November 20, 2004

I say: Making and maintaining a games site: hard

     Well folks, for about another half hour my games site is going to be down. Why? because once again my server has crashed. You may be saying to yourself: how in the world does your server keep crashing?! Well, quite simply put, because my machine can't handle the newly humongous number of requests it's been recieving. On an average school day there is over a couple hundred megs of games downloaded from my site. That's a huge tax on my bandwidth (which I'm freely giving to you people), but more importantly it's a huge strain on all my protective software and especially my resources. For example:
     Between the hours of 10:30am and 12:30pm (normal lunch crossovers for Pyle and Whitman), I normally recieve about four hundred connections. now to keep that in perspective that's approximately 3 to 4 threads per download and so technically that's 1200 to 1600 connections to my computer in the span of two hours. evenly dived that's about 10 connections per minute. Now think of my moinitoring software:
     If it takes 10mhz to moinitor one connection then it takes 100mhz per minute, or half of my total processing power on my computer. Now, if I normally have about 72% processing power free than all the sudden my processing power drops to 22%. At this level I now also have only about 1 megabyte of ram remaining. At less than 5 megs of ram norton antivirus becomes incapable of mointoring my computer and freezes everything to inform me this is so. Thus halting everything until I get home and hit the enter button. It's also difficult to find games that are "actually" fun. The reason I mention this is because I don't like sites that offer tons of games, only 1/16th of which are fun. I like sites that have like 30 really good games.
     But even more important than just having good games is that they aren't going to become obsolete. So very many of the games on addictinggames.com have either become broken links or pages that have big white spaces in the middle. That's no good! In fact, it makes it harder not only to play the games, but it bothers you when you move on if it was marked as a good game. All of the games I offer are hosted from the place they are offered, thus guaranting that they will not dissapear unless I made a mistake, or the whole rest of the site goes down. The only real issue with this method is that it requires not only a huge amount of coding per-page, but it also requires my to break down a huge number of games that are heavily encrypted to prevent people like myself from stealing them in the first place. And despite the fact that I've learned so very much about this sacred art of stealing flash games, flash director games are still beyond my grasp unless they are maintained in a single file. Delirium is a good example of a game that is a flash director file. It's all inside that one file, so it doesn't need me to hack it to find all it's other resources. A good example of a game that needed a lot of hacking to find all it's maintained resources was the Mystery of time and space. And for those of you who've already noticed, even that is an incomplete hack (the final level has no text and the "TO BE CONTINUED" screen is no where to be found). But a good example of a game that is a DCR that I'm incapable of hacking is both loop and rampage on shockwave.com. I'm still working at learning an effective method of stealing dcrs, but don't expect anything soon. Anyway, I'm done ranting, and the site's back up. I'm going to bed.

--Update--
     After using some seriously modified browsers which logged all the files downloaded, I was able to catch all the files that I needed to hack rampage. It's now part of the site. and all this after what? Two and a half hours of work? Pssssh, those other sites don't know what their missing.

Posted by Kickmyassman at November 20, 2004 11:58 PM
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