It was tempting to write a long long story about the subject, but because of exams and other important work, it was delayed - and can now contain some positive news too!
Offline
TMN went offline after some players decided to break it by using an exploit. Sad, but true. After a couple of days -and many supporting e-mails- we decided that TMN will definitely be back, but it will require some more changes than "small tweaks". This would be the time to make the changes we wanted to make a year ago!
Communication platform
For the meantime, we decided it would be nice to open up a communication platform for players to communicate with us as well as the other players. This system was created partially during my exams, and partially in the following days, but now it is ready! You can access it from the TMN home page at http://www.tmn2010.net
Future
As stated, TMN will definitely be back, but it may take quite some time. I personally think the end of May should be possible, but all that depends on how busy I am at uni, and how fast development goes in general. We will make changes that will stimulate game activity, allow faster game rounds (and ranking), and make playing a more fun experience in general. More information on that can be found on the Game Forum that's currently online.
Marc
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Killfest, Gambling and Reset
On the game forum as well as the in-game news page you'll find an announcement regarding the killfest, gambling day, and reset. It was quite difficult to schedule it, and I really had only two options; do it in January, or late March. I chose the first option.
The game will go offline on January 21st
There will be a killfest on January 22nd
There will be a gambling day on January 23rd
The next round will start on January 24th at 19:00 (GMT+1)
For more information, read the Game Forum or in-game News Page.
Marc
Update #1: Added launch time, which is 19:00.
The game will go offline on January 21st
There will be a killfest on January 22nd
There will be a gambling day on January 23rd
The next round will start on January 24th at 19:00 (GMT+1)
For more information, read the Game Forum or in-game News Page.
Marc
Update #1: Added launch time, which is 19:00.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Christmas and Snowballs!
On December 14th we announced our holiday schedule, which included the following items:
- Dec. 14 – All I Want for Christmas Poll
- Dec. 14-25 – Christmas Gift Giveaway
- Dec. 18-19 – Jail Break Parties 2PM, 6PM, Midnight
- Dec. 20 – Drug Transportation Unveiling
- Dec. 22-25 – Snowball Fights
- Christmas Eve (Dec. 24) – Lcuk’s Christmas Riddles
- Christmas Day (Dec. 25) – Peace On Earth, 24 hour ceasefire
The Drugs Transportation Missions launch went quite well, although some players at first didn't realize it's an extra way to rank, and only drugs will be removed from the Drugs & Booze page. Just before the launch the kill records page was renamed to Personal Stats, which includes counters and timers for DTMs, OCs, Crimes, GTA. This page may in the future be used for other statistics as well.
At this moment the Snowball Fights are active, and proved to be quite a lot of fun! Using a special page (link is on the game forum) players can throw virtual snowballs at other players, who will receive a notification, and (in most cases) a small gift (some money, a credit, a car). At the same time, the Shoutbox is updated with a similar notification, visible to all other players.
In addition to the snowball throws in the shoutbox, we figured it would be nice to disable these messages too. Today (24-12-2010) I made the change; two buttons to toggle visibility of jailbreaks or snowball messages were added. While doing this, I also updated the shoutbox in general, allowing possible new features such as network chat and/or personal messages to players. These possible updates haven't been scheduled for creation yet.
Finally, I would like to wish all TMN players (and other readers) a merry Christmas and a great 2011!
Marc
- Dec. 14 – All I Want for Christmas Poll
- Dec. 14-25 – Christmas Gift Giveaway
- Dec. 18-19 – Jail Break Parties 2PM, 6PM, Midnight
- Dec. 20 – Drug Transportation Unveiling
- Dec. 22-25 – Snowball Fights
- Christmas Eve (Dec. 24) – Lcuk’s Christmas Riddles
- Christmas Day (Dec. 25) – Peace On Earth, 24 hour ceasefire
The Drugs Transportation Missions launch went quite well, although some players at first didn't realize it's an extra way to rank, and only drugs will be removed from the Drugs & Booze page. Just before the launch the kill records page was renamed to Personal Stats, which includes counters and timers for DTMs, OCs, Crimes, GTA. This page may in the future be used for other statistics as well.
At this moment the Snowball Fights are active, and proved to be quite a lot of fun! Using a special page (link is on the game forum) players can throw virtual snowballs at other players, who will receive a notification, and (in most cases) a small gift (some money, a credit, a car). At the same time, the Shoutbox is updated with a similar notification, visible to all other players.
