In the middle of creating my second major webgame, SimDerby, I am finding the challenges to be much different than SimYard.  This time around, the balancing act is in creating a schedule of races that has a variation to it that matches as closely as possible the variation of horses.  If there are only three 2-year-olds in the game which can run at a mile and a quarter, then there shouldn’t be any of those races on the schedule, for example.

I’m finding that successfully mastering a task like this all comes down to having the right tools.  It all seems easy looking at it from the other site now that these tools have been built, but it was rough trying to figure out what they needed to look like before they were built.  They tell me which races are being canceled because there aren’t enough horses so I can remove them from the schedule.  They tell me a cross-section breakdown of horses which went a whole day without running in a single race so I know to schedule more races of those types.  They show me the schedule of races for each track and allow me to fill in the missing races with the types that I need.

Currently, there are seven tracks in the SimDerby universe.  Each of these tracks will have a race every five minutes and the schedule will be the same every day.  That’s over 2,000 races a day that need to be hand-crafted to match the balance of horses that can run, and there will probably be more tracks added.  This seems like a daunting task, but ultimately this schedule will be what horse breeders and owners interact with.  More importantly, computer horses running on this schedule will represent the claims pool that owners will choose from to begin breeding.

I expect these numbers to only grow.  It’s a good thing I have these great tools to help, because they sure do save time.  The schedule is one of the most important parts of the game, and it’s deserving of lots of attention.

A brand new online poker game will be coming soon to a browser near you.  Bluff This is in beta testing right now, and is an RPG poker game.  Your characters will start at level 1 and gain skills in reading, bluffing, and slow playing.  Money is distributed through Penny Ante games which will ensure value.

Bluff This will not allow you to play for real money.  It’s illegal in the United States, so that can’t be done.  Bluff This uses play money.  The real problem with that is that people will discard the value of play money because they can always just reload, so the poker game suffers.  This is not true on Bluff This.  Bluff This uses a Penny Ante game to distribute money.  In Penny Ante there is no blinds, only a $0.01 ante for each player.  If you have no money, you are given this $0.01 for free and placed all-in.  This is a fair system and means that losing all of your money pays a real penalty.  You have to wait until you win a hand at the Penny Ante table, and then make use of those winnings before you get ante’d out.  Once you graduate up to the next table, there will be real games going on.

In Bluff This, you gain experience points every time you show a hand at the end.  You also get additional experience points if you beat someone who shows their hand.  As you move up levels, you get skill which allow you to get reads on other players, or notice when other players are getting reads.  A tiny sweat drop appears on a player when they have a worse hand than you, or a plus sign when their hand is better.  A small eye appears when that player gets a read on another player.  Of course, your skills and attributes (instinct, game, awareness, poise) help prevent others from getting reads on you.  As you get skills, you also unlock additional skills, like being able to read if a player caught the river or flopped a set.

If you want to help Beta Test the game, point your browser to beta (dot) bluffthis (dot) com.  I do not want to link this online because I don’t want Google to crawl it just yet.  See you at the tables!

SimYard has been upgraded with a new database server, and it is performing very well.  Opening Day 1906 has been better than any opening day so far.  The server performed well, and even the longest games took only 30 minutes to run.

If you haven’t joined SimYard yet, you should check it out right now.  SimYard doesn’t end in October like most baseball.  It continues right through the off-season with a new season every month.  So far there’s more than twenty leagues in Major, AAA, and AA levels, competing for their championships and to increase their fanbase.

Bid on players, join a league, trade with other managers, claim players from the waivers list, make the championship — all of this can be yours on your custom team.  You create them.  You name them.  You decide who starts, who sits, and who gets cut.

SimYard runs right in your browser.  You can play from work, or from school.  No download or plugin is necessary.  It’s massively multiplayer, so all of your opponents will be other real people.  And they’re great guys.  I know a lot of them, and really respect them.  They love baseball, and they’re fun to compete with.

Try SimYard now.  It’s free to play pick-up games, and under $5 / month to play in leagues.

SimYard runs on a webserver with eight cores.  The games themselves run as a PHP script on this machine.  Recently, the game hit the maximum speed because the PHP script was running as fast as it can and couldn’t keep up.  The solution was to make it multithreaded, and so the adventure begins.

