The monetized events are only every other month (even).
(Cash-)Free (may very well be "for silvers") events are the alternate months (odd).

.

Problem is that StormFront is not running "just a text game" for you. It's got the window splits, the highlights, the HTML links, the clickable action menus... it is definitely not "just text".

Also, remember that you need to get EVERYTHING, for each character, across the connection.
NOT--as with a graphical game--just a pointer that says, "at these XYZ coordinates, on this directional vector, for this distance, display this visual effect from LibraryQ" (and then go reference the hard disk where all that stuff has been downloaded). Doesn't matter if that is "fireball moving" (and then the next command is the explosion), or "elf flying", the only thing moving across the pipeline is a small nugget of information, and the work is being done by your machine at the downstream end.
Seventeen lines of text for the Sigil Staff doing a double-flare with Ensorcel and set-bonus effect and elemental flare all going off bang? == 17 lines of crap that the server needs to put through, for every single person standing in the room.

>> Also stormfront works fine by itself. Your scripts running in the background are a large contributing factor. No one is running 3 instances manually without scripting.

To be fair, Stormfront is a bit of a bloated beast. The performance is definitely noticeable between Wizard FE and Stormfront FE even if you only play one character at a time manually. This is why I still use Wizard FE.

-- Robert

>> A mongrel kobold points at you and yells, "Mine! Chasin!"

Before this turns into something more, I'd like to explain more of what my role is. While I hold the role Product Manager / Producer with Simutronics, a better representation of my role is lead GameMaster as Wyrom. I'm a remote employee. I manage the day-to-day operations of the game. I do not make financial decisions for GemStone IV. I do not manage a budget. I do not have control over the number of paid events we run. What I do manage is translating the business goals to game goals as best as I can. I manage the event schedule and the type of events we run based on the targets I'm provided. I steer the general direction of the game and I try to create an achievable roadmap with the over fifty GameMasters we have. I stay active with regular GameMaster duties because I feel it is important to know how things are at all levels of staffing. I stay visible and approachable because I find it important to everyone involved. I play the game to get a feel for the difficulties as a player.

Requests like this I champion for often. Website, forums, front end, wiki, servers, etc. The things we can manage we do, such as the in-game code and now Discord. Simu moved toward the WebFE, and that's actually their priority front end. But with the lack of scripting, it lacks a lot of appeal. Unfortunately, there is a lack of staff tools with the WebFE as well, so most GameMasters don't use it either. Only in a pinch if I need to jump on do I use it.

As for 3 instances bogging you down, I run between 4 and 15 instances of the game. I rarely see it consume more than 1% of my system. I started typing up this response around 1pm ET and ran three endless loop scripts on 3 of my 8 instances and I never saw a change. I also don't see a lot of the lag that gets reported. We've had reports that there is lag between 8am and 9am every day, but our performance charts show nothing. The game-side lag has mostly cleared up with several updates we did. So my guess is something has to be going on with the client side in these cases. Have you tried to run your three characters without Lich installed at all? Not just off, but completely removed from your system?

---

Wyrom, PM

>>I would like to repeat my request for the in-game command "wiki"

I have requested it, and I'm going to check on it again. We create a WIKI command that simply gives you a url to click, but to have it launch off the command, we need some engine updates.

---

Wyrom, PM

I run 11 characters at the same time just fine. You should check out my streams sometime of me clearing out warcamps and see how fast the text flies by.

You should try out the WizardFE to see if this helps at all. I stopped using SF for several reasons, one of which is it seems to have a memory leak which isn't too noticeable if you're only running one or two accounts at a time, but it becomes more noticeable the more accounts you have running at once and the longer you stay logged in without relogging.

Also do you always have this issue while playing? Or just certain times? Do you use Lich? Because I can tell you when ;go2 is moving as fast as it can and all 11 of my characters are running it (or they are all grouped together and 1 character is running it) my CPU usage skyrockets, sometimes approaching 90%+, but this quickly goes down to negligible levels (each instance of Ruby using less than 1%, mostly 0.1%) and I have a pretty decent computer.

This was not meant as an attack in any way on Wyrom. As I said, I think he is doing a great job and am super happy with game feature progression. I completely understand the game is a business, and I dont want to get into a monetization discussion as we've been down that road many times now.


