BrainFlint The spark of insight into tech, politics, start-ups, religion, or whatever.

Loading Issues Resolved – Part Deux

Hello All - after a couple weeks, we've finally tweaked a couple more settings and upgraded our servers to boost performance! I sincerely apologize to the community for the lackluster performance of Chess Buddies over the past couple weeks. Things are looking much better after these tweaks, and we're going to continue to work hard on making sure performance is as quick and responsive as it was when we first launched.

We found a major resource hog that was creating a lot of load on the server - the "Recently Completed Games". You'll notice the app no longer lists the 3 most recently completed games. Instead you can go to the "Completed Games" list to get a more extensive list of games completed. Removing this list has reduced load on the servers roughly 300% (yeah, it was that bad) - so you should all see a great boost in performance.

We also released a "Pro" version of Chess Buddies for $2.99. This version helps us support our server costs - which are upwards of $150/mo. now. With no ads, this is a way you can help keep the game and the community alive.

The Pro version will eventually receive additional features like downloading your game PGNs, enhanced tournament play, and new chess boards and avatars!

Thank you all for your patience in the last couple weeks. I've been dealing with a couple issues that haven't allowed me to give Chess Buddies the attention it deserved. I'm back now, though, and ready to take the game and the community to the next level!

Let me know how performance looks and if you want to lend your support, please think about purchasing Chess Buddies Pro!

- Mike

Server Issues Resolved!

Hurray! It looks like we've resolved our server issues - so everyone should start seeing Chess Buddies be a lot more responsive! Please let us know if you still see any issues but we've made a lot of tweaks to the server to speed things up. We've also put a ton of monitoring in so if things do start running slow, we'll get notified and get to fixing things!

I'm really excited to have Jeff on board now - he's an amazing developer and a Chess Master! So he'll be able to not only improve the game, but also start coming up with features that really improve the game experience!

Now that the server issues are resolved, we can finally get back to getting out some new features! Jeff is working on draw functionality and improving caching, etc. and I'm working on a web-based version of Chess Buddies so you can play your friends even though they don't have Android devices (and you can also see your game histories for those of you that want to do some more analysis!).

Once again, stay tuned and thank you all for being patient as we sorted out problems with our servers!

Mike

New Developer Guy and Server Issues

Hey there everybody.  New guy Jeff here.   I'm writing a quick post to let you know that we are aware of the lag time involved with connecting to the Chess Buddies server and we are hard at work trying to improve the responsiveness of our server.  It is unfortunate that my first blog post has to be about this issue, but we are hoping to get something figured out very soon!

In unrelated, but exciting other news, I'm pretty close to having the "draw by agreement" functionality implemented for the next release of Chess Buddies.  I've been getting my feet wet by helping Mike work on some of these easier features while he worries about some of the tougher stuff you guys have been asking for.  I hope you have upgraded to version 1.6.2 because that includes my first change: the removal of the quit option.  From now on, you either play it out or resign.

I'm really glad Mike brought me on board, and I look forward to getting to know the users of Chess Buddies.  As always, please leave any feedback and/or comments below.  Mike has worked really hard to get us this far all on his own time and dime.  Here's hoping I can help take some of the load off his back!

Thanks,

Jeff

Chess Buddies Outage! Oh No!

I wanted to let everyone know that the server Chess Buddies is hosted was unresponsive for roughly half an hour yesterday. This seems to have been caused by my hosting provider, not the code, as there was nothing I could to to resolve it except wait it out.

I wanted to apologize to everyone for that blip and let you know I'm putting additional monitoring in to the server now and am investigating new hosting options. Once I do find the root cause to the outage last night, I will post an update. No data was lost but let me know if anyone saw any other problems.

Boo Slicehost!

Chess Buddies v1.6.1 Released!

Version 1.6.1 has just been released - with a ton of improvements to the notification system, a huge reduction in the data requirements, and some speed improvements. There have also been a couple UI and stability tweaks. Here's the list of the big updates:

• View your most recently Completed Games
• Improved notifications - receive notifications of new chats, completed games, buddy requests, etc.
• Added vibrate/beep notification
• Added a line for a short "bio" about yourself
• Added light and dark themes to change notification icon for Gingerbread compatibility
• Remove unwanted buddies from your list
• Enhanced UI tweaks
• Reduced amount of data sent back and forth for quicker response time
• Coming Soon: Tournaments, web-based play and game histories, iPhone version?!

Soon, I'm going to be rolling out a web version of the game so you can play your non-Android friends. And there will be an improved elo system that improves the skill pairings.

I'm also going to be rolling out a premium option that'll allow you access to additional features (full viewing and exporting of game histories, unlimited concurrent games, tournaments and betting, and so much more).

