Roaming Gamer

Archive for April, 2009

I’m still worried that the response time for this site is less than stellar. So, I decided to seek professional help, or at least professional testing.
After a bit of searching, I came across a site (http://loadimpact.com) that would load test my page(s) for free, simulating up to 50 simultaneous users. This sounded like good deal (free is a great price), and a reasonable start (50 simultaneous users should be about my max for now).

So, I gave it a shot, and the results were… less that super. Actually the results were a little questionable since the test aborted at about 30 users, but for now I can see the following (click images for full-size graphs).

The user load-times dropped steadily from 10 to 30 users. This means I was not yet fully loading my site, so the data is only partially useful. However, the bad news is that for 10 or fewer users, the load times averaged 10.4 seconds. That bites! That alone makes me strongly consider moving to another provider. (We’ll see.)

Next, the ‘Home Page’ (only) load times were better (8.15 second average for10 users), but still not great.

Lastly, I examined the file load times and discovered something useful (although not surprising). Some files have exceptionally long load times. Specifically, one of the PNG files on the home page (inove.png), and the images from the ’sexy bookmark’ feature. Both of these files took an average of ~250ms to load. That kind of load time can add up pretty fast!
That is about all I know so far. I guess the moral of the story is, “get a good (i.e fast) provider and save yourself some heartache.” If anyone has suggestions for providers that can handle high-loads of wordpress sites, let me me know. Meanwhile, I’ll keep digging on my own.

Cheers,
edo

Today, I am (officially) releasing the Torque Script Took Kit (TSTK). This kit is a collection of utility scripts (and other stuff) that I have written (and continuously improved) over the years.

I strongly encourage all Torque engine users to download this kit and to become familiar with it. I guarantee that this kit will save you hours of coding and debugging, and that it will help you write better scripints of your own.

I provide basic documentation on the kit here. However, at this time, I do not have a complete users guide for the kit. Instead, you’ll need to take a look at the kit and try some things out on your own. Don’t worry though, most of the scripts are self-explanatory in name and signature. Also, I will occasionally blog about features of the kit and give examples. To that end, let’s get the ball rolling. Let me show you a couple of my favorite TSTK features.

My Favorite TSTK Features

There are some features in TSTK that I use nearly every day, in fact I can hardly imagine writing code without them. I think, after seeing the examples below, that you will agree and start using them too.

SimSet::forEach

This first script allows you to execute any method or function on every object in a SimSet. Typically, when when you want to call a method or function on the objects in a SimSet, you write code like this:

For those who have had the misfortune to have been coming to my site and following my progress over the last few days, I must apologize.  It has been and continues to be a mess.  You might say I’m still stuck in my ways.  I remain committed to changing to a blog-based approach, but must admit to being stuck in the ’static-pages’ mentality.

The good news is:

• Although I’m no expert yet, I do understand the fundamentals and more of WordPress.
• I am just beginning to grasp the value of ‘Categories’ and ‘Tags’. 
• I am over the “try a new theme” urge and ready to buckle down and start doing the hard work of making a theme of my own, well mostly (see Artisteer below).
• I’ve settled on a set of plugins that I like and find useful.
• I have content to release, I just need to figure out the best way to release it so it doesn’t jump all over the place.  Some of the upcoming content includes:
  • Torque Script Tool Kit - A collection of utility scripts I’ve written and improved over the years.  I know you’ll find this useful if you use any of the Torque engines.
  • A Boatload of Resources for TGB – I’ve got a ton of resources for TGB, include some add-on tools (for the level editor), behaviors, and content packs.
  • Old notes from GDC 2009.  Believe it or not, I still have a bunch of unreleased notes from this year’s GDC.
  • First installment in the “Roaming Gamer: Make a Game” Series - OK, this isn’t entirely done, but its very close and I’m really excited about it.

As I mentioned above, I’m getting ready to buckle down and make a theme of my own.  As part of this process I’ll be using the template design tool Artisteer.  This is a handy visual tool that allows you to generate and then tweak a large number of settings and options.  Once you (or I in this case) finish with the tweaking, its time to start hacking the CSS and PHP to get those last few changes/enhancement in and then viola, custom theme complete!  Certainly, the tool doesn’t do every possible one might want, but I’m very impressed with what it does provide.  I’m sure the investment will be well worth the time it saves me.
Well, that’s all for now!

Cheers,

edo