In addition to the snowball throws in the shoutbox, we figured it would be nice to disable these messages too. Today (24-12-2010) I made the change; two buttons to toggle visibility of jailbreaks or snowball messages were added. While doing this, I also updated the shoutbox in general, allowing possible new features such as network chat and/or personal messages to players. These possible updates haven't been scheduled for creation yet.
Finally, I would like to wish all TMN players (and other readers) a merry Christmas and a great 2011!
Marc
Monday, December 6, 2010
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Activity, Shoutbox
And again it's been way too long since I last wrote something. This time I'll cover the recent activities on TMN, for those who missed it (and those who are just generally interested to see the numbers).
Halloween
Alright, it's been over a month, but it was fun anyway. Devious thought it'd be fun to make collecting a prize somewhat more interactive, so we used a pumpkin to click on in order to claim a prize. I had a friend create an animated 'wheel of fortune' kind of thing, which worked quite well (although there was a bug somewhere...). In the end 28% of the participants got "Scared to death by Marc" and lost 2% health, but the remaining 72% received a better prize. Other prizes included were 5 expensive cars (8%), 5 semi-expensive cars (8%), 5 bombed cars (15%), $1,000,000 (10%), some Experience Points (9%), and 20 credits (11%). The remaining players received bullets, and a few were in the race for a network. In total 546 players participated in the Halloween giveaway.
Thanksgiving
Because Thanksgiving isn't really a weekend, and the day wasn't a very good one for me personally, we spread it over 2 weekends. During the first weekend we did some forum giveaways (first 10 to post, etc), and let players shoot players with the names of former moderators for a GMW reward. Also everyone who did an OC during the weekend was able to collect $1,000,000 from a special page (188 players did this).
During the second weekend we set the OC timer to 6 hours instead of 8, and did some more giveaways. Using another special page where players could claim a prize, we gave 356 players a total of 19 OCs with Devious and Marc, 290 Arnages 1685 Credits, 14000 Bullets, more than $865,000,000 (exact number is unclear because of less structured giveaways), and 500 lottery tickets.
Activity
Shortly after the game economy hit 16bil, partially thanks to our giveaways, it happened... SOA and SI emptied their AWPs and shot hundreds of high ranked players. The economy dropped to below 10bil, and we were unsure on what would happen. Some players had no hope and quit, others stayed and are now quietly ranking. To stimulate the economy, we did some giveaways during Sinterklaas (google it, it's a Dutch national holiday), and increased the money you get from OCs and GTAs. We are now trying to think of and implement ways to keep players interested, and make them realize this was only the first half of the game: the second half is almost starting....
Shoutbox
A new feature was added to the game, even though it isn't finished yet: the shoutbox! There's a preview inside the game forum topic, but you can open the pop-up (looks better and is easier to use than the preview) by clicking a link in the right top of all forum topics. There is also a link on the jail page, because the shoutbox displays all jailbreaks as well! This has been requested ever since we disabled the "jail break messages" a few years ago, and now it's live! Devious lead the first couple of jail break contests, and it's up to the players to continue it now. I will keep improving it, and eventually it will most probably replace the Game Forum topic. Other ideas we have for it include notifications of new messages, kills, OC inviations and status and possibly private chats.
Marc
Halloween
Alright, it's been over a month, but it was fun anyway. Devious thought it'd be fun to make collecting a prize somewhat more interactive, so we used a pumpkin to click on in order to claim a prize. I had a friend create an animated 'wheel of fortune' kind of thing, which worked quite well (although there was a bug somewhere...). In the end 28% of the participants got "Scared to death by Marc" and lost 2% health, but the remaining 72% received a better prize. Other prizes included were 5 expensive cars (8%), 5 semi-expensive cars (8%), 5 bombed cars (15%), $1,000,000 (10%), some Experience Points (9%), and 20 credits (11%). The remaining players received bullets, and a few were in the race for a network. In total 546 players participated in the Halloween giveaway.
Thanksgiving
Because Thanksgiving isn't really a weekend, and the day wasn't a very good one for me personally, we spread it over 2 weekends. During the first weekend we did some forum giveaways (first 10 to post, etc), and let players shoot players with the names of former moderators for a GMW reward. Also everyone who did an OC during the weekend was able to collect $1,000,000 from a special page (188 players did this).
During the second weekend we set the OC timer to 6 hours instead of 8, and did some more giveaways. Using another special page where players could claim a prize, we gave 356 players a total of 19 OCs with Devious and Marc, 290 Arnages 1685 Credits, 14000 Bullets, more than $865,000,000 (exact number is unclear because of less structured giveaways), and 500 lottery tickets.
