[Manialink-Game] Tetris

[m4rcel]

After a longer time of inactivity, I am happy to announce the next big update of the Tetris ManiaLink!

New Mode: Nightmare

I published a brand new mode, called Nightmare. And when I name it "Nightmare", it really is a nightmare. WHat happens, if you are no longer able to see the gamefield? Can you remember, what you saw just moments ago? You better do, or you will be faster gameover, as you want

You still don't know, what I mean? Then take a look on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciheSbVy6F0
Here I play the Nightmare mode in an early version... and fail to remember the field at around 3:00


Nightmare Contest

To make the mode more profitable for you, I started a 2week long contest: Play a round of Nightmare, and win 1000 Planets!

Detailled contest rules:

• To participate, simply play the Nightmare mode and save your Highscore.
• You may try to improve your highscore as often as you want. Your best score counts.
• The contest ends on 17th October, 23:59 (CEST, UTC+2).
• The Top5 Highscores will win 1000 Planets.
• From all Highscores, 5 will randomly win another 1000 Planets.

Other changes

There were a lot of other changes on the Tetris Manialink with this update. I want to name the most important ones:

• New Tetris-Engine
  I completely rewrote the Tetris engine. The old engine had some problems, which I was unable to fix, so I decided to begin from scratch with some major changes i how the engine works internally. You mostly won't notice any changes in the game itself, maybe (if you played Tetris a lot), you may notice that it "feels" a bit different.
  (If you are interested in some background information, I published a German Blogpost about it. I won't translate it into English, though.)
• Small changes in Design
  I changed the design from the ManiaLink a little bit. Most of the boxes are now more transparent, so that they better match into the background replays of Canyon and Storm. Additionally, some MouseOver effects have been replaced, as the old ones were still from ManiaPlanet 1.0 and did not look nice in ManiaPlanet 2.0.
  A little downside is, that the text may not well readable, if you do not view the Manialink from the main menu of a concrete title like Canyon or Storm. I hope this is no big problem, as I did not wanted to loose the replay in the background
• Donations based on Transactions
  Donations are now based on Transactions, using ManiaConnect. This is a first test for me on how these Transactions work, as I may need them later for other tasks. Advantage: Click on "Custom" and choose yourself, how many Planets you want to donate. Disadvantage: You need to be authenticated thourgh ManiaConnect.
• Logout Link
  This is only a small change, but an important one to respect your privacy: Click on "Logout" in the top left menu, and the ManiaLink will forget about you (but not your Highscores and Settings, of course).
• Nicer URLs
  As of internal resturcturing of the ManiaLink, the URLs now look a bit nicer. Not really important, unless you like to peek in the address bar on how the URLs of the different pages look like.
  Example: Before: http://tetris.funtrackers.net/play.php?mode=classic Now: http://tetris.funtrackers.net/play/classic/

So, that's all for now. Have fun with the new Nightmare mode, and may the Nightmare not become a nightmare for you

[m4rcel]

New Feature: Challenges

In the last weeks and months, I worked on a big new feature of Tetris: Challenges.

A Challenge consists of two player, who (indirectly) play against each other. The first Player creates a Challenge with selecting a Mode and a planets cost for it, and then plays for a Highscore. Afterwards a second player can accept that Challenge, and play for his own a Highscore. Both players have to pay the same Planets cost, and the winner of the Challenge will win all of them*. Both players have the same conditions for their Highscores: Exactly one try to play the score, and the exact same order of Blocks. So any excuses like "I only lost because I didn't get the Long one" won't work: Your opponent didn't have a Long one to that moment, too

For this feature, the menu of the Manialink has been extended with a new item. With a click on it, you see the currently open Challenges: These challenges already have a Highscore, and are waiting to be accepted by a second player. Click on one of them, pay the Planets, and let's go! Don't like the currently available Challenges? No problem: Click on "Create Challenge", select mode and how many Planets you want to pay, click on "Start Challenge" and let's go! Additionally, you can read all the rules and look up any Challange where you participated as creator or challenger from the other menu points.

* The Manialink keeps 5 Planets of each Challenge to balance transaction costs and some other things.


Screenshots:


List of open Challenges. Mode, Creator and Planets cost: No more details for you to decide whether to accept this Challenge. You cannot accept your own Challenges, they are only listed for completeness.


Menu for creating a new Challenge. Select Mode and Cost, and click on the appearing "Start Challenge" button, pay the planets, and you are right within your own Challenge.


A nice banner announces the start of a Challenge round. Now it counts: All or nothing.


After finishing a Challenge, the challenger will see the details of it including the state if he won it or not. A ManiaHome message is sent to the creator to notify him, too. In the same moment, the Planets are transmitted to the winner of the Challenge.



At this point, I want to thank those, who supported me with developing and testing this new features. Most important was kastun: As you already see in the screenshots, he supported me a lot, and offered many Planets in form of Challenges to keep the tests running. I do not want to know, how many Planets he finally spent and lost through malfdunctions of the Manialink Also, thanks to seeba. He played only few Challenges, and were not very successful with them so far, but yet he was able to detect some bugs in the Manialink.


I wish you lots of fun with the new Challenge feature, may the skill be on your side. But remember: Although you are not the best player, you may still win some Planets. The smallest mistake of your opponent may let him go Game Over, and may let you eventually have the better score

Of course, I would like to hear your feedback, and maybe to see the one or other donation to the Manialink


FT»Marcel

[haenry]

The challenge feature looks nice.
I'd only like to see how many points you need to achieve to beat the challenging player, after you accepted the challenge, but before starting the game!

