Want to beta-test Longbow?

Sorry for the radio silence over the past few weeks. We've been focused on our ongoing games as well as some pretty exciting stuff we have coming up on both the software and business sides of things.

I want to post an additional call for people interested in beta-testing GXC 2.0, codenamed Longbow, this summer. If you think you will have some time to play GoCrossCampus over the summer and really bang around with the system, email us at beta-testers@gocrosscampus.com.

Multiple Games

Quick update, if you haven't realized it already - users can now join multiple games!

This will free up many players of our current games (MIT, Wustl, JHU, Florida) to join the GXPB and vice versa. It's a big step toward building a community to allow users to get involved in many games at once, and we've definitely seen a demand for it thus far.

We have a couple fairly major changes coming soon, so look out for the corresponding posts.

Weekly Updates

Okay, so it has been a while. This is totally our fault. Matt got eaten by a bum on York Street, Sean finally went to sleep after seven months of UI development, and Jeff has actually been doing productive work instead of blogging. As they say, those who can't do, blog.

Anyway, I'm going to start updating the blog late every week, which is when we do weekly site updates with new code. This week, we have a fair number of sweet updates to the site:

- No more waiting five minutes for the map to update. There's no cron script running every 5 minutes, which means that all information updates continuously.

- Territory names and info displays on mouseover. This will allow you to easily identify the territories you own, so you can easily decide where to place armies.

- All personal info on the map is accurate. You can now see how many armies you have on each territory by zooming in.

- A better "Review Game" page after a game has ended.

- Lots of other changes that you may or may not notice.

Many more updates to come.

Almost...

Wanted to give everyone another update on getting some games back up. We're well into the testing phase now, and it should not be long at all before we can get RPI's game over to the new system. Once that happens, we'll want to make sure that everything is working as expected. Then, we can get back to playing and growing as planned. :D

We're committed to having everything work well once it goes back up, which is why we're taking a while with it. This is also why we might seem a little less focused on immediate problems than we were three weeks ago. Since we're switching systems soon, it doesn't make too much sense to spend our time on short-term fixes rather than making the long-term solution better.

If you need further explanation, just check out today's XKCD.

An Update

So, it's been almost two weeks now since we started putting games on pause. I think you're due an update.

First, it's probably a bad idea to unpause anything before Thanksgiving break is over. People want to think about getting the hell away from college. They want to think about sleeping twelve hours per day, eating turkey with the family and spending their Christmas shopping cash.

They don't want to receive a half dozen commander contact emails and worry about whether they placed their troops on the side of the library.

Plus, this just gives us more time to make the lag not suck. Every day we go before we unpause, we can spend our time optimizing, testing and fixing instead of figuring out why turn processing suddenly removed all commanders from their posts and replaced them with MIT students.

Also, a heads up: when the games restart, we are launching the first inaugural GoCrossVideoContest! It's open to all schools, but check out the RPI game page for more details:

GoCrossVideoContest details on RPI Game Page - Click "Learn More!"