I use stormfront + Lich. Honestly at this point the features that lich provides are so great i'm not sure I'd want to play the game at all without it. It would be like going back to 1990 AOL days, might be fun and nostalgic at first typing out e, w, and navigating the game with a paper printed map, but that would get old fast.

So I agree with the comments whatever solution potentially overtakes the existing front ends would need to support lich, or build in it's own "lich" with player shareable scripts that can utilize deeper access to the game than the front-end scripting system (which i also love by the way).

I could try wizard FE to see if my performance improves. I never really liked the look of it and its missing alot of features that I like from SF, so I will have to see.

It's not a major issue, I am able to run 3x instances of SF+Lich, plus all the other apps I tend to have open at the same time.

What about an update? Does SF update itself automatically? I think in all the years I have played I've never seen stormfront updates either automatic or manual. Even just plugging some memory leaks, tuning performance a bit, etc. could be a huge improvement. It's pretty rare in the software industry you have a piece of software released with 0 (or even a few) updates over a 20 year span.

"reeking havoc" -- Wyrom

Sure is stinking up the place!

.

.

"Wreak" is the verb you're looking for. :)

The only thing that I miss from SF after switching to Wizard is the bounty window.

Everything else is peachy, and if I need a SF feature I just pop into SF real fast then back.

<I have very few complaints about Stormfront itself. It could definitely use some love but I certainly don't feel a new FE is a priority from my perspective. If they could just make some improvements it would go a long way.>


Pretty much my opinion as well. I don't wanna see any drastic changes to it, but it could def use some improvements like the RT indicator/spell active window being better synced to the game. The MAPS in it also need to at least include every town, if not every hunting area (go away with your lich suggestions for that)... at the moment that's useless if you're not in EN.

Starchitin, the OG

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

<You can, of course, not use Lich and the game is absolutely playable. As long as you don't need a graphical map. ;). I hear Rivers Rest is a great place not to have to use a map for. . . 0:)>

Of course it is, and I rarely need to consult maps once I've been to an area a time or two... cause I don't have someone else's script holding my hand.

Anything in Lich that a large number of players would leave the game without should be incorporated into the game/official FE, not ignored cause Lich already does it. New players shouldn't have to feel like it's necessary to go through the process of installing Ruby/Lich just to get started and the people that develop/maintain 3rd party features for games abandon their projects all the time for a whole host of reasons. It happened with Psinet and there's no reason it couldn't happen with Lich.... and there'd likely be a much bigger exodus if it did.

Starchitin, the OG

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

Exceedingly wise. Do boot-pee-ers get a bonus to wisdom?!

>>Anything in Lich that a large number of players would leave the game without should be incorporated into the game/official FE, not ignored cause Lich already does it.

Absolutely agree. Not practical, but absolutely true.

>>New players shouldn't have to feel like it's necessary to go through the process of installing Ruby/Lich just to get started

I try to make that better - but yes. 'Necessary' is just. . . sad.

>>and the people that develop/maintain 3rd party features for games abandon their projects all the time for a whole host of reasons. It happened with Psinet and there's no reason it couldn't happen with Lich.... and there'd likely be a much bigger exodus if it did.

And yes, sadly. But not while I'm around!

Doug

<Exceedingly wise. Do boot-pee-ers get a bonus to wisdom?!>

Nope.... everyone else gets a penalty!

To be clear, I don't have anything against Lich... I just get sick and tired of everyone pointing to it every time I make a suggestion or ask for input on training. That's why I put what I did in ()

Starchitin, the OG

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

Id be amazed if Simutronics open sourced anything ever.

As I gaze over the horizon, the wind tugs at my cloak and whispers, "Adventure" in my ear.

A squeaky halfling nearby asks, "Why you playing with orcs heads and troll rearends?!"

>>"reeking havoc" -- Wyro,

>>"Wreak" is the verb you're looking for. :)

Who's Wyro?

:)

My suspicion is that part of it has to do with overall internet latency. When there's multiple characters and instances running, if you have high amount of internet lag to the simu servers, it exponentially makes it worse.

