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Weekly Progress Update

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This is the first of the weekly RW progress updates that I promised would start this week. I’ll try to avoid going into too much detail and provide a summary of where time was spent on RW over the preceding week. When things arise that aren't expected, I'll also include a modicum of explanation, as is the case this week.

Please note that this thread will be locked so it can serve as somewhere that everyone interested can monitor the progress. You are welcome to start other threads to discuss these updates, if you like.

Without further ado, here’s the recap for the past week, thru October 7th…

One of the big items that’s been looming is how we’re going to be managing everything for KS backers once we get everything completed. That’s something that will ultimately be handled by the CS team, but nobody had yet assessed what was actually in place. So I took a close look last week and discovered we had some ancient spreadsheets that were both incomplete and out-of-sync with everything we have on the server regarding accounts for backers.

We have many backers with wide variety of situations that will all need to be resolved by the CS team. We also have discrepancies between the backer spreadsheets and what’s actually in the database. Reconciling those discrepancies manually would be a huge amount of work for the CS team, and managing everything into the future for 1800 backers via a spreadsheet would be a daunting task, not to mention exceedingly prone to errors. We needed a better way.

The CS team needs to do a lot of work to get everything into shape before we can deliver anything, making it clear this couldn't be dealt with later. So I mapped out a way to cleanly handle it all by partially automating the process and addressing the biggest problem areas the CS team faced. Once there was a solid plan, I put some of the foundational automation into place. I also outlined further automation pieces for Steve that he’s coding this week, and I began coordinating with the CS team on everything they will need to do.

That effort consumed all of my Realm Works time this past week. However, it allows the CS team to get things into place in parallel while development work continues over the weeks ahead. Steve will be finishing up all the automation work and then getting the CS team oriented in detail. While he’s doing that, I’ll be switching my focus back to the issues down in the guts of Realm Works.

Thanks, Rob
 
Albeit a day late, here's the update for the past week, thru October 14...

On the health front, I reached a critical milestone last Monday. I’m finally completely off the nasty meds, and subsequent tests have confirmed that everything looks good. Huzzah! The downside is that, after being literally wired for almost two years straight from those meds, my body is burnt out now that the meds are gone. So I’m continually exhausted, and a much bigger chunk of this past week was spent sleeping. My energy should return, but I don’t know how quickly that will occur.

Despite the lack of energy, a bit of progress was definitely made. Some last-minute tweaks were needed, but the remaining pieces are in place for the CS team that I mentioned last week, and the CS team is now getting all the data sorted for KS backers. Down in the guts of the product, I managed to get two issues fixed that have been a problem – one bug and one limitation. One of the most common and annoying crash bugs that users have been encountering is now resolved, so that’s a good thing.

The constant exhaustion makes it hard to focus on complex problems right now, so I’ll be tackling less intricate issues this week. I’m also working to get things into a state where I can enlist the assistance of another developer on some items. I’m not sure how successful I’ll be in that effort, but it seems like the smarter approach based on how I’m currently feeling.

Thanks, Rob
 
Here's the update for the week thru October 21st...

While this past week has been difficult for me physically (see above), it’s actually been reasonably productive from a coding standpoint. I’m also at a point where I can talk publicly about something that I’ve been working on. Specifically, Realm Works is essentially now ported to operate as a native 64-bit application. We’re still not entirely out of the woods yet, as testing has uncovered a number of problems thus far – and a couple of them still need to be resolved. I’ll be focusing on those in the days ahead, and I’ll be doing a lot more testing, but it’s looking quite promising at this point.

Many of you are probably quite happy at this news. Some are saying it’s about time. And some are questioning what the big deal is. So allow me to quickly address the latter two groups.

Converting RW to be a 64-bit application was not a simple matter of recompiling the product. In fact, there were a range of complicating factors that had to be dealt with. We leverage many third party components, some of which don’t play nice in a 64-bit space – and one of those components is still being wrangled. We have our own custom components that we wrote in C++ with 32-bit assumptions, where the logic does a bunch of byte level data manipulations for performance – those had to be overhauled to run smoothly as 64-bit. We need to support both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, since some users are still on 32-bit machines, so that means everything has to adaptively switch based on what machine RW gets installed on. None of this was rocket science, but there was quite a bit of work involved.

