Game g = new Game();

Tomorrow Wednesday Aug 5th at 19:30 CEST, we will organize a big stress test to challenge our AT.LANT.IS server infrastructure.

During the test, all items in the shops will be available for only 1 ORI, to encourage lots of item purchases and new avatar renderings at a short timespan.

So, if you always wanted to check out how that golden shark helmet fits you, register now and login tomorrow evening!

(As a side note, all beta users will receive 3 months premium membership for free !)

Another major AT.LANT.IS update is live.

The website has received an overall overhaul:

• The static landing page is gone in favor of some animated info texts and highlights
• Lots of help pages explaining the global concept and the intricate details
• Public character profiles – you can now present your character to the world, outside of the game client, or browse other characters

In addition, we will reveal a new game soon – and leverage a new feature, the community goals. The idea is that new features and games will be unlocked by the community by playing games and thereby earning the ingame currency “ORI”.

This is the last major update before we go premium – beta users will receive some free premium time, so if you have not already done so, register your character today.

I included some info about plazz and AT.LANT.IS on the startup portal site startups.yeebase.com.

I also answered some interview questions, that should appear there soon.

I never got around giving Flex a serious try.

The most interesting features, like the Live Cycle Data Services, allowing server push-based RIAs, are very expensive, and I did not had the need for anything else that I could not handle using some simple (Y)UI thrown together and hooked into a DB using Grails.

Now, the current implementation of our Atlantis backend polls every n seconds from the server and new messages are added, via AJAX. This led to some browser stability problems and a general bottleneck if several AJAX-”windows” are opened and each of them refreshed every n seconds, respectively.

Affter some research, I stumbled across BlazeDS, which might solve this problem – another part of Adobe technology that was released open source, and should provide the basic functionality needed to access hibernated Java objects from Flex, plus allowing push subscriptions and notifications from the server to the client.

I will check out this tutorial about getting Flex, BlazeDS and Hibernate to work together.

Also, there is a great post about the differences of the various flavors and licensing details, as well as another one.

I will post my findings here.

Apparently, some kids on AT.LANT.IS are some kind of embedded journalists, to test if our claims of a safe, moderated youth community are true:

VWI machte sich also zusammen mit einer 13jährigen Testspielerin daran, das Spiel bereits vorab zu testen und festzustellen, ob die hohen Erwartungen gerechtfertigt sein würden.
[...]
Ein Versuch unserer 13jährigen Testspielerin, die ICQ-Nummer eines anderen Kindes zu erfahren, brachte ihr zunächst eine Verwarnung ein. Da sie das schnell begriff, versuchte sie es heimlich über persönliche Nachrichten. Dieses Tricksen wurde mit einer 24-Stunden-Sperre bestraft – völlig zu Recht. Hintergrund dieses strengen Regelwerks ist es, dass AT.LANT.IS den vollständigen Schutz seiner kindlichen Spieler gewährleistet. Andere Internetplattformen wie die oben angeführten werden naturgemäß nicht überwacht. Deshalb wird jeder Versuch, über dieses System an die Realdaten von Kindern zu kommen, bestraft.

They even appreciated the strict profanity filter we use for chat messages and ingame mails – interesting.