Board Thread:Off-Topic Activities/@comment-32349266-20181203072659/@comment-29191679-20190108212918

116.26.109.118 wrote: Um, why not update it now? I mean, you  posted.

It might not look like it, but updates actually take quite some time to finish.

I know this because I've been in a similar situation before. Back on the Geometry Dash Wiki, I was the Game Master of a revived version of Break the Chest (which was originally created by TimewornKaiju). Games like these require you to take note of a lot of information with every update.



This might be a bit more of an extreme example, but here it is anyway.


 * Every turn had somewhere between 5 to 15 player actions, most of which were attacks, and an additional 1-7 enemy actions depending on how many enemies were active everywhere in the world.
 * Every attack action required me to generate a random number between 1 and 6, which determined how well every action went.
 * Then I had to calculate damage, based on which weapon the player attacked with. This required me to consider the weapon's tier (from 1-20), the weapon's material, and whether the user has any bonuses to damage from any sort of item or status effect.
 * Once all that was done, I had to update inventories. If a player broke a chest, a few weapons or items would appear in that biome for players to claim during the next turn, all of which I needed to call RNG to decide what they were.
 * If any items already exist in the biome during a turn, a player may claim it, and I have to add it to their inventory.
 * I'm pretty sure that chests spawned naturally, and some may have spawned from certain enemies. Either way, I had to decide what type of chest spawned every time one did.
 * Later on, factions were introduced. Some player actions may affect their relationship with various different factions, which I then had to keep track of.
 * After all that, I had to update every entity's health based on the damage values I calculated earlier on, removing any enemies that have died during the current turn. I then needed to add status effects if necessary.
 * There may be even more things that I don't remember (since this was a year or two ago), but once all of them were done, only then did I post the update.
 * And sometimes, when I posted the update, FANDOM didn't actually post it, and yet the reply box closed and I lost a good chunk of progress, if not all of it. It's become a habit for me to copy everything from the text box, reload the page, and then paste it back in before replying.

And all of this took at least one hour to do, not counting any mistakes that others may point out which I then have to fix.



Now, Phoenix may have less information to keep track of, but that doesn't mean it doesn't take a long time to update the game. From what I can tell, here's what he has to do with every update:


 * First, for every post that follows the rules, Phoenix has to use a spinner to generate a random number for every post, determining how many pins are knocked down.
 * If a part of any post doesn't follow the rules, I'm assuming that he'll ignore that part of the post.
 * In addition, he has to consider whether that user has already knocked down some pins in the previous frame.
 * If any events are currently going on, he has to generate another random number to determine whether the event interferes with the throw or not.
 * He then has to determine whether the object bowled down the lane would be better or worse at knocking down pins, determine bonuses for certain objects, and apply them accordingly.
 * Then, he has to update the scoreboard, using the values he has calculated earlier.
 * I don't know if Phoenix has encountered the same glitch that I have enough times for him to get into the habit of copying updates, reloading the page, pasting them back into the reply box and then posting them. Either way, I'm sure that it's been infuriating every time it happened.

I think it's safe to say that being able to post does not mean you can update a game like this.

Anyway, I bowl this entire post down the lane.