (Milestone 4)

Risk Game Database Upgrade

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!

50 fivers medal bronze100 fivers silver medal250 fivers gold medal1000 fivers onyx medal

50 sixers bronze medal250 sixers gold medal100 sixers silver medal1000 sixers onyx medal

Thank you!
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Medals To Risk Players – October, 2014 Upgrade (Milestone 3)

More Medals To Risk Players

Nukes Medals To Risk Players

Risk players get more medals for a win. The medals can be won by playing the classic Risk game against a single or multiplayer computer opponents. This October’s update will resolve the long issue of the medals not being attributed to all Risk players. This fix was described in our previous Blog post: We are getting medals back, where you can find descriptions of all gameplay medals and how to earn them. The October’s upgrade will also resolve a number of other issues. Some of these issues are listed below:

 

Website Upgrades and Improvements

MAJ-63 Upgrade WordPress
MAJ-92 Create medals for the “The Forgotten Kingdom” map
MAJ-93 Add the missing map medals (Conflict: Africa, Australia, Middle East, Philippines, Duck and Cover, Sea of Japan and Balkan Peninsula)
MAJ-97 Upgrade the wiki
MAJ-98 Scoreboard changes
MAJ-101 Track the highest score for each user

Server and Performance improvements

MAJ-00 Install Nginx resource load balancer Executed
MAJ-00 Install Munin system monitoring tools Executed

Bug Fixes and Infrastructure improvements

MAJ-60 The medals are not being attributed
MAJ-87 Integrate performance monitoring tools

As you can see, we now have over 100 issues that have been resolved (or soon to be resolved) and we are adding new ones every day. Some of these improvements will not be noticed by the user, but will help create a solid foundation for a better site in the future. There’s a lot more to come!

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