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Ilkor: New Content & MongoDB

We’ve been extremely busy of late with the game and I must say we’re really happy with our process.  The two main areas of focus are equally important but totally unrelated!

We’ve included quite a bit of new content on the website which is great for potential players as the information reveals yet more game related information.  If you haven’t gone to check it out then I suggest you do so.  Infact you should try and visit the website on a weekly basis as we’re adding content pretty much weekly.  Most of the new content comes in the form of ‘scroll popups‘.  To see them you simply have to navigate to the homepage (http://ilkor.com) and then click on the footer at the bottom ‘Core Features of Ilkor‘.  This will take you to the Features section.  Riddled throughout this section we are adding obvious and not so obvious links to additional information.  Some of the more recent additions can be found in the Character Races & Classes section.  If you click on the portraits you’ll be presented with a scroll popup supplying you with background in-game information.  Spend some time on the website, explore and try and discover what is new.

The second major area of focus is extremely technical and rather boring to most people I can imagine, it is the migration from using a Microsoft SQL database to a Mongo database.  However you won’t believe just how important such decisions are to the success of Ilkor and the overall performance of the website.  As of a few days ago we completed this rather tedious task of converting our SQL database across to MongoDB.  It might sound rather silly for a game in it’s early stages of development to just change ‘database ships’ like that, however we did give it alot of thought before doing so.  We have many years of experience using Microsoft SQL and upon starting developing Ilkor we naturally setup SQL to be our database of choice.  After 4 months of development we started to realise that potentially SQL would not cut it in the long run for an online game that we hope will attract 10s of thousands of players.  There have been a number of technical challenges in migrating across the 50 +/- tables we have already scripted in SQL, but we have done it and we are super impressed with the performance we are now experiencing.  The current website (http://ilkor.com) uses very little MongoDB running at the moment, most of the tables are used for features that are not yet exposed and will only really come into use once we put the registration and login process.  There are also many more tables to come.