Torn City Newsletter - Autumn 2017

[Torn Logo] New servers & software upgrade!Volume 23 | Autumn 2017 Edition In this edition --------------------------------------------------------------- [Project Status](#section1) [Major PHP upgrade](#section2) [New servers live](#section3) [Sidebar rebuild](#section4) [Chaining](#section5) [Competitive warring](#section6) [Christmas Town 2017](#section7) [Mining corporation](#section8) [Future progress](#section9) [Autumn freebie](#section10) In other news --------------------------------------------------------------- Elimination "204 the Musical" by rainbowsaurus [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Mat-senpai's Elimination infographic [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Duke's highly controversial entry into Elimination [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- TCN's coverage of Elimination [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Lonestar's viral tweet [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Pink Power win Elimination 2017 [Read more]( Connect with us on --------------------------------------------------------------- [Facebook]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Twitter]( Autumn 2017 --------------------------------------------------------------- Hey {NAME} Welcome to the 23rd newsletter from Torn City. Just a quick one this quarter while we crack on with some big updates. Read on to find out more and don't forget to claim your free energy boost at the bottom of the newsletter. [Autumn Newsletter] --------------------------------------------------------------- []Project Status Here's our updated main project list. This doesn't include many other minor projects we're working on or have completed, but there's certainly too much on this list currently so we're working hard to finish them up - looking forward to releasing a bunch of long-term projects over the next 3 months. [Progress list] To keep track of all of the updates / changes we make, please check out the [Bulletin Board]( for the weekly patch lists. --------------------------------------------------------------- []Major PHP upgrade Our hands were finally forced when we found we needed to upgrade our PHP version in order to install our new web servers. We immediately made this a high priority, upgrading from 5.3 to 7.1, assigning the majority of our workforce to this task in August. People who understand what this means know that this is no small feat, especially for such a huge site like Torn. We haven't upgraded this in almost a decade mainly due to how difficult it'd be to achieve - we hadn't really even considered it... So we had a lot of catching up to do. Somehow it looks like we've managed it, and this software update is now live - along with the installation of some new webservers. Since TORN is pretty much entirely programmed in PHP, we're seeing some massive benefits with such a substantial upgrade. Speed - PHP7 is heavily optimised compared to its older predecessors. We've seen a 30% - 70% performance boost (depending on tasks) and a great memory usage reduction. Developers have noticed that attacking in particular has never been so fast. New servers - This upgrade also allows us to finally add in our new web servers which are many times more powerful than the current ones. I know thousands of you have been eagerly awaiting this and we're sorry for the delays. Increased security - The newer version of PHP includes many bug fixes and security updates. Improved development - New features and libraries are now open to us, giving us more options and increasing development speed. While making this upgrade we've also removed many depreciated features at the same time which clears things up for us, making future work easier. As with any major software upgrade, it's possible this causes unforeseen issues. While it's been thoroughly beta tested by the developers, staff and committee for the past two weeks - issues may appear. Please report any problems you see in the [Bugs & Issues forum]( and have patience while we make fixes and the necessary optimisations. --------------------------------------------------------------- []New servers live {NAME}, we'd like you to meet PHP1, PHP2 and PHP3. They'll be handling all of your requests from now on, please be careful with them. They appear to be settling in nicely. You can see the dip in page load time as we switched off our old webservers earlier today and enabled our new ones. These new servers combined with our PHP upgrade and a huge amount of refactoring means we're seeing unprecedented response times - We're seeing an order of magnitude improvement on front-end request times. TORN is now way faster and much less vulnerable to spikes. --------------------------------------------------------------- []Sidebar rebuild For implementation of the new bar required for faction chaining, we decided it'd be best to rebuild the sidebar with live functionality - a stepping stone to making the entire site totally live - without requiring reloading pages. This means your sidebar will receive live updates. Any changes to your money / icons / messages e.t.c will instantly update within a second (no need to reload the page). Hopefully