Connected mobile games

I have spoken with several people about mobile games with multiplayer capabilities and I was surprised that those games are also called connected games.

I am now not sure, what is more used, should we call our games connected games or multiplayer games? I am writing this post to see, how many people will come to it from Google search, based on search term "connected games" (connected gaming), that's why the title is a little bit strange.

We keep calling our platform multiplayer for now.

If anybody knows the difference, please let me know.

UPDATE 1:
for term "connected games" , we are number 9 on Google
for term "connected mobile games", we are number 5 on Google

I will post data from Google Analytics on how many people use this term soon

UPDATE 2:
I have observer the Google stats and only three people came to the blog using connected mobile games term. What does it mean? I think that it means that nobody is using this term.

Lets go back to free mobile multi player games term.

I am doing some other observations regarding mobile SEO, I hope I will write a post about the results.

It's getting bigger

Here's another great piece of news:

We're past the "20000 registered users" mark.

I think that's excellent because it shows that even with a minimal (virtually zero) marketing budget a project can attract people by providing a good entertaining experience.
Our games are - and always will be - free. We believe that users should not be FORCED to pay for good entertainment, they should WANT to pay to keep it going (in other words use the donation button). This is similar to what I've recently seen happening with free podcast books. Make it free and they will come (more than once if your content's good enough). And don't forget - there are always adds to help along the way :)

Serving more than 1000 games a day

I think this is pretty awesome - just yesterday we've hit more than 1000 games served in a day for the second time (that's actual games played after both opponents confirm) here is a small table:

Date / Games

2007-11-08: 1013

2007-11-09: 818

2007-11-10: 713

2007-11-11: 1126


I think this is really great and I hope that the numbers keep going up. Right after we re-launched in July we were getting between 10 and 140 games per day so it's good to see that the community is growing and having fun!

My trip to Silicon Valley

I have been for a month in Silicon Valley. It was really good experience for me and I have met many interesting people. I think I now have a better idea, how startups works there.
I have published some photos on my Wirenode blog, so go there if you like to see them.

Is Eclipse MTJ dead? I hope not ...

.. and yet it appears to be. I've recently browsed the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ) project pages (found here: http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/) and it seems to me that there has been no major development for quite some time now. Quoting the latest news from their web:

The first public release (0.7) was completed on November 06

And that my friends, is a year ago. I must say that I am rather sad about this. Even though I am a NetBeans fan and Mobility Pack committer I’ve always felt that it was competition (read ‘Eclipse’) that stimulated the NetBeans community to produce a better IDE. And all Java developers benefit through better tools.

If MTJ is truly dead it is certainly no favor to mobile developers. Competition sparks innovation and there is never enough of that. Let us hope I am wrong and MTJ is just getting ready to stun as all with some awesome tools.

In somewhat related news NetBeans 6.0 has been released as Beta2 and the FCS is so close I can nearly smell it. If you develop in Java then definitely check it out – it’s the best thing since The Simpsons made it to TV!

Apple and Java 6 - I am not getting a MacBook Pro

I am looking to replace an old laptop and get myself a brand new development machine. At first it seemed a no-brainer:

"I'll just get one of those oh-so pretty MacBook Pros"

My wife has owned an iBook for around 2 years. She even paid the money to update to OSX Tiger, and bough the .Mac yearly subscription for the 3rd time now. So despite a few issues she is clearly quite happy with her Mac and continues to throw money at Apple.
Until recently I thought I'd get an apple as well but I changed my mind very quickly in the light of recent events and after a bit of investigation.

So here is why I will not be getting a Mac:

1. I am a Java developer (one of about 5 million apparently) and there is no Java 6 on OSX, not even in Leopard

That's it.

I guess I could buy the MacBook Pro and run Linux (which I've been running so far on my Toshiba Tecra), but for the money I can get better hardware elsewhere. The value for me is in having a MacBook AND OSX. If OSX is out due to lack of Java support, the deal is off.

I'll not make an actual purchase for about 3 months and perhaps in that time Steve will come to his senses and change the company attitude towards Java developers and users in general. And now BEHOLD as I will conclude this blog with a poem of my own making.

Again old saying seems to hold
That all that glitters is not gold
With OSX less Java 6
I'd lose my job, start turning tricks
Apple needs to listen well
Else I'll end up with a Dell

BattleBlocks released ...

