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Rankings reset

Scoring and high break recording are now all working well - so to restart a fair competion - I have reset the rankings.
Good luck to all !

All accounts extended

All accounts have just been extended by 16 hours to make up for downtime (approx 8 hours) over the last couple of days.
Despite it being a major upgrade and the very great bulk of the downtime being between 1am and 7am I have had a lot of complaints and critisism, so I have given everyone double the downtime. (including unregistered players on free trials)

NOTE: The rankings will be reset again at 9.00 am tomorrow - and *probably* on the first of every month thereafter - depending on what people think ?

New release - I've done so much the info won't actually fit in the update window so here it all is:-

6.1.168

THIS IS A MAJOR RELEASE - YOU MAY WANT TO STICK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE FOR A WHILE

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE ON THE 'BLEEDING EDGE' OF DEVELOPMENT FOR A FEW HOURS - PRESS NO.

* Changed computer to never concede
* Allowed you to put the balls back and put the computer back in if he misses
* Added close button to opening/splash screen
* Added close button to smiley window
* Made smiley button toggle as close button
* Adding smileys now shifts noticeboard up so you can still see incoming messages
* Made easy/medium computer opponents more accurate with their shots/clumsier with power
* Fixed bug when computer potted white
* Fixed issues with the white cursor being left visible
* Shortening guides - as your break builds, the guides now get shorter makes games more interesting.
* Added challenge decline reason dropdown
* Added a sound when you are challenged
* Fixed some problems around conceded games

* Major changes to improve reliablity of reconnects, improve speed, handle more users.
* Moved rooms and branding of rooms to database.
* New room chooser shows number of players in each room.
* Added country flags to ranking
* Added high breaks and frame times to results
* Added a SHOUT facility for admins to address people in game.
* Added player info popup containing country, full comments, roomscore, and YOUR expiry info
* Game News events feed into games, PB breaks, New Members, Account Expiries
* Fixed problems with livescores lagging behind
* Fixed problems with double (and wrong) break messages

In case you thought I was resting on my laurels . . .

Been very busy improving things, some work on the computer opponent and the occassional missing white over the weekend.
Then, yesterday I took a big and scary plunge into the waiting room code - stripping it down to use one socket per player instead of two, this has removed alot of duplicated code and should improve the reliability and performance (and thereby the capacity), also moving all rooms and branding into the database allowing for rooms to be put up branded or torn down whilst the rooms are running.
Each waiting room program can now run an arbitrary number of rooms, the room chooser has the number of players in each room visible, The noticeboards and rankings are now isolated from one another so there is a kind of 'leauge' in each seperate room. Swear filter is being worked on, results list changed oh, all sorts of good stuff.

Website Revamped . . .

Well, in the process anyway hope you like the new style it should improve again shortly.

OK, So it's not really news but . . .

Running the latest version on Jakes PC today I noticed how rubbish the fonts looked, especially on the 'splash screen'

Turns out he didn't have 'ClearType' enabled - I've a feeling it doesn't ship with XP 'on' by default so it might be worth checking *your* PC too, things look much nicer (especially on flat panel displays) with it switched on.

Here's a line of text without and with ClearType - so you can see what I'm rattling on about.

Follow this link if you'd like to try some of the fonty goodness. href=http://www.xp-tips.com/enable-clearytype.html

The deed is done

Thanks for everyone's patience - the switchover went *reasonably* smoothly, the extra load and some new players wheedled out a couple of new bugs - but they've been fixed now.

Still one or two minor problems with the noticeboard shred function, and second and subsequent challenges but I'll get onto those this morning.

Anyone struggling to get onto the new version - please drop me an email, if you have an expired trial account, have been running a cracked version clone or anything else - try the new one anyway, I'm having a bit of an amnesty BUT be aware the new room has much tighter security and controls - we're pretty liberal but, please behave or you will potentially be banned - registered or not.

Sorry for the 'dry patch' of news - The beta participants know it's been a difficult week, and I somewhat dropped the 'news' juggling ball.

Two posts in a day again - that's almost frantic activity

Right - more thanks to Corby - we put together a test program and tried a bunch of things on his machine
DirectSound does NOT want to work under his vista - so I've spent the whole day building a 'failover' system - if directsound doesn't want to play ball on your machine it should downgrade gracefully to using winmm calls. To translate that into English - If you're on Vista the sound will be slightly crapper - until Microsoft pull their finger out and fix whatever-the-hell it is that's wrong.
Some sunny day, after a Windows Update you lucky,lucky Vista users might get a 'd' pop up after the version number in the top of the window bar - whereupon you'll notice (or not) the proportional volume and simultaneous sounds.

In the meantime I'll try and improve the sound by producing the ball sounds at different volumes (the present click is annoyingly loud - the more adventurous amongst you might like to attenuate it a little in your favourite sound editing tool c:\program files\quicksnooker\click.wav UPDATE: Turned out that all of the above nonsense was because I wasn't shipping DX8VB.DLL!