Warscale 71 - Warscale Closed Beta in progress

Hi all!
Long time with no post! I have been quite busy trying to solve the most obvious bugs in the game. Some friends are helping me in the closed Beta identifying a lot of problems. It has forced me to solve many things but everything feels more solid now. There were a couple major things which were solved as well.

Exterminated bugs
Fixed: A new area selection system is used which is at least 4 times faster than the previous solution.
Fixed: When a player logs into the game using an account which is being used (i.e. from a different station), the previous session will be disconnected.
Fixed: Damage to unit HP now uses a yellow font instead of red to avoid confusion with the red heart icon for health.
Fixed: problems while rendering some areas of effect.
Fixed: Tested the Skeleton giant damage against the wolf armor. The damage was dealt correctl on a 100% of the cases. Added a battle log system to aid reproducing internal bugs.
New feature: Manual is now packaged with the installer. Pressing F2 will open a web browser with the manual.
Fixed: The card rules text now avoids some duplicate entries.
Minor fixes and refactoring in the code of the spell system.
Fixed: The area of movement had a bug which allowed some units move out of the game board.
Fixed: Unit summoning area allowed the unit to be summoned out of the game board in some cases.
Fixed: Each time the mouse cursor changed, a new thread was created which consumed unnecessary resources.
Improved: Reorganization and refactoring of the game updater.
Optimized: Area rendering can collapse multipe tiles into a single object reducing rendering time.
Tested: 20 creatures in the game board with no significant framerate degradation.
New feature: Added a check to remember the login/password.
New features: New help system. F1 will detect the screen you are located in and launch the manual page in the website. F2 will open the local manual copy.
New feature: In the editors, you can now press Enter or Space to add the selected item in the upper list to the the lower list.
New feature: In the editors, you can now press Del or backspace to remove a selected item from the lower list and put it back to the upper list.
Server improvement: Lowered the CPU usage in the server from 80% to 2%. Server runs quieter and cooler now.
Server improvement: Keep alive packets keeps the database connections open when unused for long periods of time.


Dedicated server
I spent some time looking for a new laptop. In the process I gained a little more respect on the Apple laptops but not enough to justify the price. On the end I got an Asus G51JX-FHD laptop which is really a powerhouse and performs admirably. This means my wife moved onto that laptop and left me the old laptop, a HP Core2, which was immediatly transformed into a dedicated game server.

Now, one of the problems in any HP computer is the cooling system. They make quite nice laptops but they tend to overheat. Add two Torque dedicated server instances and it just overheats to over 55 degrees on each processor and the mainboard bridge and the GPU reaches 75degrees. Not good.

Fortunately we have the engine code. By hacking the GameDemo::main processs and adding a sleep call for 1 msec, the CPU usage got down from 80% to 2%. Now everything runs cooler and I can even allocate mor servers inside should I need them.

Anyway, I managed to take a full HD screenshot 1920x1080 resolution in the new laptop... and it looks fantastic!!!

New website features
I have added a screenshot page as some people requested.
www.warscaleonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&a...

Also all the account creation and invitation has been tested with multiple users. I also included an invitation page so you can invite your frinds to join you and get some gold in the process.

So when will the open beta start??? Soon... meanwhile if you have any requests for the website register then go to the forums.

Luck with your projects!
Guimo