Project Quicksilver
The collective name for a near-total re-write from Tootsville III to Tootsville IV.
This project produced Persephone, the 90%+-rewritted Flash front-end, the new Membership & Billing system, the new server system Romance 1.0, and the original Tootsbook.
History[edit]
From Hillside Demo, we (Res Interactive LLC Engineering) had inherited some very — shall we say, “craptastic,” at the risk of insulting “crap” — code. Tootsville II added on some networking code, based upon a licensed game “chat” server that we had learned was in use by a few other small (at that time) games … including the Club Penguin game that was (then) about to be purchased by Disney. We made the (as it turned out, foolish) assumption that we could use this for our much more complicated game.
Well, Tootsville III was put together on those shaky foundations. There were problems galore. The chat server couldn't handle rooms with more than a few people in it, and really had no code to handle our character actions and costumes and stuff. We later learned that Club Penguin had written extensive additional server plug-in code, and barely used any of the software that we had licensed.
During the Tootsville III era, we did get a lot of screens built, but the load times were long, and sometimes players got “stuck” between rooms. (The “loading” screen would appear … and hang.) Character data got out of sync, and the load on our server got very high with only 100 or so players online.
Then, we made the Scholastic Toots Licensing Deal and panicked. We were about to send out flyers to thousands of kids across the US, and we knew the system couldn't hold up. As I presented it to Codfish Howie and Alex Pecci, it was like we had build cardboard stage sets and were going to try to move people into buildings that couldn't hold their weight.
We didn't have much time, but — we went crazy and wrote most of Tootsville IV in five weeks. It was a nightmare (ironically, Project Nightmare was the code-named for the previous — Tootsville III — conversion), and we were working 18+ hour days. I took on some beautiful code from Cassandra Nicol, including the Chat Filter system that we continued to use and enhance, and threw out a huge amount of other code. We cleaned up the sloppy database structures, built reliable logging infrastructure, and consolidated some game controls that had been written in PHP into the Java code-base.
Then we turned on Project Osiris on the Beta.Tootsville.Com region and … it bombed. The software we'd licensed, the chat server that Club Penguin was using, couldn't handle the volume of traffic were were simulating. Players would appear and disappear, chat messages wouldn't get delivered … we were so exhausted at that point, that after the deployment test (conducted at Qui-Gon Gene's home), I sent everyone home to sleep and hoped we'd dream up a solution.
Fortunately, I had a game server of my own, at the time called Braque, half-written. It was in Java, like Osiris, and it could do everything Osiris needed and a lot more. I thought about it, cleared it with an (understandably panicked) Codfish Howie, and spent about a day and a half converting Osiris to work with Braque. We renamed Braque Appius Claudius Cæcus, because the software we'd licensed was written by a Roman company, and Appius (who was blind and twice Consul) had built a major route out of Rome.
Well, it was a success, and we hooked up our new Membership and Billing to Appius in short order, and the rest was history. Appius was the first of the Romans namings.