Valkyries Fall

Database issue fix (permanantly)

01 February 2021

Just a moment ago an issue with the database caused the game to crash. This was due to what's called an Arithmetic Overflow Exception.This is where a table id number got larget than an int can take (2.147 billion). It's happened a couple times before in the games history and I always fixed it with a quick fix. Today I fixed it permanantly by changing the datatype of the id column on the affected tables. It will now take 4,294,967,298 times longer for this issue to occur again, so should be essentially permanantly fixed.

The Seer, plus performance fixes

01 February 2021

Seer:

The Seer is a new building in the settlement area. Once the Seer is obtained you can purchase upgrades for 9 different things, which all help boost your settlement and its effectiveness.

1. Agriculture. Increases efficiency of your Farm.
2. Wood Chopping. Increases efficiency of your Woodyard.
3. Stone Mining. Increases efficiency of your Stone Mine
4. Iron Mining. Increases efficiency of your Iron Mine.
5. Raiding efficiency. Increases the rewards gained from raids.
6. Silver Detection. Increases the MINIMUM silver gained when raiding. (Can't go above the maximum for that raid)
7. Offensive Prowess. Increases offensive power when attacking.
8. Thrall Taxation. Adds/Increases gold gained when collection from settlement. This is based on available Thralls. Army and land tending thralls do not pay taxes.
9. Harbouring. This increases the maximum level of the shipyard. It has a max level of 5 and therefore adds up to 5 additional levels for the shipyard.

A change has been made to the names of the Raiding locations. So that Vinland can be last in the list still (America being the furthest away from Norse homelands), I have seperated Northumbria and Wessex into different Counties of England.

Other Changes:

• Market tables have been condensed for better mobile view (Vericode)
• "Your Items" in market has been combined into the main market table. You can remove your items from within the single table now. This is to prevent repeated markup and increase performance.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a long standing issue with chat. Sometimes the chat server would restart for one reason or another, causing a synchronisation issue between player and chat server. If this reconnection happens now, you should still be able to see Private Messages without need of refreshing!
• Added a max level check to the settlement buildings, preventing it being possible to make a building a higher level than should have been possible.
• Query optimisation for getting inventory items and getting a count of your inventory. This greatly increases performance on actions such as Inventory, Market, Buy/Sell Items, Blacksmith and Beastiary by up to 800%.
• Along with the Inventory query optimisation, API output has been changed to include both the inventory information and the count together, preventing a double api call for 2 different outputs of the same information.
• Query optimisation for checking whether you have a specific item, which affected the teleport feature. This also increased performance by up to 800%.
• Bunch of other misc query optimisations that were left remnant from a previous version of the game. Some of the admin tool changes made in the past made it possible to query data faster and some queries were incidently left behind.
• Fixed output for raid collection where it would display silver twice in the message.
• Typo fix to settlement top list header
• Typo fixed in tour description (Vericode)

Next Up:

• Market rewrite to make it function better. This will include the addition of being able to trade resources for gold.
• ability to directly send gold/diamonds to other players.
• Quests
• Maybe a diamond item/items for settlement (I keep flip-flopping on this)

Additional Developer

14 January 2021

Today marks the day that We have officially expanded the team to include an additional developer!

Ingame his name is Vericode.

While he's still learning the ropes and gaining understanding of the games mechanics and the codebase, he will initially be making minor changes, until he is comfortable in making larger changes.

He is an IRL colleague of mine and has been a developer for probably longer than I've been alive. He's a good man and shal hopefully see some good changes to the game with him with us!

If you see him around, be sure to welcome him :)

Miscellaneous Madness

06 January 2021

Subscriptions now also add bonus time to events.

Long awaited: Added a value for total defence to the Other Stats tab.

Retuned monsters attack values slightly. (making them a little easier)

Optimised markup on settlement pages.

Fixed a "phantom" bug caused when a/c'ing. Players never saw it but it littered my logs. This clears that and makes my error logs easier to navigate.

Another long awaited: Private messages and alliance messages now persist through refreshing!

Increased total chat messages held in memory from 200 to 500 to compensate for the extra items now in it.

Some alliance messages didn't have timestamps. Now they do.

Beast spawns have been changed. The tiers no longer favour the lower end. It was originally done this way as there was noone able to kill higher tier beasts. No longer an issue. Chances have changed from 30,25,20,15,10 (Feeble-Myth) to 20,20,20,20,20. Everyone gets a fair chance.

Beast spawn rates have been slightly lowered to compensate for the shift in variance spawning.

83 "other" changes/additions/fixes to areas unrelated to playing, such as Admin tools.

Groundwork has been done for the Seer, and will be the next update. Soon™

Christmas Charity Results

04 January 2021

As most of you are aware, throughout December I pledged that I would donate 10% of all donations made to the game, to a mental health charity called Mind.

