Playkey Developer Log. Week Five

Hi, everyone. One more week is behind us. And this time the lion’s share of working hours was eaten up by the mechanism to monitor playing time. We put the bulk of it into place last week, but decided to allow more time for testing and optimization, since errors in this area can lead to unpleasant consequences.

For example, a player might pay for 60 game minutes, and the subscription will end after 55 minutes. The result is a frustrated user contacting technical support, and programmers spending time on corrections. Or the opposite situation, where 60 minutes may be paid for, and the subscription will not end even after 80 minutes. In this case, it’s the miner who suffers losses. To avoid all this, we did extra checks on the counting algorithms and made sure that everything is working right.

We even managed to handle one other task: to synchronize the clipboard between the client application and the server. This function will let gamers copy their login and password (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) for game services such as Steam, from their computer to the Playkey client. Keep in mind that this data is not stored on our side, but only used to log the player in on his Steam, UPlay, or other accounts when running the games.

Finally, this week we began localizing messages from the server (errors, warnings, etc.). You always see messages like these, when you’re using any application or service. For example, a player has decided to try Playkey and has launched a demo game. After 15 minutes, he is notified that he needs to confirm his email address in order to extend the free period…

Now with this localization, the message will be displayed in different languages. The architecture supports an unlimited number of them.

The highlight of next week’s program will be the algorithm for deploying the Playkey infrastructure on miners’ servers. Stay with us!