3 New Games! 6 Million Hands Dealt!!

Wow. It's already been over a month since my last update to this blog. Seems like just yesterday :)

Since the last blog update, World of Solitaire has been doing great.
I've added three new games, Clock, Sultan and just today, Flower Garden.

More amazingly is that the game continues to grow in popularity.
Since the last update the number of hands dealt on the site has DOUBLED from 3 million to over 6 million today.

The 6 millionth hand was a game of Golf dealt to user Skeletor54 on December 13th 2007 at 5:19PM.

I'm really happy that so many people are enjoying the site, it's turned out so well. It's far surpassed any expectations I had when I first started developing it several months ago.

I want to thank all the players that play, without your feedback (both in e-mails and blog comments), bug reports and comments the site wouldn't be where it is today. So THANK YOU.

Until next update... enjoy playing!

*** UPDATE: I fixed a bug that caused games like Pyramid not to work. I accidentally introduced the bug last night with the new game. Sorry about that :)

New Deck and another milestone!

When I first started World of Solitaire, I had no idea it would be so popular.

40 days after launching the site, 1 million hands had already been dealt.
34 days after that another million hands had been dealt.

Today I announce that on November 3, 2007 at 7:31PM that Anonymous user #233,297 was dealt the 3 millionth hand in a game of "Klondike (Turn One)"!
That's only 17 days since the 2 million mark!

I want to thank everyone for playing and I hope you are all having fun.

In celebration of this event I've updated the game with a new deck!
This deck is called 'Animals' and has a bit of a playful/cutesy theme.

I've also vastly improved the speed for viewing statistics. The trade off for this speed is that the Global and Leaderboard statistics are now only updated once every three hours.
Your personal statistics are still shown in real-time.

Over the past month or two I've also received some reports about the game not loading up correctly. The progress bar when you first load the game was getting stuck for some people which prevented them from being able to play. I've changed the way I preload the card images and I hope that this progress bar will no longer become stuck.
Let me know if anyone experiences any problems.

Enjoy playing! :)

2 Month Anniversary! 2 Million Hands Dealt!

World of Solitaire has reached another milestone! Over 2 million hands have been dealt!

The 2 millionth hand was a game of 'Klondike Turn 3' dealt to Anonymous User #196,888 at 2:19 AM this morning, October 17th 2007.

Over 86 million moves have been made and traffic has been increasing ever since launch!
I am really pleased that so many people are having fun playing on the site, it makes it all worth it.

Today is also the 2 month anniversary since World of Solitaire first went live!

I want to thank everyone who plays for playing as without you I wouldn't have the motivation I had to make the site into what it is today.

You may have noticed it's been almost a full month since my last update. I've been taking a little break from development and just been enjoying 'real life' for a bit. I still welcome all feature ideas or new game suggestions as I write them down in a to-do list.

I hope everyone continues to have fun playing! :)

1 Million Hands Dealt!

Last night at 7:38PM CDT time, World of Solitaire dealt it's 1 MILLIONTH hand!

The user who was dealt the 1 millionth hand was an anonymous user, User #50,758

The server move is pretty much complete at this point and the site should respond better during peak use times.

My plans for the site over the next few weeks/months is to add more and more game variations while continuing to fix bugs that are reported.

I'd like to thank everyone who plays for help making the site a success! I am glad that you are all enjoying playing and I hope you continue to have fun :)

Speed Improvements Coming

*UPDATE - Sat Sep 22nd*
Part 1 of the server move is complete. The database is now running on a different more powerful server and the statistics should be a bit quicker now.
Part 2 will take place silently in the background over the next few days the web server moves to the new box. After that is complete things should be much faster :)
*END UPDATE*

So over the past few weeks I've watched the World of Solitaire become more and more popular as more and more players visit and play each day.
During certain moments the site can become slow and the statistics are as you know very slow to load.

Well after forecasting traffic patterns, I've determined I need to get a new server to sustain the traffic and provide a faster experience :)

So over the next week I will be working behind the scenes to get the new server up and running.
You won't notice anything until I'm just about ready to switch over to the new server. This will require having Statistics and Login be offline (the game will still work fine though) for a few hours one of these days coming up.

When I get closer to knowing when that is I'll let you know. I'll also make sure the site shows a message (bottom center of the board) when the move is taking place.

Thank you all for making World of Solitaire a success and I hope you all continue to have fun playing :)

New Deck and Updated Card Graphics

World of Solitaire's first custom made hand-drawn deck is now live!

Call the 'Majestic' deck, players should see it under the 'Deck' menu.

Here is some of the beautiful art of this deck:



I hope you all enjoy the new deck!

In addition to the new deck I've enhanced all the decks to support some icons that will help clarify what all the 'bases/foundations' are for the different games.

Now foundations where you can build upon have this image:



If a stack base allows you to click to 'redeal' cards you will see this image:


Once you have exhausted the number of deals your allowed for that particular game the redeal icon will change into:



I hope these new icons will make what the different stacks in the game do a bit more apparent players who are new to that particular game.

I've also fixed several bugs that folks have let me know about! Thank you very much everyone for your comments and e-mails!

I hope you continue to enjoy playing :)

New Feature! Plus something special!

Based on player requests, I've implemented a new feature! The options you pick (deck, background, options, etc) are now saved with your username.
This means that you can login to another computer and your options will automatically load.
This also allows multiple people to play on the same computer. Whenever you login your options will be loaded and whenever you change any options they will automatically be saved.

Well... that's the new feature... and now it's time for something special.
I've been working with several artists over the past few weeks and I'm pleased to say that coming very soon is a brand new deck! A deck hand drawn just for World of Solitaire!

Here is a sneak preview:
















So stay tuned.

I also wanted to thank you all for commenting and on my blog posts and sending e-mails.
Player feedback is what keeps me motivated :)

I hope you all are enjoying playing! :)

Welcome new players!

This morning a very popular newsletter linked to the World of Solitaire which brought over 15,000 new visitors to the site.
To those that are new... welcome!

The new visitors also brought with them increased traffic to the server which caused the game to be much slower than normal through most of the morning.
Things appears to be a back to normal now however.

Also, several new players attempted to register and received errors.
I've spent that past few hours looking into this and I believe I have fixed the errors with the registration system.

Let me know if anyone out there is still experiencing issues!

Both new and existing players alike, I hope you are all enjoying the game! :)

Random Number Bug Fixed

Thanks all to who posted a comment in response to my first thread.

Special thanks to 'Anonymous' who suggested that there may be a flaw in the randomization of the cards.

After reading their comment, I investigated the random number generator in more depth.
I created a page to test the deck shuffling and create a visual result so I could clearly see if any non-random trends were evident.

To my surprise, there WAS a bug!

The shuffler tended to favor keeping like numbered cards together and deal lower numbered cards before higher ones.

I've just implemented new randomizing code that appears to be much more random.
I cannot see any trends at all with this new code and truly appears to be random.

Sorry about the bug folks, but they happen :)

Thanks to everyone who is playing and I love receiving e-mails from you.
Bug reports, praise or any other type of feedback is welcomed!

Welcome!

Welcome World of Solitaire players!

I decided to create this blog in order to better communicate to all of you about changes that may be made to the game.
I plan to continue updating the change log, however I thought that a blog would allow me to be more descriptive about larger changes and would give you players the opportunity to comment on them.

I launched World of Solitaire about 3 weeks ago, around August 18th 2007.
Since launching over 63,000 unique users have visited World of Solitaire and 400 have registered.

I hope everyone is enjoying playing!