I have around 200+ ms ping to simu servers and especially when ;go2 is going crazy fast across multiple instances, it super super bogs down. Not just go2 but whenever SF is trying to display a lot of stuff, really often such as during old REIM farming, warcamps, invasions, etc. What happens if that the STORY WINDOW is displaying a delay in where I am whereas I'm already at the new location (as narost/xnarost will actually show I've already arrived).

For long distances like from solhaven to the landing, there could be a literal 10s lag between when I arrive at a location and the room description finally scrolled enough to show I've arrived.

Running with minimal minimal lich scripts help but doesn't completely solve the problem. I've found certain scripts like uberbarv, etc tend to make this effect worse.

I'm honestly not expecting any solution to this problem outside of hoping new player FEs like illthorn or such get more developed to replace stormfront.

For what it's worth, the last time I played with an official FE was ... in 2006 for about a month before I decided I hated Avalon (it was practically impossible to get YASSE running, I only ever did it successfully once in my life). The last time I was really using Windows for playing more than a week or two was 2 decades ago, circa 2002.

I've been using third-party FEs since about 2007. I'm looking forward to Illthorn. As a dedicated Linux user for a long time, I rather realized in a game this size there was no hope to ask for something decent. Even if there was something, it'll be a WebFE (as stated) or Java and probably as slow as LibreOffice. My gaming experience is perfectly fine in Profanity.

When it comes right down to it for me, my computer is using almost entirely free, open source software, except a few drivers, Skype, and Zoom. It makes sense I'm using free, open source front ends, too. Lich is heavy because that's how Ruby is, in a word. It's very efficient for humans to code, but it's quite heavy on the processing power of the computer. All benchmarks show this clearly. We could write our scripts in C and they would be lightning fast, but they would be really annoying to code, debug, and share. I've gotten back into TI calculator programming for fun in C, and it's really amazing how efficient you can write code and databases when you need to. I fit the nuclear masses for every species (about 4000) into a program that's about 50 kb.

This is a common trade off in the industry. When a bank of mine updated a couple years ago, their webpage was so bloated it froze my oldish laptop that had 2 GB of memory and 4 cores. I switched banks. Web developers these days are too lazy to write anything fast on the user end. Why are boot times still as long in 2021 as they were in 2000? Because people are used to it, and there's little motivation to take the time to make things efficient. Everything is constantly under new development, and users always expect shinier software rather than realizing the programs we used decades ago were generally good enough.

It could be a lot worse when it comes to companies with software. I can't change my address on the bank's websites. My options are literally to use a smart phone (which is just a computer I don't have), go in, or send a letter by snail mail. Go try to use WhatsApp on a website: please scan the QR code with your phone!

There are around 5 official Front Ends Simutronics offer, which I have to say, despite their age, is pretty impressive by modern standards. There are ones that are fast and efficient, and ones that are slow. People complain Simutronics is stuck in the stone age, but there's no way one cannot run three copies of StormFront on a modern computer, when it ran fine a decade ago.

One thing we need to work on, which we have a team for, is the lich mapdb. There is no reason it needs to be 25 MB, but it is. However, should we be spending time to remove extraneous trash or make sure it actually works and more rooms are added? I am sure almost by universal acclamation, people want the latter.

Aaaaand there's a new version of lich in the works. No one is ever satisfied in the status of software. It's like Fight Club. Old? Too old. Databases? Too fat. Eye candy? Too blonde. New? It crashed.

>> I never bothered to ask, but I know exactly what the answer would have been: "Because it still WORKS. Reliably. And has 40+ years of information in it."

And, possibly, "20 years ago we realized we could no longer extract the previous 20 years of information from it... but it still runs, so." ;)

"if anyone runs across anything well enough made to pass on to future generations that isn't a knife, Zippo, or coffee machine" -- Starchitin

I have a steel T-square I can let you have, cheap. Also a completely non-biodegradable acrylic ruler. And any number of ratchet sets.

>> but I find it runs significantly slower than the previous version.

Lies! Slander, I say!

More seriously. . . details please? You can send to my play dot net. I'm very interested in this NOT being the case, and would enjoy all the detail you have to offer so I can correct this.

(Ruby version 2.6.6?)

Doug

Ah, understood. I look forward to hearing more, when convenient for you.

Doug