Poker Mavens 2.51 Released

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Kent Briggs
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Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Poker Mavens 2.51 Released

Post by Kent Briggs »

Upgrade Patch:

http://www.briggsoft.com/patches.htm

New Features:

Added "Remove no-shows" setting to tournaments for automatically removing absent players at the end of the first level. Blurb from the help file:

Remove no-shows - Set to Yes to automatically remove "no-show" players from the tournament at the end of the first level. A no-show player is someone who registered for the tournament but never pressed their Ready button once it started. It does not matter if they are logged in or not. Their buy-ins and entry fees will be added back to their accounts and the prize pool will be reduced accordingly. All chips in their stacks will be removed from the tables except for those that were bled off from the blinds. This feature is best used with freeroll tournaments.

Eliminated client/server version mismatch errors by including a Version parameter in the HTML wrapper. This was especially a problem for sites that embedded the game in a frame in their own web page. And made worse by players using Internet Explorer which does a crappy job of managing its cache correctly. Now the browser sees "PMClient.swf?Version=2.51" instead of just "PMClient.swf" and treats it as a new file (which it is) instead of using the old one stuck in the cache.

Fixed custom graphics updating issues by including a CRC parameter on graphics references. This is related to the caching problem described in the previous item. But since graphic files don't have versions associated with them, I just have the server pass the CRC32 value for the file and now the http reference will look something like this "http:PMTable?Crc=12345678" instead of just "http:PMTable". So when you update your custom table graphic, it gets pulled by the browser right away because the Crc parameter will be different from the one it has cached.

Improved performance of Accounts page in Remote Admin interface by adding search and paging navigation features. Now if you have tens of thousands of player accounts, this page in the remote admin interface won't take forever to load (or just crap out completely in Internet Explorer). By default it displays 100 accounts at a time but you can change that to as small as 10 and as large as you want. Plus there's now a player search box that will take you directly to that player's page.

The server's "\avatar" link (used for API functions) now serves custom avatars when specified. Previously it only spit out the default avatar set even if you replaced those with the "Avatar folder" setting.

Updated API Examples page at http://www.briggsoft.com/docs/pmavens/A ... ew_account with new Create New Account (NewAcct.php) example that can now display avatars in SWF format. This is related to the previous item since custom avatars can (and should) be in SWF Flash format.

Added "RingChips" parameter to AccountsGet and AccountsList API commands for showing a player's chips in play. This will be handy if you want to know a player's total chips since the "Balance" parameter doesn't include chips on the table in ring games.
madcow
Posts: 197
Joined: Fri May 22, 2009 1:25 pm

Re: Poker Mavens 2.51 Released

Post by madcow »

Kent Briggs wrote:Upgrade Patch:

http://www.briggsoft.com/patches.htm

New Features:


Fixed custom graphics updating issues by including a CRC parameter on graphics references. This is related to the caching problem described in the previous item. But since graphic files don't have versions associated with them, I just have the server pass the CRC32 value for the file and now the http reference will look something like this "http:PMTable?Crc=12345678" instead of just "http:PMTable". So when you update your custom table graphic, it gets pulled by the browser right away because the Crc parameter will be different from the one it has cached.
.
Hi Kent,

sorry, I don't get this part .. what is this param? and how do we load it ?

thanks
Kent Briggs
Site Admin
Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Re: Poker Mavens 2.51 Released

Post by Kent Briggs »

madcow wrote:
Kent Briggs wrote: Fixed custom graphics updating issues by including a CRC parameter on graphics references..
sorry, I don't get this part .. what is this param? and how do we load it ?
It's all automatic, you don't have to do anything. I was just explaining how it worked internally. The parameter was the "?Crc=xxxxxxxx" part on the end of the URL that the client uses to fetch the graphics (tables, seats, chat box, card back, avatars, etc.) from the server. A CRC is a "cyclic redundancy check" which is just a fancy name for a hash algorithm. At 32 bits, the odds of two different files having the same CRC are about 4 billion to 1. So since that changes when the graphic changes, the browser will treat that as a different file than the one it has cached. Then you don't have to tell your players to clear their cache to see your updated graphics. That was really only an issue with Internet Explorer. A properly written browser like Mozilla will tell the server to send the file only if its modification date is newer than the one it has. But most of the time IE won't even make that query.
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