Particracy Dev Blog

So, I launched the Particracy II Closed Alpha thursday evening, and reception from the community has been great! There were some hickups initially, but all things considered it went as good as I could have hoped for. There are dozens of registered players right now, and the game hasn’t slowed down to a terrible crawl, so at least it can handle the basic load.

The influx of players exposed some problems in the code base. The critical ones I solved right away, the rest were filed as tickets in our Trac database. There’s quite some work set out for me, I definitely won’t be bored anytime soon.

If you’ve registered for the alpha, but haven’t been let in yet, don’t worry, I plan to let in more players in the coming days.

Over the past few days I finished up some loose ends concerning the election algorithm. It now takes a decent mixed bag of factors into account: political opinion, personality, party reputation, ethnicity, and endorsements from other parties. The only thing that’s missing is a “native son” effect, where a politician gets a small bonus in elections in his or her home territory. I’ll get to that as soon as I have time. Most of this counts for head of state as well as legislative elections.

A notable point of difference between Particracy II and Particracy Classic is that you can run politicians in legislative elections as well. That way you get a small bonus from the politician (if he or she is liked by the electorate) and it makes for excellent roleplaying material.

My checklist of stuff to do before we’re alpha-ready is almost complete. Expect an announcement later this week.

For the past week I’ve been struggling with some Object-Relational Mapping issues. At the core it was an optimization issue, which may seem non-essential, but it caused the database layer to create records and run queries that weren’t really needed. So I dived in to some of the less pretty parts of my code and wrestled just as long as I had to, to get it to do what I want.

ORM isn’t always a perfect solution, and every implementation has its flaws. Your choice depends on the domain you’re trying to model. In the case of Particracy, there’s a very rich and complex model that depends less on sheer quantity of data, and more on the kind of logic I feel comfortable expressing with Objects and inheritance. In designing a database-backed application, you need to decide up front whether your master model is your database schema, or your domain class hierarchy, and I chose the latter. I could nag on for hours about this object-relational impedance mismatch, but I’m not going to do that here.

With these issues (hopefully) behind me, I can get back to the real work, which is finishing the features that will make it into the alpha, polishing up the user interface where required, providing the game with some basic content (such as the map, some nations, ethnicities and of course proposal variables) and lots of testing.

Today I mostly worked on user-interface related enhancements and continued toward finishing my checklist for the closed alpha release. In the same vein, it’s been noted that while for the past few years my bug databases - host first with Mantis, later Trac - have been accessible to the public. The current Particracy II bug database however, is no longer publically visible. This isn’t really a conscious choice of mine, but rather a consequence of our autorization/permission structure when we set everything up at the new server. I haven’t decided whether this is a definitive change of policy, but how interesting is a bug database anyway for a closed source project? For now, I see no reason to open it up again.

As some who have seen sneak peeks of Particracy II have noticed, the game itself also contains a rudimentary ticketing system. I don’t intend to use this for tracking game bugs and enhancement requests. Rather its function will be to track support issues that players have ingame. The fact that this is ingame makes it easier to track and link the ticket with the relevant ingame data.

At this point I’m not quite ready to announce a firm release date for the closed alpha, but I do know that it isn’t far off. Most of the work now is in providing enough game content, rather than finishing features of the game itself. I’ve already designed the world map and the territories and nations it comprises, but I still need to create a few dozen bill proposals and create a couple of believable royal families to rule them. As in Particracy classic, some nations will be Republics, governed by a President, whereas others will be constitutional monarchies, ruled by a monarch.

So, in short, a few more weeks’ patience at worst. Then we’ll start allowing people in to see whether this monolithic monostrosity I’ve built is actually playable.

I figured I couldn’t stay behind the rest of, well, the entire internet, so I decided to open up a blog to journal development on Particracy. You probably won’t be distracted by anything of a personal nature on this blog, since I’m well aware that that isn’t what you’re here for.

For the past few days I’ve been reorganizing the particracy.net domain and the servers that back it. The classic Particracy game, created in 2005, can now be found at classic.particracy.net. It still redirects you to the old ip-based URL, and I didn’t dare touch that because so many people have links lying around based on the ip-address and the particracy/main/ path.

The main www.particracy.net page will now no longer direct you to Particracy classic, but instead show you a glimpse of what’s to come. A link to this blog can be found there - it’s probably how you got here in the first place. I envision to eventually host several Particracy II universes in the future, all with different world settings and even themed with different societies. The main page will link you to all these worlds. Currently only the classic Particracy link has any meaning, but soon the closed alpha test for Particracy II will go online and it will feature there too.

Speaking of Particracy II and the timetable for it: I expect to open it up for registrations in a couple of days. As soon as I’ve gathered enough user registrations, and when I deem that it’s technically ready, the alpha game world will start. I’ve designed a small world map that will support about a hundred players, which is the capacity I’m shooting for for the alpha test. But it’s likely the game will start before I have reached that capacity because I want to grow it gradually.

The alpha test will only sport the features that I deem technically ready for testing. This means there will be no economy or warfare, but it will include almost all features of the original Particracy, as well as some new concepts, most notably politician management. Expect more updates in the coming days.