Positions:

- Retired Staff

Join Date: 06 October 2013

Posts: 17972

Posted on 19 May 2016 - 11:56 PM

Hey everyone. SG 2.0 has been a long and ongoing project here at Badlion. It has almost become the circle jerk of Soon TM for Badlion because it has been promised so many times for different release time frames. It's half way through May and we are ready to just start a closed beta for it (full release somewhere towards end of May or first week of June). I'm going to try to not make this post into an essay but rather summarize each and every delay that has made SG 2.0 later than expected.

1. Original Jr Dev assigned to the project did not have the time constraints to meet the demand of SG 2.0. The original assignment was handed out November 17th. This caused a 2 month delay until i removed him from the project.
2. The project was then handed to SmellyPenguin to work on, who was busy working on other things such as ArenaPvP stability w/ me. Remember the ridiculous 10 second lag spikes from 100k chunk packets being sent? Yeah we wasted a lot of time working on that and other features around the network. As a result from this Smelly didn't really get working on it until the beginning of March.
3. Smelly made some good progress towards the beginning of March and then all gear/effort was shifted towards making Badlion 1.9 compatible which was a huge pain in the ass for us. Nevertheless we got it done but it slowed down the progress of SG 2.0 again.
4. The mainframe system you have heard about or had issues with in the past few weeks is the center piece to all future Badlion code. SG 2.0 cannot work without it. Due to all of the craziness for me in real life and on Badlion I did not have enough time to put work into it until the end of April. As a result SG 2.0 couldn't make any further progress.
5. Now that the mainframe was finally operational we were able to sit down and configure our network wide party system and matchmaker. There are some other components needed which we are in the process of finalizing today and will be doing a full network reboot for as well. These new components will add the missing bridge between the SG Lobby and the SG Servers finally. Concurrently Smelly has now been finishing off the last pieces of SG 2.0 and it is the beginning of May.

I can honestly say I don't think that any projects we have undertaken have taken a whole 6 months to get going from the start to the end. This one was much of a larger task than one would normally think though. We spent a lot of time cleaning up our infrastructure and codebase to try and make building new game modes going forward a lot easier. The pieces that can be re-used again and again for future game modes are as follows:

1. Party system (this is a MUST for season 13 and future team gameplay on Badlion)
2. MiniPvPGames Plugin (this is our new core game engine for future games. With this core plugin now properly built/designed we can spin up new game modes really fast [e.g. skywars rebuilt])
3. Mainframe (this is the all-knowing system of Badlion that will allow future design to be done with ease since all of the data will be in place)

These three systems might not seem like a lot from the front side, but on the back side there was a lot of work and design put into them so that we can pave the best path forward with Badlion. Fun fact is we have barely started working on season 13 yet, but with all of these new tools that we have built over the past few months, and our increased development team size, season 13 will be out the door extremely fast for how big of a system it will be.

I hope this post clears up some of the questions the community has about why SG 2.0 has taken so long. The tl;dr of the whole thing is we wanted to spend some extra time making it so that we designed everything properly so that going forward (later half of 2016) we can pump out new features left and right with ease.

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