Independence Day update – 2024 Preparation for this event was rather rigorous. New content: Several new items were added. Check the summer event shop to see whats new Breeds: Scottish Terrier and upcoming Doberman! In addition to several new items, several features were introduced since the easter event, as well as backend overhauls New features Dog 2.0 – This was already released but still being updated. The main advance here is the ‘single page’ functionality introduced. You can equip your dog and render all at once, without page loads. Almost all functionality on the dog 2.0 doesn’t require a reload. There are some things still to do here, and that’s detailed in the upcoming features thread. In particular the skill training is MUCH easier now. Shops 2.0 The event shop for the summer event will eventually take over all shop functionality on alacrity. As with dogs, it uses AJAX requests to complete transactions. it unifies all the shops into a library, and has the flexibility to handle any type of purchase. With this there will be no more missing purchases, double purchases, etc. User Wallets The primary currency of alacrity will always be bones. There will never be a requirement to purchases different currencies other than bones with real world money. That said, events often operate on temporary or seasonal currencies of a sort. Oftentimes we refer to them as ‘points’. The easiest way to think about this is an old school arcade. You play skee ball, and you get tickets which can be redeemed at the counter. This is a currency of sorts. Since the old item system isn’t really suited to unlimted entries I created a generalized wallet. It can track all sorts of stuff like lifetime ea ings for a particular event, agility trial placings etc It can also track your purchase history, so if you ever have a question you can just look it up! miniGames system revision This is a work in progress with more to be described in the upcoming features thread The big hits here: First off, the game interactions has been updated to work under a client / server model, similar to dogs. This means we can have live games without page loads. The backend for the gaming system has also substantially overhauled, in preparation for final revisions into interactive games (details in upcoming) and more mode code base. This was a very intensive backend update. Most of it you don’t directly see, the visible portions are the tip of the iceberg. The gist of it is client / server, and enhancing the capabilities of the system Api system This basically ties into all the new updates. In order to break away from tom the old alacrity model, I had to develop an api to handle user interactions. Dog 2.0 is a great example of this. The design of the dog page is pure html/javascript. The backend is purely software. All the pages will eventually be done this way, which makes for MUCH EASIER page updates and redesigns in the future. Single Page App (SPA) This is usable from the user profile button. It’s a work in progress. The gist of it is that you can now click around the site without having to worry about things like chat reloading every time you load the page. This was a rather difficult project, but its well under way. As more and more of alacrity becomes cleaned up, this feature will become more useful. You can test it by enabling it, then click to something like your kennel. It will show a loading window while the new page loads. Adminstration and artist tools While not visible to the end user, a whole host of administration and artist tools have been added to enable more efficient updates. Suffice to say, were serious about getting more updates out, and these will help! Backend fixes to enable breeds and new coats A LOT of cleanup had to be done to make releasing new breeds practical. (lets just say there was a reason that new breeds were not added for a long time, and it wasn’t the drawing of them!) New breeds and coats are now easy to design and insert into the system. There are some issues with compatibility that will be addressed in the coming updates. Forums response notifications were made so you can track responses to your post Numerous legacy system improvements In particular the shout box, legacy shops, the riddler etc. most if not all pages are now mobile compatible as well. More… Theres a lot more, but unfortunately I was rather rushed to meet the July 4 deadline and didn’t track as well as I had hoped. I’ll update this thread with them as I remember.