Human Loadtest Tonight, Monday June 3, 10pm PDT!
Update: The loadtest was a success, thanks everybody! It was fun to hang out and chat, and a bunch of other indie game developers showed up as well, including Davey Wreden (Stanley Parable), Alexander Bruce (Antichamber), and David Rosen (Overgrowth), which made it in to a bit of an indie lovefest loadtest! Fun seemed to be had by all!
I wasn’t worried about the server’s performance this time, since the robots pounded pretty hard on it, I was mostly interested in how a crowded lobby would feel as a player. We hit 170 people at one point, which meant we filled up Headquarters and people created overflow rooms, so that was good. Chatting was crazy and hectic, as you’d imagine. I need to move the Practice button from the bottom of the lobby list or no one will ever see it. I found a few different things like that I need to fix, but best of all, I got a suggestion for fixing the lobby list moving around while you’re trying to select somebody, which is awesome! I ♥ my players!
Beta tester KY called this “Mount Loadtest”
Original Post: I’ve been trying to write this blog post for three days. I am…let’s just say…a little frazzled.
As you may have read, I recently finished optimizing the lobbyserver using robots in the cloud1 to loadtest it. I then moved everything (including this site) to a new faster server, all in preparation for opening up the Early-Access Beta. You’ll also notice, if you clicked through that last link, I’ve disabled beta signups now, and I’ve finally sent all the invitations, including around 5000 to people who had never been invited, and over 13000 to people who had been invited before, but hadn’t responded. If you missed signing up for the beta, don’t worry, you’ll be able to play very soon, just check back here or follow the game on one of the social media outlets you can see on the sidebar. I still need to send a few hundred here and there for various reasons, but I’m done with the bulk of the invitations, thankfully! I am so happy to be out of the “invite business”, and almost into the “just buy the game and play it now” business. Getting mail delivered on the internet in 2013 is a disaster.
On the topic of almost opening the beta, and all the new people playing the game, I want to run a loadtest with actual humans tonight. Yes, I know, this is short notice, but I’m barely treading water here, so it’s the best I can do right now! I need to test with lots of humans in case the robots didn’t do a good enough job pretending to be humans, testing-wise. Trust me, they were very boring to talk to.
Sorry this is not a great time for most of the US or the world. If you can’t log on that late, come earlier, and maybe everybody who can’t go late will make their own crowdsourced loadtest before the official one! But, if you can be on at 10pm, whether you decide to come early and play or not, please be there!
Here’s the player graph for the lobby over the past week. This is averaged data, so it’s a little low, but I’m told by zerotka, the resident SpyParty historian, that the max was 53 simultaneous at that spike on Sunday evening. Let’s see if we can beat that. Over 100 would be awesome, because the room size limit is 100 so it’d be nice to test that code with humans.
I may try to stream the loadtest at the SpyParty twitch.tv channel. Not sure how exciting watching a lobby list and chat is going to be, and not sure if I’ll be panicking and fixing things and have to turn it off, but we’ll see. I’m also going to play kcmmmm‘s 5000th game with him tonight at 10:30pm, and we’ll try to stream both sides of that.
Come play if you can! Thanks!
- ROBOTS IN THE CLOUD!!!! [↩]
I probably won’t have a chance to play tonight, but I’m logging in now and intending to leave it idle all night :)
Hah, okay, that’s like half-way between human and robot. :)
Cyborg power!
Side thought: the new lobby looks great! but people are logging in and out like crazy and it’s causing a sort of “jitter” in the online list. Makes it hard to mouse-over/click the people you want to.
Bug report in the forum so I can keep track of it please! :)
*grumbles and complies*
Here, does this help?
http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Food
I’ve never actually played a game and am at work!
I’ll remote connect to one of my machines at home, log in and leave it in the lobby :)
Sounds good, but you should come play sometime too! :)
I will! I promise!
I’m happy I FINALLY got my invite. I love it. Although I tried to log in today around 1:00 (Central time) and it wouldn’t let me. The website wouldn’t load either. But from what I played last night, it was a complete blast. One thing that bugs me is how hard it is to hit a moving target. I lost two games as the sniper because I was trying to shoot the spy, and he started walking, and I accidentally shot a civilian. But the game itself is a blast. I can’t wait fpr the updated graphics/models. Thanks for the invitation. $15 well-spent!
Huh, you’re the second person who told me they had trouble logging in today, except there were 30 or 40 people in the lobby all day, so I’m confused. Report a bug in the forums if it happens again (of course, you need to be able to access the forums to report a bug…), thanks! And, so glad you’re enjoying it!
> If you missed signing up for the beta, don’t worry, you’ll be able to play very soon, just check back here or follow the game on one of the social media outlets you can see on the sidebar.
Not all interested people will do this, or might plan to do it but forget about it. If I were you, I would add a subscription form to a ‘Notify me when the beta is open’ mailing list.
Also, I hope the load test went well :).
Can you move the practice option to be visible when they press escape? The one with the “Return to Headquarters” and “Settings”
Yeah, that’s the plan, but stuff like this is best in the Suggestions thread in the beta forum so I can keep it all in one place!