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Devlog #45 - Level 30
Play Now at https://fantasyonline2.com/!
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https://discord.gg/fantasyonline2
Amazon AWS bills most things hourly as either On Demand or Reserved. If you reserve a resource by committing to pay for hours over 1 or 3 years then AWS will give you a discount. Our MySQL database is running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, so reserving by pre-purchasing hourly credits is definitely the way to go.
I purchased AWS RDS MySQL 8 db.t3.micro instance type hourly points equal to 3 years of running time. As you can see from the chart above, I did this on February 20th. See where the blue bar turns to red?
Here's what that "reserved instance", which is actually reserved hourly points for the instance type, looks like in the AWS dashboard.
db.t3.micro is not very powerful but it's fine for Alpha 2. In July I'll be setting up a more powerful MySQL or Redis instance for data written and read by the game server and then I'll use this db.t3.micro for data that is only read from the server on startup.
Smartfox Server has an analytics module that compiles lots of data about users that log in. The map above shows where Alpha 2 players are coming from. USA and UK are at the top. This will be fun to see as time goes on and we start launching on other platforms this Summer.
While researching which EC2 instance type to use, I ran across some insane configurations that AWS offers. For $110 an hour you can run a machine with 448 vCPUs and up to 24 Terabytes of RAM. Holy crap, what a beast! Apparently these are for in-memory databases.
This week I'll be buying a 3 year savings plan for the EC2 c7g instance type. This will be used for the main game server until we outgrow it. I'm letting our c7g.large run on demand for a few days to see what the average hourly cost is so I can pre-purchase the right savings plan.
Did you know Kongregate is still up and running? I got developer access a few weeks ago and was just setting up the FO2 page today. Their APIs are exactly the same as they were 10 years ago, so it shouldn't been to hard to set it up. After Flash died they kind of disappeared for awhile and then reemerged awhile back after funding development of a Flash emulator!
https://blog.kongregate.com/happy-2023-kongregate-com-is-back/
https://medium.com/@kongregate/unlocking-kongregates-flash-games-65cca6805e6d
I had no idea. That's pretty dang cool!
They've also been busy redesigning large sections of the website. The only negative is that they were leaning hard into NFT/web3 nonsense in 2022 which is gross. Hopefully they're over that as I see all of that stuff as a giant scam.
Facebook doesn't really have a game ecosystem like it did 10 years ago and it's a hellscape so FO2 will never be coming to Facebook.
https://www.crazygames.com/ this site looks to be an option as they have a microtransactions API and it's quite popular right now apparently.
Would there be interest in putting FO2 on Steam? There is this widely used framework https://www.electronjs.org/ which should allow me to port the FO2 client to a native executable so that it can be distributed on Steam. It looks like a lot of devs have had success with https://www.electronforge.io/ to build/package electron apps but I'm sure I'll have to do a bunch of tinkering to get it working and then get it optimized. I'll delve into it further this fall.
Don't forget to comment on the T1 post. It's nearly done. Crafting coming soon.
We've got community art contest winners now available in-game.
Patch Notes #32 - Ogres & Skills
Most all level 30 skills are now in the game along with a couple mobs in Mirabella Cove. The art for the rest of the mobs and drops is nearly done so I'll be putting a lot of that in this week.
See you next patch notes!
Have Fun & Keep Gaming!