- added a few more patterns to the pattern pool
- additional admin functions (player mgmt, affected a couple of areas)
- added new room

- updated game/chat clients, fix an issue wherein some new players (depending on the browser/OS) are unable to enter any room, saying they have not played enough games (even in the Newbies room). still have to check though if the problem is really solved already…
- minor changes in blog pages

- minor game changes (pattern/ad related)
- if a player has a game in progress, then gets disconnected somehow, allow the player to come back to the game even if the room is full already (as long as it’s the same game that’s still playing). this doesn’t include the scheduled game server restarts though (when everyone gets booted), since this will not try to resume the previous game and all players just get back 75 pts in return

- added code to detect duplicate patterns (apparently, my previous check doesn’t cover all possibilities, although I only detected one duplicate in the last set)
- added a lot of new patterns, there’s about 225 available patterns now (previously 108 only I think). only 150 patterns are active at a time though, randomly selected from the pool. this means each game room will play a different set of patterns, and the set of pattern will also be changing (approx every 12 hrs when the game servers are auto-restarted as part of current maintenance)
- added codes to determine a pattern’s complexity, and rate it accordingly (e.g. is it a quick game, a long game, or something in between)
- better distribution of patterns, according to its difficulty rating. this means that (1) games with normal difficulty will be played more (2) the really long games are now (a bit) limited, and spaced out more evenly (3) a fast game will be played every 6 games or so. i’m sure the ranking/selection isn’t perfect, but this should still be better than before (ie patterns are just randomly shuffled)
- some general changes in ad delivery
- changed pot/JP split percentages, depending on the pattern difficulty, so fast games will now contribute more to the JP. this means (1) JP will now increase a bit faster than before (2) given the same # of players and cards in play, longer games will get bigger pots than fast games
- moved some game configs to a file, for easier maintenance

- opened additional rooms
- additional chat/account filter checks
- fixed a minor, non-critical bug in message parsing codes

- optimized main machine, apparently some unneeded applications (w/c may be due to my recent software updates) are running in the background and taking up additonal resources
- looks like the sign-in bug is fixed (where the game area continues to ask you to sign-in even if you have already successfully logged-in from the chat). not sure if this is because of the JDK upgrade, or my recent code changes, but so far I haven’t encountered this issue anymore. hopefully it’s really fixed for good, as it’s one of the major issues I’ve been tracking for awhile now.
- ignore feature is now working, although i am still testing this. it’s only accessible via chat right now. i will improve this later so that there is an easier way to accomplish this and manage the list w/o having to type the player’s name manually.

Available chat commands:
1. To ignore a player (you won’t see ANY chat text from this player in ANY game room):
/mute PlayerName

2. To remove a player from your ignore list:
/unmute PlayerName

For example, to ignore me (as if you even see me chatting at all ) type:
/mute Alex

Just type the command in the chat box, like a normal chat text. Make sure you put a space between the command and the player’s name (which must be correctly spelled). The server will acknowledge if the command was successful or not.

This will hopefully lessen a set of player complaints about certain players becoming annoying/rude in the chat.

The alternative commands are:
/ignore PlayerName
/unignore PlayerName

- fixed the maintenance scripts, made some mistakes in my last update that causes certain rooms to be down much longer than intended
- optimized some mySQL tables and queries
- optimized code detection of resumed/existing games
- software/driver updates for the 2 machines
- changed Flash socket routines (add outgoing queue, and avoid potential in/out collisions)