Most excellent news :)

Last night we released BattleBlocks (our Tetris clone) and let me tell you, I've spent lots of time "testing" the game :) Even though I didn't write that one (James O'Connor wrote BattleBlocks for us) it is my all time favorite Cotopia game. It is that much more embarrassing that Tomas beat me twice last night and I didn't get a point on him... awell, maybe next time.

In addition to BattleBlocks we also pushed out new versions of all existing games with additional features so check it out ASAP.

- Forum posts have dates attached
- Better in game chat screen
- Can send SMS invites to friends straight from main menu
- Blocking of empty chat messages

Just go to http://cotopia.mobi on your phone, download all the games, and let us know what you think. Many of the changes in this release were based on community comments.

11000 players

We celebrate!
So far we have 11000 players. I think that's great, but we want more. If you know about any portal, which could add our games to their catalog, please let us know.

With a little luck, we will be able to announce partnership with a major portal from India soon, so stay tuned.

Other info:
You can read our blog directly from your phone at the address http://cotopia.wirenode.mobi
You can make your own mobile blog and portal at www.wirenode.com. It's very easy, try it!

EJB3 TimerService spec needs fixing

We've gotten many complaints about our scoring bug: people just leave the game (which they are presumably losing) time-out and do NOT lose any points ... how can this be?

It shouldn't happen and the issue has been fixed.

The error was in a little code of "silly logic" which would create clearner timers but then also kill them before they got a chance to run, the issue was thread related (as usual). How I fixed it?
(Read on if you care about the technical details of the bug in our Java EE system)

Using TimerService we have set up two timers in the EJB3 session beans that manage game creation (matching opponents etc.) and game play (including scoring). These timers execute the @Timeout methods every few seconds to make sure people get their points and there are no stale old games sitting around:


@Stateless
public class GameManagerBean implements GameManagerRemote, GameManagerLocal {

   @Timeout
   private void cleanUnmatchedGames(Timer t) {
     ... clean unmatched abandoned games
   }

   public void startGameCleanerTimer() {
     this.stopGameCleanerTimer();
     this.timerService.createTimer(PERIOD_MS, PERIOD_MS, GAME_TIMER_ID);
   }

   public void stopGameCleanerTimer() {
     for (Iterator it = this.timerService.getTimers().iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
       Timer timer = (Timer) it.next();
       if (timer.getInfo().equals(GAME_TIMER_ID)) {
         timer.cancel();
       }
     }
   }

}

@Stateless
public class PlayManagerBean implements PlayManagerRemote, PlayManagerLocal {

   @Timeout
   private void cleanTimedOutGames(Timer t) {
     ... clean games where one player timed-out or left
   }

   public void startPlayCleanerTimer() {
     this.stopGameCleanerTimer();
     this.timerService.createTimer(PERIOD_MS, PERIOD_MS, PLAY_TIMER_ID);
   }

   public void stopPlayCleanerTimer() {
     for (Iterator it = this.timerService.getTimers().iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
       Timer timer = (Timer) it.next();
       if (timer.getInfo().equals(PLAY_TIMER_ID)) {
         timer.cancel();
       }
     }
   }

}


To be certain that the above @Timeout methods are called by a single timer at regular intervals we have to make sure that one and only one timer of each kind is alive at any one time. Timers are persistent (survive server crash or shutdown) which can be nice but it can also be a pain since it means that if you start a timer every-time your server starts you'll be accumulating them. To make sure that we create timers once per server startup and delete them on server shutdown I put the code into servlet life-cycle methods.


public class MobileServiceServlet extends HttpServlet {
   public void init() throws ServletException {
     this.gameManagerBean.startGameCleanerTimer();
     this.playManagerBean.startPlayCleanerTimer();
   }

   public void destroy() {
     this.gameManagerBean.stopGameCleanerTimer();
     this.playManagerBean.stopPlayCleanerTimer();
   }
}


You may have noticed that to ensure that only one timer of a kind is alive at a time the startGameCleanerTimer() and startPlayCleanerTimer()methods also delete any old timers which may be around due to server crash. Just to be on a safe side.

All these code gymnastics just to make sure that we aren't starting multiple timers, I hope that the next Java EE spec will include some "on deployment" related features so that this is no longer necessary.

Scoring fixed

As some of you may have already noticed, we've deployed a new version of Cotopia server, this means that once you accept a game you cannot chicken out without losing or gaining points :)
I am sure that there will be quite a few people happy about this. Soon to follow will be the new MIDlets so keep an eye out for further announcements.