Activity
Shortly after the game economy hit 16bil, partially thanks to our giveaways, it happened... SOA and SI emptied their AWPs and shot hundreds of high ranked players. The economy dropped to below 10bil, and we were unsure on what would happen. Some players had no hope and quit, others stayed and are now quietly ranking. To stimulate the economy, we did some giveaways during Sinterklaas (google it, it's a Dutch national holiday), and increased the money you get from OCs and GTAs. We are now trying to think of and implement ways to keep players interested, and make them realize this was only the first half of the game: the second half is almost starting....
Shoutbox
A new feature was added to the game, even though it isn't finished yet: the shoutbox! There's a preview inside the game forum topic, but you can open the pop-up (looks better and is easier to use than the preview) by clicking a link in the right top of all forum topics. There is also a link on the jail page, because the shoutbox displays all jailbreaks as well! This has been requested ever since we disabled the "jail break messages" a few years ago, and now it's live! Devious lead the first couple of jail break contests, and it's up to the players to continue it now. I will keep improving it, and eventually it will most probably replace the Game Forum topic. Other ideas we have for it include notifications of new messages, kills, OC inviations and status and possibly private chats.
Marc
Monday, October 25, 2010
About me
As many players have asked questions about me, I thought I'd dedicate an entire blog post to it. I hope you'll enjoy reading it!
My name is Marc, and I'm 22 years old (19-05-1988). I live in the Netherlands, and have a Bachelor's degree in Information and Communication Technology (BICT). I'm currently in university (Radboud University Nijmegen) doing a MSc in Information Science, which will probably take another 2 years. It is fair to say that I got my degree partially thanks to TMN and its creator DragonCurse.
How it started
Back in June 2004, DragonCurse asked me if I was interested in testing somehing. I ended up testing and later managing the game we now know as TMN. We grew from 0 players to 2200 players online at the same time within a year, and even though we had our share of corrupt moderators, it was a great time.
Development
With no knowledge of programming, databases or even webdesign, DragonCurse trusted me with administrator access to the server (this was early 2005). He explained the (very) basics of getting data from a database, and soon I was on the way learning T-SQL. About 2 years later (January 2007, I was in the first year of my ICT study), I started programming in ASP.NET. I e-mailed my first code updates to DC on January 12th 2007 (although I may have updated more before that).
Misjudging
Because we were still too young to handle a successful game, TMN kept shrinking... From 2200 players online we shrunk back to less than 500 online, so halfway through 2007 we thought it'd be good to launch a new version of TMN: tmnX. We launched the game in January 2008, but unfortunately we misjudged the TMN players, who really didn't want another game! After 8 months of tmnX we decided to pull the plug and update TMN to a version we could manage: TMN Classic was born. TMN Classic was a 90% recoded version of TMN that performed a lot better and was easier to manage.
More recent
In 2010 the game had shrunk to less than 12 players online at times, and since I was in the middle of graduating (February - June 2010), I didn't have much time on my hands. Eventually TMN went offline. Because I personally wasn't done with TMN (and realized the players weren't either), I stepped forward and started working again. The rest can be read in the previous few blog posts.
Future
We can't predict the future, but we won't expect any luck (like in 2004). For that reason we'll be carefully planning new features, advertising, updates and promotional events such as holiday weekends. From the credit purchases we don't need to worry about server fees, but we do need to make sure the game attracts new players and keeps its current players. We may continue to work with DragonCurse and his new game (TMN4).
Marc
My name is Marc, and I'm 22 years old (19-05-1988). I live in the Netherlands, and have a Bachelor's degree in Information and Communication Technology (BICT). I'm currently in university (Radboud University Nijmegen) doing a MSc in Information Science, which will probably take another 2 years. It is fair to say that I got my degree partially thanks to TMN and its creator DragonCurse.
How it started
Back in June 2004, DragonCurse asked me if I was interested in testing somehing. I ended up testing and later managing the game we now know as TMN. We grew from 0 players to 2200 players online at the same time within a year, and even though we had our share of corrupt moderators, it was a great time.
Development
With no knowledge of programming, databases or even webdesign, DragonCurse trusted me with administrator access to the server (this was early 2005). He explained the (very) basics of getting data from a database, and soon I was on the way learning T-SQL. About 2 years later (January 2007, I was in the first year of my ICT study), I started programming in ASP.NET. I e-mailed my first code updates to DC on January 12th 2007 (although I may have updated more before that).