As to why this is a big deal, it all boils down to memory. A 32-bit application is limited in how much memory it can use, which is much less than you actually have on your computer. RW often uses lots of memory – the exact amount depends on the size of your realm and how many pictures, maps, tabs, and whatnot you have open at one time. In fact, memory related crashes are currently the third most common issue that users run into. And all the huge adventures we’ll be providing to KS backers and offering in the Content Market will exacerbate this problem and likely make it the #1 problem if we don’t address it. By switching to 64-bit, all those memory issues will basically disappear for the vast majority of users.

During the week ahead, I’ll be finishing up the 64-bit conversion. This includes a lot of testing to make sure everything works correctly after conversion. It also includes investigating and resolving whatever issues I uncover, and the number and complexity of those issues is a complete unknown at this point. Meanwhile, David has been helping out a bit and Steve will be shifting his primary focus to issues in the RW UI this week. So I’m getting reinforcements, and we’ll hopefully continue to make good headway.

Thanks, Rob
 
It's time for the weekly update, this time for the week through October 28th...

Progress on the health side for me has been mixed, but we’ve definitely made some meaningful headway on Realm Works this week. After lots of testing and a few necessary adjustments, I believe we are now completely out of the woods with a 64-bit version of the product. We still need to wrangle some annoying build automation wrinkles and all the necessary installer changes, but the product itself appears solid in 64-bit. Huzzah! And thanks to having Steve helping out heavily this past week, a variety of UI issues have been resolved, as well.

We’re steadily working our way through the items that seem to be causing users the most grief and getting them addressed. One of the big remaining issues is something that three of us are now actively investigating. It’s a serious problem with the UI framework that we utilize – one that comes to light only when working with a large realm. After debating a few options, we’ve concluded that we need to do some fundamental rework in order to properly bypass the framework problem. We’re getting started on it this week, but it’s a task that will take many days and probably involve multiple people. I’ll have more details in the update next week.

[Note: We’re hoping that the above rework will also mitigate the slow load times of tabs, which is due to the way the UI framework behaves, but it’s way too soon to be sure.]

With the announcement of 64-bit support last week, a few users have suggested that we completely abandon 32-bit support, so we took a closer look at the numbers from this year. While it’s quite true that the vast majority of users are now running 64-bit computers, we still have a contingent running on 32-bit machines. Since a main focus of the next product release will be fixing problems of various sorts (bugs, behaviors, inefficiencies, etc.), we don’t want to leave those folks out in cold. That said, we will definitely phase out 32-bit support at some point in the not-too-distant future, since it will be too cumbersome to continue supporting it long-term.

Another detail was made clear from looking at those same numbers. There are very few users still using an operating system older than Windows 8. Consequently, we’re currently assessing whether to make this the last release that supports earlier versions of Windows. That’s likely to be the case, so please consider this a heads-up.

Thanks, Rob
 
Another week. Another update. With pretty good news...

Solid progress is being made on the serious UI framework problem I outlined in the previous update. The solution entails a major overhaul of the navigation pane for topics and articles. We’ve reached the point where we’re pretty confident (95%) that the new approach will work well. However, there are a LOT of tendrils to this change due to how integral topics/articles are within Realm Works. Consequently, we’re projecting that it’s going to take another full week to get it all completed, and it could even spill into next week. Once fully implemented, we’ve got lots of testing to do so we make sure there aren’t any gotchas lurking. So we’re definitely not out of the woods yet, but it all looks quite promising at this point.

One big bonus of this new approach is that it will definitely provide a significant speed improvement when loading and switching tabs. We thought that might be the case in last week’s update, and we’ve now confirmed it. The performance gains will scale with the number of topics/articles in the realm, so users with big realms will experience huge improvements.

A few more high-frequency crash bugs were also squashed this past week. As I indicated previously, our primary focus is on the things that users are encountering most frequently, and we’ll be continuing to work on more of these bugs. We certainly won’t squish all of them, but the product should become significantly more solid for everyone shortly.

On that note, let me give you a quick heads-up on what we’re currently targeting. We want to put out a new update of Realm Works immediately prior to the long Thanksgiving weekend, which starts November 22nd for those outside the States. The planned release will resolve all the bugs we’ve been fixing, plus it will include 64-bit support. We’re working out how to do it in a way that will be safe for everybody, which means making sure that users can switch back to the existing version if they run into anything serious with the new version. If we can’t make sure of that, we won’t release it until after the Thanksgiving break.