Sadly, I cannot really play Tetris, as the title menu in the background moves, when I press left/right

[TomRiddle]

See in the corner on the bottom-left. There is a button to toggle to a static background

[m4rcel]

See in the corner on the bottom-left. There is a button to toggle to a static background

Nope, not anymore, because it is now [as of Beta 2.1] possible to have the background-only, without any menu... Finally

But this was (and maybe still is) buggy, please report if you still see the menu in the background, then I will re-add the Toggle-Background-option


@haenry:
I intentionally do not show the points to the second player. Not knowing the score to beat means that you must try as hard as possible, and this is exactly what I want. If you know that the first player only had 500 points, you will not really try to get a highscore, but to get 500 and "abort" the game.


Anyway, thank you for your feedback

[m4rcel]

Tetris: 3D-Menu Redesign (Alpha)

I started to redesign the whole Manialink to use the new 3D-elements of Maniaplanet. This new version is currently available over "Tetris3D". As there are still some problems, the old (flat) menus are available using "Tetris" as known.


As a special feature, I integrated my own moods into the Manialink: Depending on the time of day, the background color changes through all the colors. So in the morning it is more yellow, midday is green, afternoon blue and later going into red ion the night.

Some screenshots of the different colors:






Feel free to post any feedback to the new menu style, or report any problems you encounter. Keep in mind, that it is still Alpha, so some parts of the Manialink has not been redesigned yet, and e.g. the error pages are throwing ManiaScript Compilation errors


Have fun and see you in Tetris,
Marcel

[coolsnake]

Such a shame I have never heard of this before. I absolutely love games within games. Amount of polish is also nothing short of incredible, goodjob .

[m4rcel]

New Mode: Quintris

After I fooled some of you with a Fake mode on 1st april*, today I want to really announce a new mode: Quntris. The name is a combination of "quinque" (lat. five) and "Tetris", and already reveals the basic thought of it: Instead of having each block consisting of 4 peices, this modes adds an additional piece to each block. Unknown shapes lead to the problem: Where to place these stupid blocks?



As you make mistakes really fast, the game field has been increased to give you even more space to make mistakes ^^

Already want to play? Then visit Tetris or Tetris3D in Maniaplanet, and start playing Quintris!

Note: The address bar may be a problem on Tetris. Play a map or open the editor, go back into the title menu (not into the main menu of Maniaplanet!), and the address bar should disappear. Alternatively, use the Tetris3D version, there the address bar does not overlay important parts.


Still reading? Need another reason to play Quintris? How about...



Contest: Quintris Launch

You urgently need an universum with 1000 planets? Then play Quintris! Until 30th april you have time to play your best highscore in the new mode. With changing the month, the Top5 Highscores and additionally 5 randomly chosen Highscores will win 1000 Planets each!

Rules:

• End: 30th April
• Participate: Highscore in Quintris (you may improve your highscore as often as you want)
• Win: 1000 Planets
• Winners: Top5 and 5 randomly chosen

Have fun with the new mode

Marcel

* You can still play the april fools mode via Tetris?play/simplicity, but it will get removed sooner or later.

[m4rcel]

Today, I took a bigger update of the Tetris ManiaLink online. Most of the changes were in the background, yet I want to give you a list of changes, which have been made.

• 3D-Redesign
  I finally finished redesigning the ManiaLink to use the 3D elements. This means, that the old version with the flat menu styles is no longer available. I know that there are problems when viewing the ManiaLink e.g. on a server, and I am already thinking about a solution for this. But I did not want to delay the update any longer, as of the following points.
• Bug: Wrong ranks in highscore
  Especially with introducing the Quintris mode, a bug confuses the users: Ranks of the highscore were not 100% correct, so that some ranks were missing or even to highscores were swapped (a highscore with lower popints had the better rank). With the update, this problem should be fixed now, and all ranks should be displayed correctly.
• Refactoring the database
  I took the chance and re-created the database structure from scratch, to eliminate some problems with the old one. For example, all options were saved serialized in a single column, whereas now there are separate Options and Controls tables for this kind of information. And I added some indexes... Yeah, the old one had -- next to the PRIMARYs, not a single additional index
• Refactoring the Backend
  With the database change, I also refactored many parts of the classes in the background. For exmaple, each database table now has its own class, and only this one class accesses the table. Before, database queries were scattered throughout the whole project, which made finding a malformed query kind of difficult ^^

Because of this big changes in the code, new bugs may occure. I will observe the logs in the upcoming days, yet if you encounter any errors, feel free to report them. Or give any feedback to the new 3D design of the Manialink, if you want ^^


May the Tetrominos and Quintrominos ( ) be with you,
FT»Marcel

[m4rcel]

As you should know, in few hours the last month of the year will start. As there was very few activity from me for tetris in the last months, I decided to create a little advent claendar to shorten the time waiting for christmas eve ^^

Each day, there will be a small task of playing a game of Tetris. From all players who clear this task, I will randomly pick five, who win some Planets.

Rules:

• Each day will have another task. The task is revealed at 00:00 of that day, and you have time to complete the task until 23:59. (All times in CET, UTC+1)
• If the task is to play any kind of highscore, you will take part in the lottery as soon as you finish the game with "Game Over" or "Game Cleared". So don't worry: If you cannot save your highscore because you already had a better one, that highscore still counts into the lottery If playing a Challenge, you must wait for the redirection, as otherwise a validation of the score is not possible.
• Authenticate yourself before starting to play. Otherwise the highscores cannot be correctly assigned to your accounts.
• You may take part multiple times to increase your chances in the lottery. Each player may only win once a day, though.
• The planets will be summed up send some days after christmas at once. The winners will be announced on the ManiaLink.

As of the time of year, I also reactivated the christmas design of the ManiaLink. So instead of placing abstract blocks, you now place christmas presents in a snowstorm

I hope there will be many players on the ManiaLink ^^

So have fun while playing Tetris!