A couple things...

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enkindle
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Jul 11, 2013 11:03 pm

A couple things...

Post by enkindle »

I spent today integrating PM with our game (http://mafiareturns.com/) and while everything went easy I found a couple things that PM could use.

One, is when Require session keys is enabled, completely get rid of the Log In menu item like Allow new accounts does for Create Account. Or, better yet, add an option for a url to direct them to when its clicked so they can log back in via a custom setup. The problem is, if something happens such as restarting the server, they are shown the option to log in, given a log in form and allowed to try to log in, but its completely futile.

The other thing is, I would love to see an option for where to host all static content. We use a CDN (amazon cloudfront) for whatever we can because we have users all over the world and it makes a huge difference in load speeds. This could just be a url to a directory on a host that is assumed to contain all the static files. You could simply provide a .zip of all the expected files and people could replace what they want to.
Kent Briggs
Site Admin
Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Re: A couple things...

Post by Kent Briggs »

enkindle wrote: One, is when Require session keys is enabled, completely get rid of the Log In menu item like Allow new accounts does for Create Account. Or, better yet, add an option for a url to direct them to when its clicked so they can log back in via a custom setup. The problem is, if something happens such as restarting the server, they are shown the option to log in, given a log in form and allowed to try to log in, but its completely futile.
I'll look into that.
The other thing is, I would love to see an option for where to host all static content. We use a CDN (amazon cloudfront) for whatever we can because we have users all over the world and it makes a huge difference in load speeds. This could just be a url to a directory on a host that is assumed to contain all the static files. You could simply provide a .zip of all the expected files and people could replace what they want to.
The biggest file is the flash client itself, which cannot be separated. For security and other reasons, it has to connect back to the same address that it was served from. After that is the collection of avatars, which are licensed from another company and cannot be distributed in standalone form. A CDN could be used for the table and other graphics but those are cached by the players browsers anyway after the first load, so it wouldn't be much of a bandwidth savings, especially compared to all the packet traffic going between the clients and server.
Kent Briggs
Site Admin
Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Re: A couple things...

Post by Kent Briggs »

The problem with removing the login dialog when "Require Session Keys" is enabled is that that dialog has other functions on it that may possibly still be enabled, like creating an account or resetting a password. The player does get a "No session key specified, direct logins not allowed" message which, I think, is better than just graying out the login menu/button.
enkindle
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Jul 11, 2013 11:03 pm

Re: A couple things...

Post by enkindle »

FIrst, I understand that this is a wish list and appreciate any time you choose to put into my suggestions. Nothing I'm requesting is required for us to operate, in fact we've been up and integrated with PM for a couple days now with no game breaking issues and so far and our players seem to enjoy it.

How about a separate option to hide the Log In menu? We've already had people asking why it wont let them log in (they are trying to log into it with their game account not their poker mavens account, which they cant anyway because we automate that to link it to their game account) ...not all users are the brightest sadly.

As for the CDN thing, we have users in crappy regions of Brazil on dial up who have as much as a 300-500ms ping to us. Loading large files from our servers like images used to take them a long time, but now that, for them, the images come from Amazons location in São Paulo, its many times faster for them. It would be wonderful to be able to host even just the images, if not the flash from CDN.

I looked into the cross domain thing with flash and found that you should actually be able to serve up a file called crossdomain.xml from poker mavens that will allow an admin to set a domain to allow the swf to be hosted from. More info: http://curtismorley.com/2007/09/01/flas ... nxml-file/

In regards to your CRC checks for the images, if they were a URL rather than a local file, you could simply not do the CRC and not send it as a cache breaker. As part of normal use with a CDN, the web developer must already have a cache busting method in place via renaming files because the CDN caches the files at each of their locations and will ignore query strings like the Crc= value.
Kent Briggs
Site Admin
Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Re: A couple things...

Post by Kent Briggs »

enkindle wrote:As for the CDN thing, we have users in crappy regions of Brazil on dial up who have as much as a 300-500ms ping to us.
Slow ping times affect the routine client/server packet exchange more than the one-time image file downloads so those players will have performance issues regardless.
I looked into the cross domain thing with flash
A cross domain file is already being served and I have other license-related reasons for not openly distributing the client file. Flash will be a moot point anyway in version 4.
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