Before closing, I want to respond to a few comments we’ve received over the past week. First of all, the overhaul outlined above deals with only a single component of the UI framework we utilize and is not a wholesale replacement – full replacement would entail effectively rewriting the entire product. In addition, while there are definitely a few Realm Works users still running Windows 7, they represent far less than 1% of our total user base. As we run into difficulties supporting Windows 7 – an operating system that hasn’t been actively supported by the manufacturer for almost 4 years now and will be completely abandoned in one year – we simply won’t be able to continue doing so.

Thanks, Rob
 
Sorry for the late update this week. It seems half the company has been sick this past week, myself included. It must be "that time of the year" again, since we can't share it around the office - we all telecommute!

I still feel like crap, so I'm gonna keep this short and sweet...

The main focus this past week was the overhaul of the navigation pane, and that work is in the home stretch. Giant lists of topics can be loaded without problem, and the performance is vastly improved (multi-second times are now sub-second times). While we "had the hood up", we also made a number of other minor refinements and improvements that were on the wish list and that we hope everyone will like.

Due to folks being sick, we're a bit behind where we wanted to be, so we're not going to be able to get something out early next week. It's going to end up being the following week, which means there should be lots of improvements available in a new release during the last week of the month.

Now it's time for me to go lay down again...

Thanks, Rob
 
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! There won’t be an “official” update this week as everyone’s been sick and prepping for Thanksgiving, but the team has been working on getting everything already outlined in place for the release.
 
The official update this week is short and sweet. Come and get it! :)

There is now a Beta release available with all the changes we've been slaving over, including full 64-bit support. The rationale for making it a Beta release is outlined in the post that gives all the details. You'll find everything here: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=61660

Thanks, Rob
 
The 64-bit Beta has been getting pounded by many of you over the past week. Thanks for your help!

While the new version seems to be generally solid, there are a few realms that are proving problematic for users. There have also been some bugs reported in other areas of the product that we're investigating. And we've been addressing some assorted items that weren't included in the Beta last week.

So there's nothing substantive to report this week other than that we're actively investigating the problems we're aware of and working to improve the product a bit further. If you run into issues, please let us know. And be sure to submit any crash reports, as they are invaluable in helping us diagnose what's wrong.

Thanks, Rob
 
Hey everyone!

Sorry for the missed post. Rob and team have been busy battling bugs. There is a new update for Realm Works that implements a variety of bug fixes and minor enhancements. You can read about it here.
 
I'm sure everyone has seen it by now, but just in case...

The Beta is wrapped. There is now a production release that includes full 64-bit support and all the other assorted changes we've been making. A few more bug fixes and lots more quality of life improvements have been addressed since the last Beta release. So we now have a ton of new stuff officially out of Beta and into everyone's hands. You should be prompted to obtain this new production release directly within Realm Works.

We're going to be taking some time to regroup and reassess before taking the next step. And much of the entire staff will be taking some well-earned and much needed downtime over the holidays.

Here's wishing everyone happy holidays and an amazing new year!

Thanks, Rob
 
Happy New Year to everybody!!!

Here's a quick update on where things currently stand...

There are a few small things we'll be wrapping up within the desktop client very shortly. After that, we'll be focusing on the remaining server-side pieces to get the Content Market finally launched, which includes all of the Paizo integration work. Keep your fingers crossed there are no major gotchas in getting that stuff into place in the weeks ahead.

Thanks, Rob
 
It's time for another update...

As you've probably heard (it was announced last week), we're performing a massive server migration to a new hosting provider tomorrow. This migration was prompted by repeated problems we've had with our previous hosting provider - problems which some of you have unfortunately experienced the effects of.

We have about a dozen different servers for a wide range of purposes, most of which are in communication with one another. Doing something like this properly entails a huge amount of preparation and testing. and we've been gearing up over the past couple weeks. We need to make sure that everyone's data comes across in perfect order and that everything has been quadruple checked before we cut over. Since we're bringing ALL the servers across at once, it means we're migrating Realm Works, Hero Lab Online, Hero Lab Classic, Sales, internal development servers, etc. There are a LOT of pieces, and a lot of details involved.

Needless to say, we're swamped with the migration right now, and we've been highly distracted from development work since this migration became an urgent necessity (i.e. for the past couple weeks). So I don't really have anything of substance to report regarding Realm Works in this update. A bit of forward progress has been made on the development side, but nothing of note to share. Once we get the migration completed tomorrow, things will hopefully begin to get back to normal. By the end of the week, I expect we'll be back to getting pieces of the Content Market into place again. And then I'll hopefully have some progress to report on Realm Works development next week.