Misjudging
Because we were still too young to handle a successful game, TMN kept shrinking... From 2200 players online we shrunk back to less than 500 online, so halfway through 2007 we thought it'd be good to launch a new version of TMN: tmnX. We launched the game in January 2008, but unfortunately we misjudged the TMN players, who really didn't want another game! After 8 months of tmnX we decided to pull the plug and update TMN to a version we could manage: TMN Classic was born. TMN Classic was a 90% recoded version of TMN that performed a lot better and was easier to manage.
More recent
In 2010 the game had shrunk to less than 12 players online at times, and since I was in the middle of graduating (February - June 2010), I didn't have much time on my hands. Eventually TMN went offline. Because I personally wasn't done with TMN (and realized the players weren't either), I stepped forward and started working again. The rest can be read in the previous few blog posts.
Future
We can't predict the future, but we won't expect any luck (like in 2004). For that reason we'll be carefully planning new features, advertising, updates and promotional events such as holiday weekends. From the credit purchases we don't need to worry about server fees, but we do need to make sure the game attracts new players and keeps its current players. We may continue to work with DragonCurse and his new game (TMN4).
Marc
Monday, October 11, 2010
Polls, new possible feature
On October 8th a poll system was introduced to the TMN players. This system allows the TMN staff to attach a poll (with unlimited amount of answers) to a topic, so all players can vote (once). As a first test, we asked players how old they are. The result of this poll (after 3 days) is shown on the image below.
This poll was only the start though! On 11-10-2010 another poll was added to a forum topic. In this topic a new feature is explained, and player opinions are requested through replies and the poll. The idea s the result of a brainstorm session the TMN staff had, and may be a fun addition to the game. I won't explain the feature in this blog post, but it is related to Drugs, and it will function as a middle-type crime that gets more XP than GTAs and Crimes, but less than an OC.
Marc
This poll was only the start though! On 11-10-2010 another poll was added to a forum topic. In this topic a new feature is explained, and player opinions are requested through replies and the poll. The idea s the result of a brainstorm session the TMN staff had, and may be a fun addition to the game. I won't explain the feature in this blog post, but it is related to Drugs, and it will function as a middle-type crime that gets more XP than GTAs and Crimes, but less than an OC.Marc
Friday, October 1, 2010
Upgrade 1, 2, 3!
Moving the database
Yesterday we transfered the database to the VPS, which (long story short) caused a rollback of roughly two hours, and about 4 hours of downtime. Since I was in uni, I couldn't do much to sort it out any faster. When I got TMN back online it lagged a lot, so I was forced to disable jail. We decided to move the files and the domain (tmn2010.net) to the VPS on Friday morning, and hoped that would solve the lag...
From hosting package to VPS
Unfortunately this VPS was not powerful enough, causing even more lag! CPU usage was at 100% constantly, and every single file update by me would cause 5 minutes of even more lag! Even for me it was too slow to handle, so I kept jail closed and ordered another upgrade.
This upgrade really seemed a lot better (doubled the memory, and opened up another CPU core), and it was quite responsive at first. Unfortunately this only lasted until (you guessed it) jail was reopened! This was simply too much, so jail was once again disabled, and the 3rd upgrade was ordered. This upgrade will have again double the memory, and another CPU core opened. We're now waiting for it to become active (the hosting provider needs to read his e-mail first ;))
Marc
Yesterday we transfered the database to the VPS, which (long story short) caused a rollback of roughly two hours, and about 4 hours of downtime. Since I was in uni, I couldn't do much to sort it out any faster. When I got TMN back online it lagged a lot, so I was forced to disable jail. We decided to move the files and the domain (tmn2010.net) to the VPS on Friday morning, and hoped that would solve the lag...
From hosting package to VPS
Unfortunately this VPS was not powerful enough, causing even more lag! CPU usage was at 100% constantly, and every single file update by me would cause 5 minutes of even more lag! Even for me it was too slow to handle, so I kept jail closed and ordered another upgrade.
This upgrade really seemed a lot better (doubled the memory, and opened up another CPU core), and it was quite responsive at first. Unfortunately this only lasted until (you guessed it) jail was reopened! This was simply too much, so jail was once again disabled, and the 3rd upgrade was ordered. This upgrade will have again double the memory, and another CPU core opened. We're now waiting for it to become active (the hosting provider needs to read his e-mail first ;))
Marc
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)