April 2020 Roadmap

Announcements Roadmaps
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Another month bites the dust!

The March 2020 Roadmap went fairly smoothly, except that I lost this week to sickness and also pivoted to working on some estate planning. I think I probably caught Coronavirus: I had a fever, headache, fatigue, runny nose, and still have a dry cough (but thankfully it’s been getting better steadily). Tests aren’t available to me where I’m at though, so I can only guess. Either way, I am fully quarantined in my house with no other humans.

Despite all this, I successfully started in on mobile work as planned, beginning with Performance enhancement: don't send a game's entire history upon joining. I still have some more work to do on “Server Side Rendering” so I’ll start this month on that, but it shouldn’t even take all of this coming week to complete. But then it’s onto the new stuff, which is…

“View Map as Player” Button

Thank you everyone who has expressed their desire for this feature on the forum thread or on Discord. The desire seems strong, and it’s pretty low cost, so I’m just gonna try and knock it out.

Account Deletion

I had my first “please delete my account” request this week, which is exciting, even if a little sad as well. Feels like a milestone in Shmeppy’s maturity. But that’s my cue to make it so that users can do it themselves, so I’m going to add an account deletion process to Shmeppy that can be activated through the Account page.

Drawing Refactor & Performance Monitoring (Error Reporting Too!)

A “refactor” is developer jargon for “moving a bunch of code around without changing anything for users.” So this is about as unexciting as it gets.

This is all a bunch of supportive work for several of the upcoming mobile-support changes, particularly the client-side performance enhancements. The refactor will have me move everything around into more discrete chunks that I can then have Shmeppy measure the performance of individually.

Essentially, I’m going to be able to tell what’s actually slow on ya’ll’s computers so I can go make it unslow.

Basic Mobile Interface

While I’m waiting for the performance data to accrue… I’m going to top of the month (hopefully) by adding basic iOS and Android support. I just want to be able to pan around a map. I’ll only be testing on the two devices I have available to me right now (an iPhone and a Pixel), but I’ll expand into more devices as mobile support ramps up.

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I’m a little less confident in the contents of this month’s roadmap than I normally am. The global pandemic and my own sickness have me a little shaken, and I’m unsure of how much productive work I’ll be able to do this coming month, but I’m hoping that it will be business as normal and I’m planning as if it is.

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Hope you keep feeling better!

I’m excited to see “View Map as Player” :slight_smile:

A risk about account deletion you may not be aware of unless you’ve dealt with large scale account handling in a hostile environment: At scale, it is fairly common to see bad account deletions. Usually, this happens when an account gets taken over (e.g. by somebody’s sibling going onto their computer) and then deleted. To avoid this, a standard pattern is to do an initial temp deletion followed by real deletion some time later. Of course, similar problems can happen if there is a way to delete or damage all the content in an account.

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I’m new here (hoping to run my first game next week), but I’m excited to see where this is going in general, and for being able to view the map as a player.

Hope you feel better soon!

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I haven’t seen reports of hostile account deletion before, and I’ve worked on a website with milllions of active users, interesting.

I was going to do a stepped deletion process anyways though. The point of account deletion is that it’s permanent, so the staged deletion allows a large “confirmation time” when they can still undo the “permanent” action before it’s too late.

Where were you seeing malicious account deletion? It seems like such a weird attack.

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It really depends on the userbase. I’ve fairly regularly seen it reported around games that have many young players, which is why I thought of it as a risk here. I cannot comment on how much I’ve seen or not seen that at work (Google). I can say that we are large enough and with diverse enough services that we see most types of attacks.

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Hope you feel better soon! The recent update made performance a lot better by the way!

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