Today, I have tabulated the results of all those donations, and would like to share with you all, the results.

This charity is close to heart for me, so I would like to thank you all so much for all the donations made in this time, allowing so much to go to such a needy cause in these times.

Take care of yourselves everyone, Dave.

Server Move

21 December 2020

As most of you will already be aware, we have moved to a new server.

Our old provider was having hardware issues and was refusing to take responsability. After a few days of back and forth, them trying to get more money out of me, I gave them the middle finger and jumped ship.

We moved to the new server yesterday and had a bit of a rocky start, which was entirely my fault. I configured the database server incorrectly. I paid a colleague of mine in love to sort it out for me and in your own words, we are now "zoom zoom".

The server may be of a weaker spec, but the hardware and infrastructure make up for it.

I do appologise for the issues caused and I can't thank you all enough for the constant support and patience you've all shown. I am grateful to have you all here.

Enjoy the Christmas event! over the holiday season, progress on updates will be spotty, but I am of course always available to you guys.

Happy Holidays!

Community Outreach

09 December 2020

Hi!

A member of the community, ingame: Justice, has created a YouTube channel and has started making some content for help and tips within Valkyries Fall.

He asked me if I would do an interview with him to discuss the game, community and the future. I wanted to share that with you all. It's quite lengthy, I just listened to it like I would a podcast.

Interview between Justice & Hazonko

I hope you enjoy listening.

Stuff omitted from today, because I'm an idiot

03 December 2020

So, when I released an update earlier today, I had neglected missions for the new mobs and such.

You can now accept missions for the new monsters.

Your last mob should also now automatically be selected when trying to do missions again.

Event and Monster Changes

03 December 2020

Event Changes

I've rewritten how events work to be better manageable by myself.
This has allowed me to make some other changes to events and have now added the much discussed addition of free bonus time for all upon any donation.

What will happen is that 1 minute per $1 donated will be pooled. On the first of the month, at 18:00 (most voted time) an event will start with the amount of time accumulated over the last month.

If there is a sceduled event (IE Dec 21st - Jan 3rd for Christmas), the time will pool and extend that event rather than a new event.

If an event is in progress, any time gained will be added to the current ongoing event.

Mob Changes

Defensive equipment is now more effective. Those of you that have been skating along with weak armour may need to check their mob, because they seemingly hit harder, when in fact you just dont have enough defence.

For those of you that have acquired a secondary class, this now opens up a new mob list. Ascended monsters! Careful though, they don't mess around. This adds another 45 mobs per plane.

Unlike the first 45 mobs, their stats are calculated programmatically. Should work for some nicer rate of endgame progression.

Other Changes:

Changed where event information is displayed to be more prominent to the player.

Stats, skill and main partial have been optimised to load faster.

As an effect of the above change, Teleport will now always show in the actions drop down menu, even if you cant use it yet. You'll just receive a message saying come back when you can. Not optimal, but it makes the Main partial load 50x faster not having to check whether you have Slepnirs Horn in your inventory.

Added a null check on alliance top lists to see if an alliance is deleted, but cache hasn't updated yet.

Changed maximum alliance members to 15.

Added a 3 day warning for subscription expiry upon login. I get many complaints about people not noticing that their sub has run out. Hopefully this helps!

Alliance now shows againt the player on top lists. Hidden by Tarnkappe if turned on. We seem to have some vengeful alliances, so both these things can be used in retaliation tactics.

Fixed a message bar display error for admin when banning a player.

Admins and Mods now have specific colours, regardless of what plane they're sitting on. Red for mods, blue for Admin.

Added Christmas theme effect for the event from 21st Dec - 3rd Jan.

QoL and such

25 November 2020

When Auto Attacking, it will now tell you how many auto's are remaining in the tab title. So you can see if you need to come back and refresh your actions!

Grammatical fixes to auto and bonus action numbers.

Fixed an alliance tax display issue for pending taxes above a certain number.

Terms of Use has been updated.

Abuse of multiple accounts has led to some unfair gameplay. Many discussions were had both privately and publicly with the community regarding this. I was running an honour system, to which most adhered to. Those that didn't gained unfair advantages and this now stops.

Tooling has been created for Admins and Moderators to monitor those with too many accounts.

Moderators can now jail (temp ban) a character or characters infringing on this rule. Ready for me, the Admin, to permanantly ban when available to do so.

This has been an ongoing conversation for quite a while. So why did it take so long to implement something? I created something that extracts your original IP and is visible through VM or Proxy to also catch those that may attempt to circumvent this rule.

If you have too many accounts, message Hazonko so that the "correct" ones can be banned. If you don't, in a weeks time (1st December) I'll just be swinging that banhammer.

Here's to a fair game with a great community!