Thanks to all of you for playing and enjoying Chess Buddies. Chess Buddies will always be ad and cost free - as long as I can pay for it - but I hope these premium options help give me some room to continue to make the game better!

Upcoming Enhancements in v1.6.1

This last release had an issue with notifications for chat. I'll be pushing out a release that fixes that soon so that you'll be able to properly receive notifications when someone sends you a message. Here's how it'll work:

If you only receive one message in that time, clicking the notification will take you directly to that conversation. If you've got several messages, it'll let you know how many you've got waiting and clicking the notification will take you to the list of Current Games. From this point, any games with chat messages you haven't yet read will show up with a little chat icon over the flag of your challenger - and you can go in to that game and review the conversation from there.

Also in this release, I'm adding a "Completed Games" button on the home screen that will list the last 10 completed games. You'll also receive notifications when a game is completed by your opponent (they beat you, resign or force a draw) and clicking that notification will bring you to this "Completed Games" tab.

Another great suggestion that will be in this release is the ability to add a short bio to yourself that will show up in the Leader Board and other areas where you see the user's details (thanks chromoly6).

Also, when you complete a game, you'll be presented with the option to "rematch" that player.

And there is a fix to let you remove buddies from your buddy list (you'll also receive notifications when you receive a new buddy request!).

Finally, I'm adding an option to enable Vibrate/Beep notifications when a new notification arrives - though it'll be off by default.

If there's anything else you want in this release, post a message here and I'll try to include it in v1.6.1 - which I'm targeting to release in 2 days tops.

Thanks,

Mike

Chess Buddies v1.6 Released

I've just released v1.6 of Chess Buddies. The biggest highlights in this feature release are:

One last thing - Chess Buddies now has a Facebook page! Help me promote the app by "liking" it and spreading the word - Chess Buddies Facebook Page

How Elo Rating is Calculated in Chess Buddies

Now that I've implemented an Elo Rating system in Chess Buddies, I wanted to explain a bit more about the logic behind it. First off, for people unfamiliar with the Elo rating system, you can read more about it here. Basically, it's a way to calculate relative skill levels between players based off their play histories - wins, losses, and draws.

There are various implementations - and I selected one very similar to that used on GameKnot.com with some slight variations. Here are the key points:

• Players are held in provisional status for the first 30 games. During this time, the K-rating used is 25.
• After the first 30 games, those with a rank below 2400 use a K-rating of 15, and those above 2400 use a K-rating of 10.
• Games timeout if a move has not been made in 3 days.
• If a game times out and there were at least 3 moves made, it counts as a win for the person who moved last, and a loss for their opponent.

Right now the system is fairly simple and I will be tweaking it again - as some people have some very very high ratings. I'm testing a couple tweaks to the rating system - so don't be surprised to see the ratings change slightly in the coming days/weeks.

I'd like to get feedback from everyone on this system. Once a final system is settled upon, I'll update the Leaderboard to order by rating rather than points.

Chess Buddies v1.5 Released!

Whew! Thank you to everyone that contributed their feedback - you all had some really great ideas. I made sure to incorporate as much as I could into this release - and thanks to your ideas, I think Chess Buddies has really matured and become a solid app.

Here are a list of a couple of the major changes included in this release. The Marketplace only allows 500 characters in the "What's Changed" field, so what's listed there is just part of what's been included.

• Added "Confirm Move" button that is enabled by default. Actually, there's no way to disable it. The more I played, the more I realized the "confirm" step doesn't add much time anyway, so why risk taking it off and making frustrating mis-clicks. So, "confirm move" is there to stay!
• Ability to play back your move history. This has been a big request - now you can go prev/next and play back your entire game, including games you've already completed!
• Find friends from your contacts and challenge them! This game is only fun when you have someone to play with - so I made it a bit easier to find your friends by integrating your Contacts list. If they don't have the app yet, you'll have the option to email them a link to download it for free!
• Implemented an Elo Rating system! I'm going to have an entire blog post about the methodology behind it. There's still a bit more that needs to be done on this, which is why I didn't sort the Leaderboard by it yet - its there for informational purposes only until I get it all straight!
• Ordered "Current Games" by last move - so you know which games you need to pay attention to first. This is helpful when you've got a bulk of games and need to know which deserves the most attention.
• Also showing your last 3 most recently completed games. This gets rid of the frustration a lot of people were having with not knowing how they lost or what happened to the games they were playing. Now, you'll see them show up in your list - only the last 3 for now, but as things get going, that number may increase.
• Added password/email for increased security! This is an important one - eventually you'll be able to take your data with you - so its important that you secure your username now - so if Chess Buddies ever makes it to another platform, you'll be able to sign in there and still maintain your game histories, etc.
• So many bug fixes! I'll list these out soon. It's late - so more later.

Let me know what you guys think of the latest release. And time to start building that wish list for the next version!