the background (and sidebar) will also be able to adjust instantly upon moving to / from the jail and hospital. At the same time, we have the new mobile application being released very soon. So we decided to improve, simplify and condense the 'top bar' navigation & information panel from this... To this... The main changes being... - Areas moved into a slider system - Areas can be favorited by tapping and holding - Money & Points combined with icons into slider - Bars simplified and condensed into a single line - Server / time moved to 'info' button - Top bar will expand horizontally to meet the width of the device --------------------------------------------------------------- []Chaining Chaining was scheduled for release at the end of this month, however this has slipped into November now due to the PHP7 migration messing with our timelines. But anyway, it's probably time for a little refresher: what should you and your faction expect once chaining is released? All factions will receive a small amount of respect for any attacks made by its members, even if there are no wars, and even if the victim isn't in a faction. This value of respect can be increased by hitting special multipliers and chaining. If the victim is in a faction, that faction will lose 10% of the respect your faction gained. Chaining will be a default mechanic for all factions whether they are in wars or not. A faction doesn't need to be involved in a war to create chains, although chains will aid future destructive & competitive warring efforts. It's all about increasing your chain with your faction and hitting the crucial multipliers when it counts. All faction members will always see the chain bar on the sidebar. There is a warm-up phase where 10 attacks by any members against anyone in Torn need to be completed within 5 minutes. If the faction succeeds, a full chain begins from 10 onwards. The chain will then continue increasing past this with every additional attack made. As the chain gets higher, a general scaling bonus to respect gain will be applied, as well as incremental large bonuses at certain steps. If the faction fails to make an attack within a five minute window after the warm-up period, the chain is broken and must cooldown before a new chain can be started. The chain will then decrease relatively quickly: by 1 every 10 seconds. The highest scaling bonus reached is applied for every attack made during the cooldown, and all multipliers (except the incremental bonuses) will still be applied. Here's the current list of carefully tuned multipliers which can be combined together per attack. This will likely change before release, but hopefully provides a good idea for how it's going to work. [AltImage] --------------------------------------------------------------- []Competitive warring This isn't due until after chaining and destructive warring is released, so it's a bit of a way off. But I wanted to share a few teasers anyway. [profile] [notification] --------------------------------------------------------------- []Christmas Town 2017 This year we're rebuilding the map entirely with new and improved graphics. No longer limited to 250 steps, expanded mini-map, collect special ornaments that increase item spawn rate & a handful of new mini-games to enjoy. Christmas Town is something experimental & casual we work on for fun during the Christmas period, it's something we build upon each year. [christmas town] --------------------------------------------------------------- []Mining corporation August saw the release of the first brand new company type for several years: Private Security Firm. It has a startup cost of $950 million and includes specials such as 48 hour protection from bounties, +50% flash grenade intensity, 10% bonus when wearing a full 5-piece armor set and a Job points > Mission credits converter. This month will see the introduction of Mining Corporations. A startup cost of $4.5 billion will make it the third most expensive company, it is also expected to see specials which include damage mitigation, life enhancements and alcohol cooldown reductions. --------------------------------------------------------------- []Future progress We're going to try and limit the amount of new projects as we enter the new year - creating more availability for us to focus on Crimes 2.0 and the second contract agent. Since these projects are so big, we found ourselves prioritising shorter term projects that could be completed far quicker. This has resulted in these big projects coming in and out of hiatus when what we really need to do is totally focus on them without any other distractions. Still, we're very much looking forward to bringing you a bunch of new content by the end of this year, and then some epic releases in 2018. --------------------------------------------------------------- []Autumn freebie As with all our quarterly newsletters, we like to give you all a little treat for being part of the best online RPG community in the world. To redeem your one-time-use +250 energy boost logout of Torn then simply [login via this link](. Enjoy... Use it wisely! You're receiving this newsletter because you registered at [www.Torn.com](. Not interested anymore? [Unsubscribe here](.