Thanks, Rob
 
The migration is complete but there have been a lot of little wrinkles to work out. Rob and team have been locked away in their cave making progress with the fixes and integrating the next steps needed for the Content Market, but rest assured work is moving forward. My apologies for not being on top of this the last week or so, we had a family death and I was focused on family for much of the time.
 
For those of you waiting on a Realm Works update, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve finally passed a critical milestone with the Paizo integration thanks to their aid. Having done so, we’re now working hard to get everything properly tested and into place for the launch of the Content Market. While we can’t make any guarantees, we’re hopeful we’ll have good news for everyone in the very near future.

Happy gaming!
 
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Just a small update today. Nothing groundbreaking to report. We're working closely with Paizo to resolve last-minute glitches in the API in order to hopefully ensure everything goes smoothly for Content Market launch. The Realm Works team is also reviewing content and making sure everything is as polished as it can be while we wait.
 
If I detailed everything that's happened over the past six weeks, nobody would believe it. Take all the crazy events and setbacks that have happened over the past few years, then pack smaller versions of them into a very compressed timespan, and you might make it into the same zipcode. We've been trying to pull all the final bits together for well over a month, and it's been like one of those movies where things go from bad, to worse, to "are you serious?" The problems have ranged from the reasonable, to the stupid, to outside parties, to the downright absurd.

The good news is that there haven't been any new showstoppers uncovered this week, and the remaining problems are being wrangled into submission. We will have a new version of Realm Works out shortly (probably Monday) that addresses some key issues. Barring the discovery of any new bombshells, we'll be delivering the Kickstarter content to everyone once the new Realm Works release goes out (first half of next week). And once all that is in place, we'll officially launch the Content Market (hopefully Wednesday, but could slip to the following week, since we won't be launching it any closer to the weekend).

Based on our track record, I don't expect anyone to believe any of this until they actually see it. Heck, you can count me among that group, too. I've reached the point where I half-expect something new to go wrong every time I turn around. But it appears that we've made it through the gauntlet at this point.

Please keep your fingers crossed for us, and have a great weekend!

Thanks, Rob
 
It's time to check your Realm Works accounts for new goodies!

Everyone at the Wolflair has been hard at work ensuring the many kinks and bugs are worked through to bring you the Content Market and we’re happy to say we’re finally reaching the end. The content below has been delivered to backers and barring complications, which we've learned are always possible, we hope to have the Content Market itself available within a week.

Pack Members & Up
· Have been issued Creature Components for Pathfinder by Playground Adventures.
· Have been issued Creature Components for 5th Edition by Playground Adventures.

Pack Hunters & Up
· Have been issued Pirate’s Guide to Freeport for Pathfinder.
· Have been issued The Freeport Companion.

Timber Wolf & Up
· Have been issued Razor Coast.
· Have been issued The Grande Temple of Jing.

Those of you awaiting Blight replacements and server time extensions, we will be providing those at Market launch.

Many thanks to all of you who have patiently waited for your items and supported us along the way.

Happy Gaming!
 
In my last post, I said that this whole process had progressed to the "Are you serious?" level of setbacks. So I thought I would share yet another...

Important contextual detail: We all telecommute, so all of our servers are hosted in one place and we use VPN to access them from locations spanning the entire US.

This morning, we began the process of rolling out the Content Market, as planned. The appropriate servers were taken offline, backups initiated, etc. However, not long after starting, the developer orchestrating the rollout lost his internet connection. His entire neighborhood lost internet, with an estimated outage time of 4 hours from the ISP. Thankfully, the actual updates process had not yet begun, so someone else was able to bring the servers back online, with everything operating as it had before.

But this is what I mean by "Are you serious?". We just started the rollout and the entire neighborhood where the developer lives has a massive internet outage. <sigh>

At this point, we are still waiting for the developer to regain internet access. Then we will re-assess whether to launch this afternoon, reschedule to tomorrow, or wait until next week. We hate taking down servers in the evenings when gamers may be playing, and we also hate releasing right before the weekend, just in case there's an issue we didn't catch in our testing. So all three options suck. In any case, those are the options before us, and we're weighing how best to proceed.

Thanks, Rob
 
It's now too late in the day to do a release, as most gamers on the East Coast are in final preparations or have even started their evening games. And we don't want to wait until next week. So we're rescheduling the launch for tomorrow morning (Thursday). It's closer to the weekend than we'd like, but it seems like the least bad of the available options.

Everyone please send positive thoughts our way. We really want to avoid yet another ridiculous surprise tomorrow. :)
 
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