The script used to work this way.  It would start up every hour and only run for an hour before shutting down.  It would start by loading all of the games that are in-progress.  Then it would process one at-bat for each of those games and look for new games to start.  Every at-bat was followed by saving the changed records to the database.  Anyone watching a game has an AJAX script which runs checking for new at-bats and refreshes when they are available.

This script wasn’t using up 1/8th of the CPU power on the webserver, though.  The time that the script was taking was split between actually calculating the results of the at-bat (which uses CPU) and saving the results to the database (which takes none on the webserver).  So I had a situation where the game was pegged out and couldn’t run faster, yet the server was only running at about 10-15% capacity.

After making a couple modifications to the way the data updates to ensure that these games could actually run multithreaded, I changed the way this logic works.  Now, the script starts every five minutes.  It runs for five minutes, starting by loading up any abandoned games which have not been active for at least five minutes.  Then, it enters the same loop where it looks for new games to start and runs them.  The difference is that once the five minutes are up, it stops adding new games.  It just continues to run the current games it has.  Once all those games are finished, the script exits.

This is working well.  It’s resulting in a return to the fast gaming before SimYard got busy.  And it’s much more scalable.

The newest baseball simulator on the web is getting better.  SimYard is undergoing improvements this month which will make the game deeper and the gameplay better.  If you haven’t checked out the best baseball simulator on the web, now is the time.

A new bidding system will be launched, allowing public bids to be made throughout the season on players.  Players who have expiring contracts will give “Buy Now” contract extensions to their current teams based on the public bids.  This will lead to a much more consistent salary for all of the players.

In addition, many of the players have been working to compile a wish list of features, and I plan to implement many of them.  In my opinion one of the biggest things that makes SimYard so worth playing is the fact that there’s an active administrator working on it full time.  Yes, this is my full time job.

So stop by SimYard.  It’s free to play pick-up games in the park, and you can even qualify for the postseason tournament.  If you want to take the team to the next level, you can get a Stadium Permit which allows you to have a farm system of three teams.  The bottom team can play pick-up games in the park while the other two join leagues and play scheduled games all month in their league with a postseason at the end.

It’s a lot of fun.  Come by SimYard today and start playing your franchise now!

The fantasy baseball simulator, SimYard, opens up the 1901 season tomorrow night.  Now is your chance to get in and start playing Spring Training games.  Give your guys a little training boost before the new season.  SimYard is the next generation of fantasy baseball.

The next generation of Fantasy Baseball has been featured on Fox News Chicago.

Click here to watch it on Youtube

The traffic on the site has been quite high since then, and the 1900 season is turning out to be the best so far. Third teams have been added for players with Stadium Permits so there will be minor leagues for the 1901 season. Leagues will be having their first playoffs shortly.

http://www.simyard.com/

Nothing pisses me off more than paying for something and then getting spammed with ads.  You see this most commonly with television.  I pay like $75 / month for DirecTV, and almost all the channels are loaded with advertisements.  It sickens me.

A couple of people have asked me why I don’t put ads up on SimYard.  (For those of you who don’t know, SimYard is my new fantasy baseball management simulation webgame.)  The answer is, I will be charging next month to join leagues, and I don’t think it’s right to charge money for something and then make more money advertising to those people.  People are going to play my game because it’s fun and it makes them relax, and advertisements steal from that environment.

So, no ads.  That’s the way I like it.  Please, enjoy SimYard, a brand new webgame that has no ads.

If you want to play baseball on the web, there’s only one place to go: SimYard!  SimYard is a new kind of fantasy baseball.  You can sign up and make a team in minutes, and then go into the Public Fields and find an opponent.  The game takes under 20 minutes to play, and you get to choose your lineups and pitching rotation.

If you like webgames, and you like baseball, and you haven’t tried SimYard yet, then go there right now and sign up.  Seriously, you will enjoy this game a lot!

Now that football is over, turn your attention to baseball, and join the brand new fantasy baseball management simulator, SimYard! Own your own team and make your own lineup decisions. Choose your opponent and the starting pitcher. You call the shots. You own the team.

http://www.simyard.com/

Features:

- Create your own team, choose your name, colors, and logo.
- Recruit and dismiss players as you choose.
- You create the lineups and the pitching rotations.
- Play live games against other players.
- New season every month, ending in a huge tournament.

Sound like fun?

http://www.simyard.com/

It’s free, so try it out!