Progress Report for 2018

The year is over, and it's good time to summarize the progress done on the game throughout the year.

 New features implemented

• Supporter rewards and Patreon integration
• New Test server and Russian speaking server
• Saving pony location and in-game state
• Lying down
• Flying and wing patterns

• New animation system to handle lying down, flying and transition animations when changing the pose
• Improved animation creation tool to enable creation of more complex animations
• Region system with support for large maps
• Bigger map with lakes, roads and new locations

• Support for multiple maps
• Lots of new accessories for head, face, neck, chest and back
• New manes, tails, eyelashes, ears, hooves
• Face, horn and ear patterns
• Pants
• Collectible toys

 (Xmas Meno by orchidpony)

• New lighting engine
• New music
• New winter environment
• New Halloween and Xmas decorations

• In-game settings screen
• Application mode support for android devices.
• Automatic handling of Cloudflare screen (You shouldn't end up in the situation where you need to reload the page to save your pony)
• Chinese and Japanese character sets
• Improved rendering performance - up to 5x speed-up
• Improved networking - up to 10x less packets sent and 2x less data
• Faster loading and joining to the game
• Improved server-side performance to handle almost million accounts, more than 7 million ponies and 20-30 thousand users online every day
• Improved memory packing to keep memory requirements the same despite adding new features and graphics

A lot of other fixes and improvements, mainly for:

• camera movement issues
• animations and animation transitions
• old browser issues and browser bugs
• collision detection
• teleporting due to lag or scripting
• accessibility issues
• mobile device related issues
• connecting and re-connecting issues
• countless more

 Other work done

• Re-working entire admin panel (It was designed to handle up to 5000 accounts, but had to work for almost a million accounts and more than 7 million ponies, It was also impacting performance of the login server slowing down character creation and joining to the game)
• Mostly finishing chatlog
• Working on supporter server
• Prototyping action-bar
• Improving developer tools like map editor, animation creator, animation state visualizer or sprite sheet generation utilities
• More administration tools to speed up administration and moderation work
• Updating and replacing old and no longer supported libraries
• Reorganizing sprites to handle larger number of accessories and customization options
• Improving server architecture and performance to handle increase from 500 to more than 3000 users online

A lot of time goes into handling issues that don't directly progress the development

• Dealing with fraud and fake credit cards as soon as we opened Patreon
• Resolving issues caused by Patreon after they broke their payment system
• Dealing with duplicate accounts (which we get more than a 100 every day)
• Dealing with harassment
• Dealing with false reports
• Fixing issues caused by scripting
• Dealing with browser bugs and issues (Some of them requiring weeks of research and programming time)
• Handling support - fixing broken accounts, restoring deleted ponies, etc (Fixing some of these issues could take hours to fix in the past, it's a lot better right now due to dedicating time into improving admin tools)
• Updating swear filters (Almost every update has some update to those and it takes a significant amount of time to verify that new filters don't impact non-swearing people)
• Dealing with raids and spammers
• Resolving problems with server shutdowns and disk space issues
• Constantly fixing bugs and extensively testing every change and feature since every update is immediately published to thousands of players and any bug in the code could ruin the experience
• Constantly optimizing code to ensure the game runs well and to avoid large numbers of players on older systems or especially mobile devices not being able to play the game anymore
• Always making sure there are no security issues and eliminating potential dangers, every feature and update has to be completely secure to avoid leaking private information or enabling hackers to hack your computer
• A lot of these issues are a result of Pony Town being a free online game and cannot be avoided without changing that (Pony Town was never planned to go public at this early stage and we did not expect nearly as many players as we have now. We still want to make sure the game stays online and is an enjoyable experience for everyone, and we have already adjusted to a lot of issues that were results of having unexpected amounts of players. However, this means we are now stuck developing the game while keeping up ongoing maintenance work at the same time which will keep taking a lot of time that we cannot spend on developing features)

Regardless, we plan to continue adding new features in the future, and we're currently working on making the map larger, adding supporter servers with friend invites, friend lists, an action bar and finishing chatlog. The chatlog is already on the test server but still has remaining issues that need to be resolved such as a system preventing harassment and impersonation.

Thank you all!

And finally, a big thank you to all the supporters, we wouldn't be able to keep it up without your help. Thanks to you I'm able to do this full-time, keep the game up and continue development. I hope everyone had a great start into 2019.  • c •