The end goal is to fix the slowness and gateway errors that people have been seeing lately. We’ve basically doubled our popularity in the past 8 months and that is putting some strain on our current computer:

We’re not quite done yet–we still need to do a database upgrade which will be happening sometime in the next few days (our guess is this is going to be a low traffic week). During the database upgrade the site will still basically work but you won’t see any high scores until the upgrade is done.

Addendum (2011/11/24): The database upgrade is done (only took half an hour) and so the maintenance is more or less done for the time being. Let’s give it a week and then let us know if you’re still getting gateway timeouts and slow page loads.

Everything we can do to fix the problem has been done, now we can only wait for our changes to propagate through the internet. If you are reading this, everything is fine again.

All the games that were played last night have been imported into the new DB so the leader board should be accurate at this point.

Don’t worry about any “internal errors” you see… They should probably say something about the database being down… but they don’t.

Happy Halloween!

One thing we’ve noticed is that many players click “New Game” really fast, over and over. This is presumably because they are looking for a new game with the cards dealt in some specific way that makes the game look easier/harder/more fun.

If this describes you, we’d love to know what exactly you are looking for. We don’t mind that you do it—we are just wondering if there is some way that we can improve the site so the cards that get dealt are exactly what you are looking for, automatically.

So, serial “New Game” clickers, leave us a comment here and let us know what you are looking for. Also may sure you mention the game, since the criteria for a good game of Sea Haven Towers is probably different than that of Forty Thieves.

Thanks!

At any rate, the bug is now fixed and so if you were unhappy with how the “automatic” setting was working we invite you to try it again. Please let us know if it now chooses the correct size for your browser window.

1. We got rid of the card size popup. Instead of choosing card sizes manually, the game picks the best card size based on how big your window is. If you want bigger cards, make the window bigger; a smaller window makes cards smaller.
2. We (re)added pause support. It has been improved based on the feedback we got last time. It pauses automatically when you click away from the window, or manually if you click the pause button or press the pause key (Control-P). The auto-pause after 15 seconds of inactivity is not enabled at this time. We may add an option to enable it in the future because we like it, but we realize it’s confusing and annoying to some play styles.
3. We fixed a ton of Internet Explorer bugs. A huge percentage of our users use Internet Explorer but it’s not convenient for us to test since neither Jim nor I run Windows on our main computers. Side note: we still haven’t tried the IE 9 beta out–if any of you have it we’d be very happy to hear feedback on how the site works with it.
4. We added new, hopefully tastier looking buttons to the solitaire games. These buttons only show up on newer browsers–Firefox, Safari and Chrome users will see them right now. IE 9 may or may not show them and IE 6, 7, and 8 definitely will not.
5. We added pause support to Asteroids.
6. We added a high score table to Asteroids.
7. Hopeless got its high score table re-enabled after being dead for 2 or 3 years.

Those are the big visible changes. There are, as always, many more changes under the hood that should make our lives easier in the future.

As usual, we’d love to hear what you think. If you find any bugs, make sure you report them.

The game isn’t completely done yet. We’d still like to add the flying saucer, hyperspace and high scores. And maybe even some tasteful sounds. But we think that even in its current state it’s still pretty fun. Anyway, if you have a supported browser, go try it out and let us know what you think.

Old:	New:

The J is more legible now and not stuck into the top of the suit. The corners on the card are correctly rounded now, and the border is cleaner. Here’s another example:

Old:	New:

Again, the rank (“9″) is much clearer now.

We’ve been playing with these cards ourselves for a few months and have really grown to like the changes. We hope you do too.